Review: Encounters with Nature; Essays by Paul Shepard by Paul Shepard Reviewed by Cate Gable Berkeley, California, USA and Paris, France Shepard, Paul. Encounters with Nature, Essays by Paul Shepard. Florence R. Shepard (Ed.). Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999. 223 pp. ISBN 1-55963- 529-0 (cloth). US$24.95 Paul Shepard (1925-1996) is one of the pioneers of modern ecology. Avery Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Pitzer College, he brought diverse disciplines to bear on how humans interact with and perceive the natural world. This book, edited by his wife Florence, compiles published and unpublished essays written during the course of Shepard’s life. As David Petersen says in the Introduction, Shepard's ‘subversive science’ of human ecology … [brings together] the revolutionary study of the overarching significance of humanity’s coevolution with wild animals in shared wild environs. The themes present here are the legacy of our hunter-gatherer forebears; animals and their pervasive influence on our human being-ness, cognition, and imagination; ontogeny and the shift from bonding-to-mother to bonding-to-Mother-Nature as critical in the maturation of an individual; and place as a grounding of our being. The lead essay, The Origin of Metaphor: The Animal Connection, outlines one of Shepard’s central themes. In this treatise on the stirrings of consciousness inside the human animal, Shepard proposes that the bear became an archetype for our developing sense of self’ and other. He posits that our observing and testing wits with this magnificent creature sparked the beginnings of our first and greatest technology— language, and, specifically, our ability to use metaphor and symbology. The female bear, after disappearing mysteriously with the sun all during the dark winter months, reappears with cubs in the spring. To early humans, the she-bear may have represented the mysteries of life and renewal. Shepard notes that we named the most prominent constellations in the sky Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Big Bear and Little Bear. Our language captures bear in many forms: to bear fruit, to bear a child, to bear witness to, etc. Much of the imagery in Native arts and culture—mask making, dance and song—features the bear.