Physicians and nurses caring for terminally ill patients are expected to center their moral concerns almost exclusively on the needs and welfare of the dying patient and the patient's family. But what about the relationship of traditional medical ethics to the emerging new theories of environmental ethics, like deep ecology? As we glide into the twenty-first century, can anyone seriously doubt that the mounting global concerns of environmental ethics will eventually influence the ethics of medicine too?

In Part 1 of this essay, I raised the following question: How would our care of the dying patient change if environmentally inspired theories of ethics, like deep ecology, were imported into current Western norms of patient care?