An Environmental Ethic of Experience

from a speech upon receiving the Albert Schweitzer Medal from the Animal Welfare Institute, December 5, 1962, Rachel Carson:

In his various writings, we may read Dr. Schweitzer's philosophical interpretations of that phrase [Reverence for Life]. But to many of us, the truest understanding of Reverence for Life comes, as it did to him, from some personal experience, perhaps the sudden, unexpected sight of a wild creature, perhaps some experience with a pet. Whatever it may be, it is something that takes us out of ourselves, that makes us aware of other life. From my own memories, I think of the sight of a small crab alone on a dark beach at night, a small and fragile being waiting at the edge of the roaring surf, yet so perfectly at home in its world. To me it seemed a symbol of life, and of the way life has adjusted to the forces of its physical environment. Or I think of a morning when I stood in a North Carolina marsh at sunrise, watching flock after flock of Canada geese rise from resting places at the edge of a lake and pass low overhead. In that orange light, their plumage was like brown velvet. Or I have found that deep awareness of life and its meaning in the eyes of a beloved cat.

Commentary: Ms. Carson’s epochal Silent Spring, that awakened the contemporary environmental movement offered a three part environmental ethic that spoke to 1) preserving human health, 2) respect for the intrinsic value of non-human life, and 3) keeping Nature for human edification and happiness.

How was this ethic arrived at? Through personal experience, that she later described as a sense of wonder, where the aesthetic, the intellectual, the intuitive, and the imaginative faculties converged. Moral psychologists, drawing on evolutionary biology, now speculate that “do no harm” is one of five moral colors that are hardwired into the human psyche; that "do no harm" is a recognition of the life of the other being.

Search yourself: Have you had experiences similar to the sort that Ms. Carson describes—a transformative experience that took you out of self into an awareness of another life or lives?Ms. Carson’s awareness didn’t anthropomorphize, but respected the other life on its own merits, for its own being. Have you ever encountered another life in its full uniqueness, what the philosopher Martin Buber declared to be a subject and not an object?