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Book Review
| Where We Belong: Beyond Abstraction in Perceiving Nature. By Paul Shepard. Edited by Florence Rose Shepard. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. xxiii + 255 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.
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| Where We Belong collects fourteen essays by Paul Shepard, a seminal environmental philosopher who spent half a century grappling with the multifarious relationship between humans and nature in a series of novel, sometimes iconoclastic, studies. It joins a number of Shepard's other works republished since his death in 1996. |
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The lasting image left by these essays is Shepard, crowbar in hand, prying from nature what he considered a pathologically limited set of ideas—aesthetic values, he called them, embodied in landscape paintings and pastoral poems—that Anglo-Americans placed onto the natural world. Shepard began to explore this theme during the 1950s—some essays from that period are collected herewith a study of the Hudson Valley school of painters. By contrasting its paintings with photographs of the same subjects, Shepard showed that the painters' eyes responded not only to the world, but also to theories of art—aesthetic values. This book captures Shepard developing this idea in numerous—sometimes striking—ways. For example, in "Ugly is Better," he criticizes anti-litter campaigns because hiding trash disguises our overconsumptive ways beneath a veneer of the picturesque. Shepard stopped exploring this theme in the 1980s, but returned to it just before his death; the last section reprints an essay responding to postmodernist claims that all reality is text—just an elaboration of the old aesthetic values, he said, in need of debunking again. |
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What is missing from the collection is any payment on the subtitle's promise of going "beyond abstraction in perceiving nature." There is a lot of prying, but only a few glimpses—most notably in the section "Place"—of what a different relationship with nature looks like. Where We Belong is not an introduction to Shepard's thought, but a summary of his work on landscape. (For that, see The Only World We've Got.) Some of the decisions made by the book's editor—Shepard's second wife—however, mitigate its usefulness on that score. In the preface, she notes that she softened some of the sexist language, condensed one essay, and dropped the citations from another—in a book already deficient of citations. Thus, serious students of Shepard's thought should still track down the original essays. The book's thematic arrangement is also problematic. On page 46, for instance, Shepard (in characteristically pungent prose) calls goat herding "a kind of lobotomy on the land," reducing natural diversity to the point at which it matches aesthetic ideals. But on page 170, in an essay originally published twenty-seven years earlier, there is a more benign view of the pastoral landscape. A chronological ordering would have been less confusing. |
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These faults, though, are with the presentation, not the quality of Shepard's thoughts. Watching Shepard struggle to separate ideas about nature from the natural world—and, in the process, trace out the intricate connections between them—is enlightening. His essays are so erudite, his sources so wide-ranging, that it is impossible not to read these essays and see old problems in new ways. |
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Joshua Buhs's first book, The Fire Ant Wars, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2004. He currently lives in Japan. |
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