Nature and MadnessThrough much of history our relationship with the earth has been plagued by ambivalence--we not only enjoy and appreciate the forces and manifestations of nature, we seek to plunder, alter, and control them. Here Paul Shepard uncovers the cultural roots of our ecological crisis and proposes ways to repair broken bonds with the earth, our past, and nature. Ultimately encouraging, he notes, "There is a secret person undamaged in every individual. We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse." |
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adolescent adult agriculture alienation Anthony Storr Arnold Modell attitudes become behavior body centuries child childhood Christian civilization consciousness cosmos culture desert fathers domestication dream duality earth ecological Edith Jacobson effects Eliade environment epigenesis Erik Erikson Erikson experience fantasies farmer fear feel fixation foraging forms Garrett Hardin Greek growth Hebrew human hunter idea ideal identity ideology images immature individual infant infantile Jane Ellen Harrison Joseph Campbell juvenile kind land landscape living logic maternal maturity means ment metaphor Mircea Eliade modern monotheism mother myth natural world Nature and Madness Neoteny ness nonhuman normal nurturing ontogeny paradise Paul Shepard perhaps philosophy plants and animals Protestant Psychohistory psychological puritan reality regression relationship religious ritual says schizoid Searles seems sense sensory separation social society soil species spiritual symbiosis symbolic things thought tion unconscious University Press urban village Western whole wild wildebeest wilderness York
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Page x - Ecological thinking, on the other hand, requires a kind of vision across boundaries. The epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the self ennobled and extended rather than threatened as part of the landscape and the ecosystem, because the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves.