A New West Review

With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World, by J. Claude Evans

By Allen M. Jones, 10-28-05

If you’re a professional philosopher, devoting the days, hours, years of your life to the unthreading of certain basic issues, ping-ponging between colleagues and predecessors in your chase after the big questions (what is good? what can we know? what is beautiful? what is being?), it can’t help but be frustrating, the disregard in which your profession is held by the culture at large. It feels important, what you’re doing, yet all it takes is a walk through a shopping mall, a flip through the channels, to realize that the vast majority of the world is preoccupied with everything but questions. This day and age? Philosophy seems about as relevant as last month’s laundry.

An exception is the field of ethics. What is good behavior? It’s the rare corporate hospital that doesn’t keep on hand a medical ethicist whose job it is to negotiate the endless issues of health care. And academia? What university hasn’t been confronted, one time or another, with inappropriate behavior from staff or students. Within this particular branch of philosophy, perhaps no sub-specialty is as dynamic and alive, as relevant, as that of environmental ethics. How should we behave toward the natural world, and why? The territory is so fresh that there are still few, if any, undisputed answers. The urgency of it, the relevance, has precipitated out from our own appalling misbehaviors toward the world at large. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that we might one day soil our own nests in such a way that we have driven even ourselves to extinction. In this milieu, philosophers are at the very forefront of the debate. The animal rights movement would not exist at all, in its current incarnation, were it not for the cogent (if misguided) intellectual edifices built by men like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Paul Taylor. Less specific, less controversial approaches to wilderness have been built around thinkers in the vein of Roderick Nash, Max Oelschlaeger, Holmes Rolston. If you’re a conscionable hunter, defending yourself against a public increasingly alienated from nature, your job would be much more difficult were it not for the writings of Ortega y Gasset, Aldo Leopold, and Paul Shepard. There’s also a branch of feminist ideology, eco-feminism (thankfully, isolated to academia), that equates an assumed, patriarchal suppression of women with a similar suppression (by men) of nature. All these fields are dynamic, polarized, impassioned, shifting, urgent, often angry. And to most of us (given that they are, after all, couched in the language of professional philosophers), they’re unintelligible.

One of the newest additions to the literature of environmental ethics, Washington University professor J. Claude Evans’ book, With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World,* attempts, among other things, to distill and popularize certain heated, controversial, often inaccessible arguments. While Evans’ book includes considerations (and critiques) of the philosophies of Albert Schweitzer and Paul Taylor, and while it certainly presents arguments that proponents of conscionable hunting and catch-and-release fishing might use to defend their positions, the author’s attempts to provide a neutral framework on which to stretch out his ideas are admirable and accessible to almost everyone, no matter their personal positions. It’s a book that, through its polite and reasonable rejection of certain near-deified ideas, its embrace of other notions less popular in the academic community, its synthesis of writings (both popular and academic) from across a variety of fields, aggressively pursues the non-academic reader. It’s philosophy with a twist.

If you’re a critic, it ain’t easy, reviewing philosophy. Even in a book with the stated intention of accessibility, there’s a vocabulary that’s needs to be shared, a background that needs at least Philosophy 101 for it to be called common. How do you discuss Singer’s utilitarianism without having read Bentham and Mill? How do you talk deontology without digressing to Kant? Evans’ goal in Respect, specifically stated, is to “sketch an alternative way of approaching the issue of the human relationship to animals, particularly wild animals . . . This will not shake the convinced defender of animal rights or animal liberation, but it may give someone considering these positions pause." He goes on to describe his critiques of Schweitzer’s “principle of reverence for life" and Taylor’s “ethics of respect for nature," saying, “My goal in these parts will be to develop internal critiques demonstrating that neither position is philosophically and morally adequate."

Schweitzer and Taylor are both used as springboards to the more interesting, second half of Evans’ book, his consideration of hunting. Perhaps it’s enough to bind these early chapters inside their own nutshells. Schweitzer’s principle of the “reverence for life," as described by Schweitzer himself, states that, “Ethics is responsibility without limit towards all that live." It’s pointed out that this conviction, based on Schweitzer’s own visceral, unreasoned reaction, is an elevation of emotion to the level of formal, academic principle. In his critical reaction, Evans uses Nietzsche as a lever to pry into Schweitzer’s argument, exposing the flaws in the logic, how difficult it is to displace a universal reverence for life onto the ecology of a natural system. There’s a fox that wants to eat a duck. You can’t preserve the duck without depriving the fox. You can’t feed the fox without killing the duck. It’s a catch-22 defined by the necessities of ecology itself. No matter what you do, you’re infringing on life. Therefore, a blanket reverence for life can’t be universal.

Paul Taylor’s “biocentric ethics" comes at the issue from a slightly different angle. He endows all living things with an “inherent worth." Evans writes, “To recognize the inherent worth of living things and to give them their due consideration in this light is ‘respect for nature.’" Taylor’s kind of “biocentric egalitarianism" has apparently been very influential in the field. In his critique of Taylor, Evans goes on to say, “...the problem with Taylor’s ethics of respect for nature is not that it contains a residue of anthropocentrism...but that it is not genuinely biocentric. Interdependence is a fundamental fact of life because life as we know it is essentially consumptive or appropriative. All life, of whatever form exists and continues to exist only because it appropriates energy in one form or another from its environment. Life is appropriation. Any ethical theory that does not recognize and affirm this fundamental fact is not a serious candidate for an environmental ethic..." From here, it’s an easy step to the apogee of Evans’ book, his discussion, “Toward a philosophy of the hunt."

Apparently not a hunter himself (instead, a catch-and-release fisherman), Evans nevertheless writes a cogent, readable, well-reasoned defense of a certain kind of hunting. He begins, “I have argued...that once it is recognized that life essentially involves webs of interdependence, it becomes clear that for one living creature to kill and eat another living creature has nothing to do with hierarchies...it follows that instrumental use of another organism does not necessarily involve any kind of intrinsic superiority of the eater over the eaten." Through a liberal quoting of the writings of Barry Lopez, Richard Nelson, Ted Kerasote, Thomas McGuane, Mary Zeiss Stange, he shows that an appropriately “respectful" approach to the act of hunting is finally, in a way (and in the context of these “webs of interdependence"), its own defense. Evans writes, “To receive life, as opposed to taking it, requires that one have a deep sense of awe or perhaps reverence in the face of the phenomenon of life itself, embodied in the animal one is about to kill. Gratitude, which must be cultivated, and sedimented in practices and rituals, allows us to attain what Paul Shepard calls ‘the moment of respect and affirmation for a giving world.’"

Very few of the ideas in Evans’ book are new. Rather, the value of his presentation lies in the synthesis of previous thoughts. It’s a book that presents, in a coherent way, an otherwise confusing mishmash of ideas. And despite the occasional weakness (it’s not made entirely clear, at least to my satisfaction, why Evans chooses Schweitzer and Taylor as his particular test cases), and some sloppy copy-editing (a result of the book’s having been published by a small, presumably understaffed university press), it’s nevertheless a valuable piece of scholarship. For the average reader concerned with issues of the environment, perhaps a fan of Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Lopez, Evans’ book represents the next, challenging step.





* Full disclosure: Evans uses ideas, and quotes from, my own book on the ethics of hunting (although not always without taking issue).

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