Paul Shepard’s ‘Bear Essay’: On environmental ethics, deep ecology and our need for the other-than-human animals

The short essay that is the topic of this article was written by Paul Shepard (1925-1996) during the spring of 1995. He sent it to me as his contribution to a joint article that we were preparing at the time for a Russian scientific journal. Unfortunately, Paul was diagnosed with cancer when we were still in the process of finishing the article. The essay was written during a brief respite in which he believed that he was in recovery. But his situation worsened and he died the following year. Twenty years have passed since Paul’s death and many things have changed including the level of public and scholarly interest in our relationships with other-than-human animals, including bears. Given the increasing concern for animals in general and wild animals in particular, I decided that it was time to share his Paul’s unpublished essay which until now had been gathering dust in one of my file folders.