Holmes Rolston III has always loved the mountains on his skyline, from his earliest memories of Jump Mountain behind his birthplace in rural Virginia, to the 14,000 foot Long's Peak on the horizon of his home in Colorado today. High places lift his spirit, he says, they point skyward and beyond. But then he also recalls how the Shenandoah Valley people, loved both nature and the gospel.
Rolston grew up as the son of a country preacher, Holmes Rolston II, steeped in the faith of his father and mother (Mary Winifred Long), and, before that, of the first Holmes Rolston, a cowboy who also became a rural Virginia pastor. Rolston recently bought himself a tombstone in the ancestral church cemetery, to be buried beside both father and grandfather. He carved "A philosopher gone wild" on his future headstone; and the next day rose early and climed Jump Mountain, seventy years after his birth, "to prove he wasn't dead yet."
Across those decades, Rolston has developed an abiding love for nature. The Appalachian childhood matured into a global search for understanding who we humans are and where we are. That was the start of a journey that would bring together seemingly disparate worlds: science and religion, biology and philosophy, and, perhaps most significantly, ethics and environment. "If you need to start on a journey like mine," he reflects, "the Shenandoah Valley with its Presbyterian heritage, is as much the promised land as any place on Earth."
Ten years after his 1932 birth the Rolston family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. His father continued pastoral work and the young Holmes attended Harding High School. "Those were tough years", he recalls, "with the tragedies of war and of polio epidemics." His father, for a quarter of a century an author of adult Sunday school lesson quarterlies, became Editor-in-Chief of the Board of Christian Education, Presbyterian Church in the United States. Rolston then graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, Virginia.
For college, Rolston returned to North Carolina, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1953 from Davidson College, near Charlotte, with a degree in physics and mathematics. "Physics seemed then the science of fundamental nature," he remembers, "and I was attracted by the physicist-philosophers probing nature in the very small and very large, microphysics and astrophysics. They promised to teach me how the world was made." Rolston then enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond. "I discovered that I needed a metaphysics to go with my physics," he says. "What nature really was, was creation; so I had to learn about the Creator." In 1956 he graduated at the head of his class with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. That same summer, Rolston married Jane Wilson of Richmond. They have two children.
In 1958, Rolston received a Ph.D. in theology and religious studies from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, under the tutelage of Thomas F. Torrance, who himself won the Templeton Prize in 1978. Rolston returned to the valley of Virginia as pastor of Walnut Grove Presbyterian Church in Bristol, where he served until 1967. There, he recalls, "I had the freedom of the hills." Some seeds were growing. Back in college, biology professor Tom Daggy, a first rate entomologist, "had taught me that you could see things under a binocular microscope that you couldn't catch in a Geiger counter." Now, with help from biologists at East Tennessee State University, he became an avid naturalist. He recalls preaching on Sunday, "bringing in the Kingdom five days a week and going wild the other two." "Once I stumbled on a whorled pogonia in a seculed glade, and had to exclaim, 'Amazing grace.'"
Continuing his search for a philosophy of nature, Rolston entered the University of Pittsburgh and received a masters in philosophy of science in 1968. He then joined the philosophy department of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where he has come up through the ranks, receiving tenure in 1972, and becoming a University Distinguished Professor in 1992, one of 12 such positions among the University faculty of 1,400.
Rolston's focus has been on the forefront of the intertwining of science and religion, especially on ecosystems and ethics, an emphasis that has coincided with a much larger cause. "I've been lucky that my own personal agenda, figuring nature out, has during my lifetime turned out to be the world agenda," Rolston says, "figuring out the human place on the planet." That agenda took a significant turning point in 1975, when Rolston published "Is There an Ecological Ethic?" in the journal Ethics, effectively launching environmental ethics as philosophical inquiry. The discipline has since become inseparable from his name.
Underrunning the philosophical ethics, there has continued his conviction that nature is not only to be respected but to be reverenced as a sacred gift. His essay on "The Pasqueflower" portrayed the Western wildflower as symbol of religious significance (like that whorled pogonia he had encountered earlier). But now Rolston deepened the symbolism, meditating on "life persisting in the midst of its perpetual perishing" perennially regenerated after the winter and death. "The way of nature is a way of the cross."
Rolston was surprised when his celebration of the Easter flower was accepted by Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1991, the Journal of Forestry published his article arguing, as a climaxing value, for spiritual experience when encountering the forest. In 1979, Rolston co-founded the journal Environmental Ethics. For more than 20 years he has served on the editorial board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. In 1986, Rolston published Philosophy Gone Wild, a series of essays arguing for respect for nature, and, again, culminating with spiritual values to be found in wilderness.
Among his many books are Science and Religion: A Critical Study (1987), Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World (1988), Conserving Natural Value (1994), and Genes, Genesis and God (1999), from the prestigious Gifford Lectures that Rolston delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1997-98. His essays have been reprinted in anthologies over one hundred times. There are now over two dozen anthologies and another two dozen systematic works in the field he launched, not to mention over a thousand professional articles.
The Gifford Lectures are among the several hundred addresses Rolston has been invited to deliver during his career. He was the distinguished lecturer at the Kyoto Japan Zen Symposium Seminar for Religious Philosophy in 1989. He was invited to speak on ethical issues in wildlife in South Africa in 1990, on environmental ethics and policy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in 1991, and addressed the 28th Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota in 1992. That same year he served as an official observer at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. In 1993, Rolston spoke to the Society for Christian Ethics and then went to Cardiff, Wales, to deliver the main conference address at the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference.
In 1996, he delivered lectures at 11 universities in Australia. In 1998, the All-India Association for Bioethics sponsored his lectures on genetics and ethics at ten universities across the subcontinent, and he gave an address at the World Congress of Philosophy in Boston. Later that year, he traveled to China to speak at the first All China Conference on Environment and Development and four Chinese Universities. In 2000, Rolston returned to Brazil to address the Second Brazilian Congress on Conservation on the intrinsic values of nature. In fact, Rolston has lectured on all seven continents.
Rolston says that he started out loving the Shenandoah Valley and then discovered that he had to learn to love the planet Earth. He started out looking for trails up Jump Mountain and ended up having to go to the Rio Summit with 7,000 bureaucrats and diplomats. His long years of researching, writing, and lecturing on the environment have left him with deep concern for the human presence in the world. "It turns out that humans neither can nor ought to de-nature their planet," he says. "Only my sense of wonder turned to horror when I encountered the oncoming environmental crisis. No sooner did I discover that nature is grace, than I found we were treating it disgracefully."
Rolston is as often found out in the wilds as lecturing or writing about them. He has rafted 400 miles of the Grand Canyon, crossed Siberia in search of biodiversity, prowled the Amazon basin, journeyed to Nepal to study tigers, tracked wolves through Yellowstone, found a platypus and climbed Uluru (Ayer's Rock) in Australia. His vivid memories include being charged by an elephant in Kruger Park, South Africa, watching three lionesses stalk and kill a zebra in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, and meeting a leopard six feet away on a dark night in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. He knows firsthand the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. Last summer he backpacked in the Wyoming Beartooths; and this summer he is looking for gorillas in Uganda.
"But this is not just recreation," he insists, "for me it is re-encountering the creation." Rolston is unique in his coupling of the wild and the sacred. "I'm more convinced than ever that nature is grace, that nature is value-laden. This life-abundant Earth is a wonderland." But I'll never argue my humanist philosophical and theological critics into this conviction," he says, "until they spend more time in the back country." # # #
Rolston's autobiographical notes (from Karnos and Shoemaker, Falling in Love with Wisdom, Oxford University Press) can be found at: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rolston/karnos.pdf
