Encounters with Nature, C

Ecologist Shepard (Traces of an Omnivore, etc.), who died in 1996, maintains in this erudite collection of essays that hunting was instrumental in transforming our arboreal, cringing, tropical forest-dwelling prehuman ancestors into full-fledged humans. Pursuing a line of thought developed by Loren Eiseley, Ortega y Gasset and others, Shepard argues that the challenges faced by thousands of generations as hunters--when we lived by killing horses, deer, cattle, bears, mammoths and other large mammals--decisively shaped our human capacity for aggression, sharing, love and ritual. Along with this one-sided theory comes a defense of modern hunting for sport on the grounds that ""early death"" plays an essential adaptive role in most animal populations. Readers who disagree with Shepard on this point will still find the remainder of these philosophical essays stimulating, despite his tendency to veer into turgid or fustian prose. By examining the role of animals in dreams, folktales, children's play and myths, he shows how animals serve as talismans of human consciousness and identity. At its best, the book is quirky and iconoclastic. ""Five Green Thoughts,"" for instance, traces the layout of suburbia back to Virgil's concept of the pastoral and critiques the ""enclave mentality"" that leads us to preserve nature by partitioning it into gardens, parks and wilderness areas. Elsewhere, Shepard knocks Albert Schweitzer's ""reverence for life"" ethic for its simplistic separation of ""good"" versus ""bad"" animals. Other pieces deal with sociobiology's roots in ecology, the sacred bear in Paleolithic cosmology, the ""boobism"" of tourists prey to busywork and synthetic landscapes, and the importance of place in our lives. (Oct.)