Holmes Rolston
Biographic Data
| ID | 444001 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Holmes Rolston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Holmes |
| FAMILY NAME | Rolston |
| SIGNATURE | ROLSTON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colorado State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1944 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Pasqueflower
A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth
This Second Edition of A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers clear, powerful, and often moving thoughts from Holmes Rolston III, one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment and often called the "father of environmental ethics." Rolston surveys the full spectrum of approaches in the field of environmental ethics and offers critical assessments of contemporary academic accounts. He…
Values, Environmental
Environmental values are of various kinds, including intrinsic, inherent, systemic, Anthropocene, ecosystem, and spiritual
The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengingeering our World
Preston has a new worldview, convinced "that humans have utterly transformed the earth" and have a "startling synthetic future." But he should have been more forceful about Anthropocene abuses of power. Further, his discussion of the value of wildness is relegated to a brief, puzzling postscript
Technology and/or Nature: Denatured/Renatured/Engineered/Artifacted Life
In our high-tech world, do we live at the end of nature? Is the technosphere replacing the biosphere? Can humans control their genetically inherited Pleistocene appetites in an Anthropocene Epoch? Is experience of the urban, rural, and wild a three-dimensional life, with life focused on fewer dimensions under-privileged? Do we, ought we, wish to live on an engineered planet? Would this fulfill human destiny or display human arrogance, failing to …
Environmental ethics and environmental anthropology
Anthropology, including environmental anthropology, is a science, as also is ecology. Philosophy, including environmental ethics, analyzes issues often to make value judgments about right and wrong. Environmental ethics is a synthesis of humans and nature, with humans hoping to live well on their Earth. Environmental justice demands an equitable distribution of burdens and benefits to racial minorities, the poor, and those in developing nations. …
Placing, Displacing, Replacing the Sacred: Science, Religion, and Spirituality
Rediscovering and Rethinking Leopold’s Green Fire
Lecture given at Utah Valley University, April 4, 2013. Aldo Leopold shot a wolf a hundred years ago, the most iconic wolf kill in conservation history, a shooting now historically confirmed, which after three decades he elevated into his green fire metaphor and symbol. There are tensions. Was Leopold a hypocrite? He spent the rest of his life hunting and trying to produce more game to kill. Thinking like a mountain, thinking big in the big outdo…
Creative Genesis: Escalating Naturalism and Beyond
Does a plausible worldview need some explanations that exceed the natural? Hard naturalisms insist not, but softer, or more open naturalisms find that natural processes can produce ever more complex results - moving from matter to life to mind - in a superb natural history. This invites a religious naturalism, and challenges it. Repeatedly the critical junctures require analysis pressing beyond merely scientific explanations: whether such narrati…
Biophilia, Selfish Genes, Shared Values
WO CENTRAL FEATURES of Edward O. Wilson's work are selfish genes and biophilia (1975a, 1984a).Perhaps more than any other living biologist, he has sought an ethics that is, both subjectively and objectively, based on biology.We moral agents, human subjects who act, must have morality based in our genes.And those who are the focus of concern, the objects or beneficiaries of our moral behavior, are not simply other humans but plants and animals.Thi…
A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth
No one looking ahead at the middle of the last century could have foreseen the extent and the importance of the ensuing environmental crises. Now, more than a decade into the next century, no one can ignore it. A New Environmental Ethics: the Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers clear, powerful, and oftentimes moving thoughts from one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment. Rolston, an early and leading pione…
SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed by Martin A. Nowak, with Roger Highfield
SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed . By Martin A. Nowak, with Roger Highfield . New York : Free Press , 2011 . 352 pages. $27.00 . Martin Nowak calls himself a “mathematical biologist.” That might surprise us, though “mathematical physicist” would not. Newton and Einstein used much math; Darwin used little. Still, dimensions of biology are quite mathematical, such as population genetics. Nowak hopes by ma…
Mountain Majesties above Fruited Plains: Culture, Nature, and Rocky Mountain Aesthetics
Those residing in the Rocky Mountains enjoy both nature and culture in ways not characteristic of many inhabited landscapes. Landscapes elsewhere in the United States and in Europe involve a nature-culture synthesis. An original nature, once encountered by settlers, has been transformed by a dominating culture, and on the resulting landscape, there is little experience of primordial nature. On Rocky Mountain landscapes, the model is an ellipse wi…
Ecology Redesigning Genes: Ethical and Sikh Perspective
Critical Issues in Future Environmental Ethics
Robert Frodeman, Dale Jamieson, J. Baird Callicott, Stephen M. Gardiner, Lori Gruen, Dale Jamieson, Irene J. Klaver, Eugene Hargrove, Ben A. Minteer, Bryan Norton, Clare Palmer, Holmes Rolston, III, Ricardo Rozzi, James P. Sterba, William M. Throop, Victoria Davion, Commentary on the Future of Environmental Philosophy, Ethics and the Environment, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall, 2007), pp. 117-150
Science and Religion in the Face of the Environmental Crisis
