September 18, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    How many of our geography students know that Rachel Carson dedicated her book Silent Spring (1962) to Albert Schweitzer? For that matter, how many have heard of Schweitzer? Silent Spring, as we know, jump-started the environmental movement in the United States. If Carson is the mother of the movement, Schweitzer is the grandfather. Yet this grandfather figure--the most famous man of my time, second only to Einstein--is barely known to the young, even those who are passionately engaged in saving the whale and other living things.

    As  a young man in his late twenties, Schweitzer already achieved fame throughout the Western world as a musician and musicologist (an authority on J.S. Bach) and as a theologian, whose book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) revolutionized New Testament scholarship and aroused a storm of controversy. One day, as his thirtieth birthday approached, he put into the mailbox a dozen so letters of resignation to the high offices he held in the academic and musical worlds. He did so in order to restart life as a medical student. He needed medical knowledge so that he could go out into the world and help "those in pain"--an urge he had even as a child. Schweitzer eventually went to tropical Africa and established there a hospital to serve Africans. He lived in Africa for some forty years, putting on hold his beloved Bach and his scholarship, and died there in 1965 at age ninety. In 1952, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for dedicated service to humanity. But he ought to have received it for dedicated service to all living things. He coined the phrase "reverence for life," and for him life meant everything from microbes to elephants, and it covered even the sparkling snowflake of his beloved Alsace, respecting its brief moment of glory under the sun. One anecdote has to suffice to illustrate "reverence for life" in practice. Adlai Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois and presidential candidate, visited Schweitzer at his Lambarene hospital in Gabon in the 1950s. They strolled in the forest. Stevenson saw a mosquito landing on the good doctor's exposed arm and quickly swatted it. Schweitzer said, "That's my mosquito. Besides, there is not need to bring on the Sixth Fleet." A bit extreme, you might say, but saints have always been inclined toward extremism when it came to saving lives.

    China produced the good and wise Confucius, famed for the sort of sweet reasonableness that made him the darling of thinkers of the European Enlightenment. What was his attitude toward nature? He respected it, but did not make it the center of his philosophy and ethics, in contrast to his contemporary and rival Lao Tzu. How reasonable was Confucius? Well, you tell me. To help you in your thinking, here are a couple of anecdotes. "The Master angled, but he did not use a net; he shot, but not at sitting birds" (Analects 7:26). "When the stable burned down the Master, returning from court, asked, 'Was anyone hurt?' He did not ask about the horses" (Analects 10:12). Alas, Confucius was a humanist and not a tree-hugger or lover of animals.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu