Modern ethical perspectives toward the environment often emphasize the connection of humans to a broader biotic community. The full intimacy of this connectedness, however, is only now being revealed as scientific findings in developmental biology and genetics provide new insights into the importance of environmental interaction for the development of organisms. These insights are reshaping our understanding of how organism-environment interaction contributes to both consistency and variation in organism development, and leading to a new perspective whereby an “organism” is not solely viewed as the adaptive product of evolutionary selection to an external environment over generations, but as continuously being constructed through systems of interactions that link an organism’s characteristics developmentally to the physical and social influences it experiences during life. This newfound emphasis on “interaction” leads to an interdependency whereby any change to an “environment” impacts the interacting “organism(s),” and an alteration to the “organism” eventually affects its “environment.” The causal reciprocity embedded within this organism-environment interdependency holds implications for our moral obligations to environments, given their compulsory role in shaping all organisms including ourselves. * Biological Sciences Department, Center for Coastal Marine Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407; e–mail: slema@calpoly.edu. Lema’s research focuses on understanding the physiological and genetic mechanisms underlying the phenotypic responses of organisms to changing environments, the effects of chemical pollutants on hormone signaling, and the incorporation of phenotypic plasticity into new approaches for animal conservation. The author thanks Kenneth Wilson, Kristin Hardy, and two anonymous referees, Peter Miller and Holmes Rolston, III, for their helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. 1 See, for example, Don E. Marietta, Jr., “The Interrelationship of Ecological Science and Environ -mental Ethics,”