The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer: Jungle Insights Into Reverence for Life Paperback - 2007

Albert Schweitzer was a man whose reverence for life extended even to the lowliest of insects. Long before the environment became a major political issue, Schweitzer criticized a Western philosophical tradition that restricted the realm of ethics to relationships between human beings. He passionately strove to define a morality that would encompass all of God's creation. In The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer, the man remembered as the "jungle doctor" for his medical missionary service in central Africa reveals his personal and particular affection for a world where animals still ruled the landscape and humans moved among them at their peril. Here, among charming stories about the large and changing menagerie of injured and orphaned animals he cared for, are accounts of attacks on humans by leopards, crocodiles, hippos, pythons and other creatures - relayed by a doctor acutely aware of the suffering of both man and beast. These anecdotes culminate in a group of brief, moving essays and meditations in which Schweitzer seeks to place humanity's legitimate self-interest within the larger context of a natural world in which all life is sacred. In this time of heated animal rights activism and heightened environmental awareness, Albert Schweitzer's observations reveal him to be a man of concrete moral intelligence - and thoroughly contemporary in his concerns.