ABSTRACT

The paper appraised Paul Taylor's Respect for Nature as an ethics of possible harmonious living, as a thrust philosophy of environmental preservation and sustainability, especially for the contemporary civilizations which actions and choices are heavily effecting the environment, especially in the faces of the application of herbicides and other forms of environmental growth controls. Such ethics species the indispensable needs for responsible and pragmatic character and actions of the human person towards the management of the intrinsic values of the environment. It recognizes that the human person as a subject of development with which, he or she should necessarily value the intrinsic worth of all natural entities including himself or herself. This is in order to have a harmonious existence, as it takes lives to sustain the nature that give lives. Such philosophy did not forget or being elusive to the trend of ecological survival of lives along natural food chains, but philosophically advocate against arbitrary abuses of some particular entities or beings in order to sustain some others. It recognizes that the sustainability of the ecology is dependable on the survival of all natural living entities or beings irrespective of their lifethreatening nature as creatively possessed. Adopting phenomenological method of analysis, this paper evaluates this philosophy as it is applied to the management of contemporary global environment, especially in the developmentally and imperialistically regarded Third World countries. After the observation of the strengths and weaknesses of the ethics, it concludes that the Respect for Nature as a principle or theory of environmental sustainability is inevitable and indispensable in sustaining the values of creation. In so doing, nature will remain a “mother” that gives birth to lives and love to sustain them healthily, and it is the responsibility of the human person to sustain such mother in order to remain in existence.