Berensohn was perhaps best known for the book “Finding One’s Way With Clay” (1972), a guide to making pinch pots that blended instructions for making these simple clay bowls with reflections on art, the environment and spirituality, and that advanced the idea that creativity was universal.

Berensohn developed a philosophy: ceramics as a noncommercial enterprise that can foster human development and unlock human potential.

Mr. Berensohn was an early proponent of deep ecology, an environmental movement that values all living beings equally, and he became more vocal about environmental issues as he grew older. For decades, he said, he did not fire his pinch pots but rather placed them in the forest to melt back into the earth.

Paulus became a great teacher of workshops, and through them he touched thousands of lives. He taught at Penland and Haystack and other venues in the U.S., the U.K, and Australia. In his teaching and in his life, he came to embody a few strong messages: that creative work, or “behaving artistically” as he often put it, has an intrinsic value to the maker and to the world; that art need not be connected with commerce; and that the “craft arts” (again, his term), because of their connection to primary materials, can help to heal the earth.