Tuesday, 21 Oct 2003

COVELO, Calif.

On these autumn, pre-daylight-saving-change days, I’m at my desk before the sun comes over the hills across the river, so while I check my email, I can watch the morning spread over the meadow, and the colors change from gray to brilliant blue (sky), green (conifers), and gold (meadow grass). The transition from night to day seems to happen quickly this close to the equinox; as I wrote these sentences, suddenly the sun is over the hills and right in my eyes. A pileated woodpecker (who looks exactly like the cartoon) has taken to hanging out in the small oak behind my house, to my great amusement, and is already up and commenting on the day.

Yesterday I mentioned that we were having a cover meeting in the afternoon. “Cover meetings” are twice yearly publishing rituals, aimed at producing covers for our new books in time for our seasonal catalogs. This is the third round of cover meetings for our spring ’04 publications (the publishing year has only two seasons — spring and fall). The cover process for this group of 20-some new books started two months ago, when we editors tried to make realistic assessments of which manuscripts would really come in by the deadline and really be ready to transmit to production. An exercise in experience-based optimism.

The cover process is an iterative discussion spread over three meetings and eight weeks among many people: authors, editors, publisher, art director, designer, and staff from the marketing, publicity, and production departments. Some of us, like me, are present for the group meetings via the black box on the D.C. conference room table. Our common purpose is to arrive at a cover design that will represent each book’s message faithfully and powerfully, so that it will inspire the hoped-for audience to reach for the volume on the bookstore shelf or in the pages of our catalog.

My Ecosystems Studies program will have six new books next spring; these books have already gone through the third round of cover meetings. So I only had one book on Monday’s agenda: the paperback edition of Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Island Press published the hardcover of Coming Home in 1998; we are looking forward to reaching a new audience through the paperback.

For those of you who don’t know, Paul Shepard, who died in the summer of 1996, was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology. He wrote nine seminal books and many more pathbreaking essays during his full and creative life as a writer and teacher (he taught at Knox, Smith, Dartmouth, and Pitzer colleges). I (and many others) count Paul as one of a handful of important influences in my understanding of myself in the natural world. Before I was Paul’s editor, his words had already changed my life.

When I moved to the country in 1971, after a lifetime of living in cities and suburbs, I had what I realized in retrospect was a quite romantic view of nature; my idea of moving to the country as trying to “become one with” the natural world. I quickly discovered that real life in wild nature is much more complex and challenging (and also more deeply fulfilling) than that image. I stumbled across Paul Shepard’s Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game while I was struggling to make sense of my experience here. Paul described a different dynamic — not a losing oneself in nature, but rather a rich and endlessly stimulating exchange of life and growth. He gave me words for my experience; his writing was a genuine lifeline.

I first met Paul and his wife, Florence Krall, at a gathering at Woods Hole, Mass., in August 1992 convened by E.O. Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert to investigate the biophilia hypothesis (a term coined by Wilson to describe the innate affinity between humans and the natural world). Island Press published The Biophilia Hypothesis, an outgrowth of that meeting, in 1993. Paul was one of the chapter authors.

The first complete manuscript I worked on with Paul was The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (1996), his most comprehensive statement about the importance of animals in human evolution. The opportunity to work with him was, on the one hand, what every editor hopes for: a chance to work closely with an author whom one respects on material that is personally meaningful. But serving as Paul’s editor was also a daunting prospect. I found some of his thinking challenging to comprehend, much less edit.

As it turned out, working with Paul was the kind of author-editor interaction that I like best. He was well aware that his work could be difficult, and could be wryly funny about some of the published reviews of his early (pre-Island Press) books. Driven primarily by the passion of his ideas, Paul listened thoughtfully to editorial comments, but would often come up with his own way of solving problems rather than agreeing with me. He was unfailingly courteous and conscientious, even after his cancer had been diagnosed and he was undergoing chemotherapy.

Coming Home to the Pleistocene was put together by Paul before he died, and edited, polished, and finished by Flo in the months after his death. Coming Home is in many ways the essential message of Paul’s work: that we are the product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today’s ecological and social ills. Coming Home is, overall, an optimistic work, and I hope the paperback edition will reach a new generation of readers.

Most Island Press books offer scientific analysis, policy, or hands-on tools, or the latest information on specific environmental issues or problems. But we also publish books like The Biophilia Hypothesis and Coming Home because we know that deep and lasting solutions to our environmental crises require fundamental changes of understanding, of consciousness; a true evolution in the way we all view ourselves in relation to the natural world, of which we are a part.

It is easy, on days and weeks when my time seems to be swallowed up by administrative deadlines, meetings, details like whether or not a middle initial should be on a book’s cover, to feel that publishing books is too far removed from the nitty-gritty work of protecting and restoring a healthy and diverse natural world. But my life was changed by Paul Shepard’s words … and by words of others, too. I remind myself that it’s impossible to know how words will fall into a reader’s consciousness, and how those words may influence decisions and behavior years later. I still believe in the power of a single important book to change the course of a person’s life — and the opportunity to play a role in that mysterious process is part of what brings me to this desk each day.