A life-defining moment for the environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III came when he was forced out as pastor of the Presbyterian church in rural Rockbridge Baths, Va., in 1965.
It was a painful setback, prompted by his passion for science and the time off he took for hiking jaunts in the Shenandoah hills — pursuits that did not square with his conservative congregation’s view of a minister’s role.
But the dismissal propelled him on to a restless intellectual and spiritual journey, with stops as a trained theologian and a natural historian, until, as a newly minted philosophy professor, he posed a question that had been unasked or routinely dismissed since before Plato: Does nature have value?
His answer — that nature has intrinsic value apart from that derived from human perspectives — appeared in a groundbreaking essay in 1975 that launched his career as the globally recognized “father” of environmental ethics and, in tune with rising public concern about land, air, water and wildlife, heralded what the philosopher Allen Carlson called the “environmental turn” in philosophy after millenniums of neglect.
Professor Rolston died on Feb. 12 at his home in Fort Collins, Colo. He was 92. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his daughter and only immediate survivor, Shonny Vander Vliet.
Professor Rolston’s essay “Is There an Ecological Ethic?” was published in the prestigious journal Ethics. It was the first major article in a philosophical journal to accord value to nature.
Professor Rolston’s early essays, collected in “Philosophy Gone Wild: Environmental Ethics” (1989), are analytical, sometimes lyrical forays that explore his contention that prevailing scientific, economic and even religious thought portrayed nature as “sterile.”
“Living as we say ‘far from nature,’” he wrote, “it is remarkable to find as one of the insistent questions of our advanced civilization: How should we value nature? An ecological crisis has forced the question upon us.”
David W. Orr, a longtime professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College in Ohio, wrote in 1994 about “Conserving Natural Values,” another of Professor Rolston’s books: “No one integrates science, natural history and philosophy more intelligently than does Professor Rolston, who is widely, and I think rightfully, regarded as the most original and best of the growing tribe of environmental philosophers.”
Professor Rolston addressed centuries of ambivalence about nature, especially from European and modern standpoints.
“Nature is wilderness yet paradise, demonic yet divine, asset yet enemy, jungle yet garden, harsh yet healing, means for man yet end in itself, commodity yet community, the land provoking man’s virility yet evoking his sentimentality,” he wrote in the essay “Philosophical Aspects of the Environment.”
A signature idea of Professor Rolston’s — “storied residence” — was highlighted in heated debates about the meaning and importance of wilderness and wilderness areas, one of the defining issues both in environmental philosophy and on the ground in the United States and internationally from the 1970s on.
Like many environmental thinkers, he echoed Henry David Thoreau’s appeal in the 1850s for wild areas to be set aside, and he agreed with Thoreau’s insight that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” That led him to fiercely defend national parks and similar areas in “The Wilderness Idea Re-Affirmed,” an essay that shared space in a compendium volume, “The Wilderness Idea Examined” (1995), with critics who argued that protecting areas was, among other things elitist, and that it failed to consider that indigenous peoples had modified landscapes for human use for millenniums.
And Professor Rolston emphatically countered another criticism, from the historian Roderick Nash, that wilderness was simply “a feeling about a place” and “a state of mind.” Drawing upon his extensive travels to wild areas on several continents, he wrote, “Wilderness is not a state of mind, it is what existed before there were states of mind.”
Yet Professor Rolston did not want to ignore local culture, and he felt that people have a crucial mix of historical, ecological, geographical and cultural traits that keep the human element in thinking about wilderness.
“An environmental philosophy does not want merely to abstract out laws and universals, if such there are, from all this drama of life,” he wrote. “True, an environmental ethic demands a theory of the whole, an overview of the earth, but not a unity that destroys plurality. The moral point of view wants a storied residence in Montana, Utah, Newfoundland, the tall grass prairie or on the Cape Cod coastline.”
Holmes Rolston III was born on Nov. 19, 1932, in Staunton, Va., to Holmes Rolston II and Mary (Long) Rolston. His father, a Presbyterian minister and orchard keeper, later became a theological scholar in Richmond, Va.
When Holmes was a boy, according to his biographer Christopher J. Preston, his strong attachment to his family and its Presbyterian beliefs, and to the Shenandoah countryside, contributed to an intuition, developed more fully after he graduated with honors in physics and math from Davidson College in North Carolina, that ethics, science and nature somehow needed to merge.
In pursuit of that elusive goal, he earned a divinity degree from the Union Theological Seminary in Virginia in 1956, following in the academic footsteps of his father and his grandfather Holmes Rolston. He went on to earn a doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1958 — again as his father had done.
He and his wife, Jane (Wilson) Rolston, whom he met and later married in Richmond, left their beloved Virginia countryside for the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a master’s degree in the philosophy of science in 1968. (Ms. Rolston died in April.)
Before they left, he wrote an elegiac nature essay for a regional publication about a hike near their home during which he encountered a covey of quail as he rounded a bend.
“A dozen pair of eyes met mine,” he wrote, “in an encounter that somehow went right to the nerve of life itself.”
When he was offered a job teaching philosophy at Colorado State University in 1968, the move west fit neatly into Rolston family lore. His grandfather had traveled to Colorado in the 1860s to work as a cowboy so he could earn enough money to save the family farm in Virginia.
Professor Rolston taught environmental ethics and science and religion at Colorado State for 40 years. He became a university professor in 1992 and retired in 2008.
In 1996, he ignited a controversy that led to a discipline-wide reckoning with charges of misanthropy and even “eco-fascism” when his essay “Feeding People Versus Saving Nature” was published. Critics, including other environmental philosophers, did not consider in their haste to criticize him that he had not argued for an “either-or” proposition; nor did they consider his suggestion — one whose ambivalence he constantly wrestled with — in the context of other writings arguing that humans might have the highest intrinsic value.
Professor Rolston acknowledged an intellectual debt to the ecologist Aldo Leopold, who posited the emblematic concept of a “land ethic” in his still widely studied book “Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There” (1949). In a defining passage of that book, Mr. Leopold wrote that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Professor Rolston delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures, an annual forum for scholars who conjoin nature and theology, at the University of Edinburgh in 1997. They were published in 1999 as “Genes, Genesis and God.”
In 2003, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for work that reconciles science and religion from the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace. He was the first environmental philosopher to receive that prize.
In the early 2000s, Professor Rolston pursued studies in evolutionary ecology and religion and found a “haunting incompleteness” about purely physical explanations of what he saw as the wonder of life on earth. He conjured the term “cruciform nature” to describe how organisms, including man, progressed through suffering to a kind of grace of God, and he linked that concept to what he saw as the accumulating values of nature.
For Professor Rolston, the study of ecology, ethics, evolution and religion was part of a wider search for meaning, one he had haltingly begun to pursue at his long-ago pastorate at Rockbridge Baths. “The creativity within the natural systems we inherit,” he wrote, “and the values this generates, are the ground of our being, not just the ground under our feet.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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