Alumnus Wins Templeton Prize for Creating Field of Environmental Ethics
Holmes Rolston
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3/19/2003
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Holmes Rolston III, who has created the field of environmental ethics through thirty years of research, writing, and lecturing on the religious imperative to respect nature, has been named the 2003 Templeton laureate. The prize, valued at more than one million dollars, is the world's largest monetary annual award honoring achievements and given to an individual.
Rolston, who lived as a youth in Charlotte and graduated from Davidson College in 1953, announced that he intends to use his prize to endow a chair in science and religion at Davidson. “Half a century ago at Davidson,” he recalled, “my professors there gave me a headstart on combining science and Christian faith with intellectual integrity, and I hope that young minds a half century hence can still have the same opportunity.” Davidson College gave Rolston an honorary doctor of letters in May 2002.
Clark Ross, vice president for academic affairs at Davidson, said, “We are delighted with this opportunity that will permit us to strengthen our connections across the curriculum, involving religion, ethics, and science.”
Rolston currently serves as University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He was praised as one of world’s leading advocates for protecting the Earth's biodiversity and ecology in recognition of the intrinsic value of creation, including the ongoing evolutionary genesis in the natural world. In philosophical circles, he is widely known as the “father of environmental ethics.” In theological circles, he is known for his concept of a sacred, prolific, yet “cruciform” creation.
Rolston has been at the forefront of those who join biology and religion for the understanding of Earth’s evolutionary ecosystems, an effort made all the more critical in the past three decades by escalating environmental concerns worldwide.
The Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, founded in 1972 by Sir John Templeton as the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is valued at 725,000 pounds sterling. It is given each year to a living person to encourage and honor those who advance spiritual matters. When he created the prize, Templeton stipulated that its value is always to exceed the Nobel Prizes to underscore his belief that advances in spiritual discoveries can complement and be quantifiably more significant than those in science honored by the Nobels.
Holmes Rolston accepts his honorary degree.
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The list of Templeton Prize winners includes Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. Recent laureates have been Freeman Dyson, physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Arthur Peacocke, biologist and theologian at Oxford University, and John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian at Cambridge University. Polkinghorne visited Davidson for two days in 2002 as the Staley Lecturer.
Judges for the award are an international panel of nine authorities across a multi-religious spectrum, currently including the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths.
The Duke of Edinburgh will award the prize to Rolston in a private ceremony at
Buckingham Palace on May 7, with a public reception to follow.
Rolston majored in physics and mathematics at Davidson. He recalled how his physics teachers, especially Henry Fulcher and Clarence Pietenpol, had themselves studied under the seminal founders of modern physics, and were quite philosophically sophisticated about cosmological questions. Rolston wanted, he says, “to find out how the world was made, and physics seemed the science of fundamental nature, both the microphysics and the astrophysics.”
Rolston’s interests in biology were also awakened at Davidson by Professor Thomas Daggy. “I got entranced in a biology class taught by a first rate entomologist. The other students considered him a buggy freak, but he saw things in the woods that nobody else was seeing. He taught me that you could see things in a binocular microscope that you did not catch in a cloud chamber. ...Physics is only one of the Greek words for nature; the root for the other is natura, to give birth.” Rolston recalls that he found out that the trouble with physics is that it has no life. His interests steadily shifted afterward to the planet’s natural history.
Rolston initially achieved wide recognition with a 1975 article, “Is There an Ecological Ethic?” in Ethics, the first article in a major philosophical journal that challenged the then widespread idea that nature was value-free, and that all values stem from a human perspective. Nature, Rolston contended, contains intrinsic values independently of humans and deserves to be treated as such out of respect for and love of creation. In 1979, he co-founded Environmental Ethics, which continues to be the leading journal in the field. Rolston’s 1986 book, Science and Religion—A Critical Study, and his 1987 Environmental Ethics have been widely hailed for re-opening the question of a theology of nature by rejecting anthropocentrism in ethical and philosophical analysis valuing natural history.
Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ed Crutchfield, Holmes Rolston, and Davidson President Bobby Vagt (l-r) in May 2002.
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Rolston's work has been reviewed, cited in, and translated into 18 languages. His several hundred university lectures include the prestigous Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, as well as invitations to Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Yale Law School, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Oxford, the University of Manchester, and many others. Rolston has lectured in Europe, Ireland, Scandinavia, Australia, South America, China, India, Japan—in fact he has lectured on all seven continents.
In contrast to other advocates of theology/science dialogue who often begin in religion and move to embrace science, or vice versa, Rolston has spared neither religion nor science. “The trouble is making peace between the two,” Rolston noted. “But equally I have had to quarrel with both about values intrinsic to nature.”
“Despite what I was first taught at Davidson,” Rolston recalled, “when I got into graduate school and the larger academic world, science thought nature to be value-free. Monotheism thought nature fallen owing to human sin. They agreed that humans were the center of value on Earth. I had to fight both theology and science to love nature.”
So he turned to philosophy, but didn't find much help there, either. He explained, “Philosophers were then too focused on humans, and complained that I committed the naturalistic fallacy when I found values in nature and argued that we ought to include these values in our ethics.”
His outlook has often left him as an outsider among his peers. His first efforts to introduce an environmental ethics were rejected by mainstream philosophical journals, before his 1975 article was accepted by Ethics. He recalls how he reacted in shock when he received his invitation to deliver the world-famous Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1997-98, because, a Rocky Mountain westerner, he could barely get attention from what he calls “the Eastern establishment,” much less from the celebrated theologians of Britain and Europe. The manuscript at the heart of his lectures had been turned down by prominent publishers. It was then published as Genes, Genesis and God by Cambridge University Press in 1999, and has since received acclaim as a monumental work.
Rolston’s books have been used in classes in several hundred colleges and universities. His articles have been reprinted more than one hundred times, repeatedly in anthologies in environmental ethics. He has been cited thousands of times.
Rolston has won admirers in some unlikely places. While most philosophers would proudly include in their vita that they had been invited to deliver an address at the World Congress of Philosophy, as Rolston was in 1998, he is equally proud of his 1999 invitation to give a distinguished lecture at the Yellowstone National Park Scientific Conference on the conservation of wild nature. He thinks it is as important to publish in the Journal of Forestry as in Ethics. “I am much encouraged to get a sympathetic hearing, often from those I might first have taken to be religion's cultured despisers.”
Holmes Rolston and his wife, Jane, following the May 2002 graduation ceremonies.
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Perry H. Biddle, Jr. ’ 54, Minister-at-Large for the Middle Tennessee Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (USA), noted in his nomination of Rolston for the Templeton Prize that current concern for environmental degradation around the globe makes his prize particularly timely. “Within religious thought and practice in the second half of the twentieth century, no development is more striking than the re-consideration of the human relation to the natural world, launched by environmental concerns,” wrote Biddle. “Rolston, more than any other living person, has been the seminal thinker who makes possible a new rapprochement between biology and religion, joining theologians and biologists in their common respect/reverence for nature. In the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, the Hebrew people envisioned a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, but if and only if they resided in that land with justice and love, rolling down like waters. Rolston has enlarged that vision a hundredfold, from locally to globally, placing on the agenda for Earth in the new millennium the vision of Earth as the promised planet.”
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