Erazim Kohák loves the forest. He spends much of his leisure there, and he has written eloquently of it as a paradigm of nature, specifically searching for an ethics based on our relation to nature. He seeks to ascribe meaning to Nature. How is Nature itself, and especially our relation to it, Meaningful to us, and perhaps more importantly, what is our responsibility to Nature. Our age has witnessed an increasing insularity from the natural world. Both individually and as a culture, we spend a large part of our national fortune on dissecting natural phenomena in order to control nature for our purported economic and social welfare, and the technological product of that endeavor has had a tremendous price. Erazim has been an important voice in attempting to assess that cost, a powerful witness to how we must still account for a humane philosophy of nature even as we recede from it in the guise of controller. The fulcrum of my discussion rests on Erazim's passionate articulation of a biocentric 1 ethic. As he recently lectured (1994a), Every living being, in its strenuous effort to remain alive... testifies that its own life is a value for it … The prereflectivity given rule of all life is that life is a value for itself-and as such, a value in itself, internally, quite independently of the-existence or of the acts of any other being whatever. Life is good in itself he-cause It is good for itself Wherever there is life, there is value. That is (he point: a biocentric cosmos is not a value-neutral one. This perspective arises from Erazim's well-known phenomenological approach, where he maintains that we remain within a meaningfully ordered, value-indexed world, and more to the point, this is not simply a result of human reflection, but is constituted by life as such.