BOTH science and religion are challenged by the environmental crisis, both to reevaluate the natural world and to reevaluate their dialogue with each other. Both are thrown into researching fundamental theory and practice in the face of an upheaval unprecedented in human history, indeed in planetary history. Life on Earth is in jeopardy owing to the behavior of one species, the only species that is either scientific or religious, the only species…
Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half the Truth but Dangerous as a Whole
F/Actual Knowing: Putting Facts and Values in Place
F/Actual Knowing:Putting Facts and Values in Place Holmes Rolston III (bio) Knowing needs to be actualized, an act of ours, yet also a discovery of what is actually, factually there. In place ourselves, we manage some awareness of other places. Agents in our knowing, we co-respond, and this emplaces us. But we humans have powers of dis-placement too, of taking up, whether empathetically or objectively, the situations of others, other humans, some…
Environmental Ethics
This chapter contains sections titled: The Environmental Turn Humans: People and their World Animals: Beasts in Flesh and Blood Organisms: Respect for Life Species and Biodiversity: Lifelines in Jeopardy Ecosystems: The Land Ethic Earth: Ethics on the Home Planet
Environmental Ethics in Antartica
The concerns of environmental ethics on other continents fail in Antarctica, which is without sustainable development, or ecosystems for a “land ethic,” or even familiar terrestrial fauna and flora. An Antarctic regime, developing politically, has been developing an ethics, underrunning the politics, remarkably exemplified in the Madrid Protocol, protecting “the intrinsic value of Antarctica.” Without inhabitants, claims of sovereignty are proble…
Environmental ethics on Antarctic ice
An environmental philosopher gets disoriented in Antarctica, an uninhabited continent, wilderness in deep freeze. Antarctica is peripheral to the main focus of environmental ethics, sustaining life on Earth. Yet Antarctica could set the pace for thinking about the common heritage of humankind. We must stay busy at work on the other six continents, but we ought to set this seventh continent aside. Don't nationalize it. Don't internationalize it. N…
Environment and the Moral Life: Towards a New Paradigm
Evolutionary History and Divine Presence
The genesis of life is keyed to genes evolving in organisms. There is remarkable debate about randomness and probability, the inevitable and the contingent, actualities and possibilities, as these result in increasing diversity and complexity. The generated biological information displays a cumulative creativity that, described by science, is nowhere implied by biological theory. Such genesis invites an account of God as the Ground of Information
Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes Need to Be Science-Based
Address at "Meeting in the Landscape," the First International Conference on Environmental Aesthetics," Koli, Finland, June 1994
Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy
Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes Need to Be Science-Based
Address at "Meeting in the Landscape," the First International Conference on Environmental Aesthetics," Koli, Finland, June 1994
Values in Nature
Nature is examined as a carrier of values. Despite problems of subjectivity and objectivity in value assignments, values are actualized in human relationships with nature, sometimes by (human) constructive activity depending on a natural support, sometimes by a sensitive, if an interpretive, appreciation of the characteristics of natural objects. Ten areas of values associated with nature are recognized: (1) economic value, (2) life support value…
Can the East Help the West to Value Nature
Eastern religion mixes uncertainly with Western science. It is doubtful whether Taoist and Buddhist views can be successfully exported to value the nature described by evolutionary ecoscience or to prescribe values for technological science. Specifically examined are the relations between karma, reincarnation, and biological value; binary complementarity and evolutionary nature; nondual union and biological integrity; and nirvana, emptiness, and …
Are Values in Nature Subjective or Objective
Prevailing accounts of natural values as the subjective response of the human mind are reviewed and contested. Discoveries in the physical sciences tempt us to strip the reality away from many native-range qualities, including values, but discoveries in the biological sciences counterbalance this by finding sophisticated structures and selective processes in earthen nature. On the one hand, all human knowing and valuing contain subjective compone…
Human values and natural systems
What human values are carried by natural systems? I can answer that question directly while I indirectly address a deeper question. Are values in nature objective or subjective? Some values (the nutrition in a potato) seem objectively there, while others (the eagle as a national symbol) seem merely assigned. Either way, certain experiences that humans find to be valuable require and are carried by natural things. As we examine the types of natura…
Can and Ought We to Follow Nature
"Nature knows best" is reconsidered from an ecological perspective which suggests that we ought to follow nature. The phrase "follow nature" has many meanings. In an absolute law-of-nature sense, persons invariably and necessarily act in accordance with natural laws, and thus cannot but follow nature. In an artifactual sense, all deliberate human conduct is viewed as unnatural, and thus it is impossible to follow nature. As a result, the answer t…
Environmental Ethics in Antartica
The concerns of environmental ethics on other continents fail in Antarctica, which is without sustainable development, or ecosystems for a “land ethic,” or even familiar terrestrial fauna and flora. An Antarctic regime, developing politically, has been developing an ethics, underrunning the politics, remarkably exemplified in the Madrid Protocol, protecting “the intrinsic value of Antarctica.” Without inhabitants, claims of sovereignty are proble…
Environmental ethics on Antarctic ice
An environmental philosopher gets disoriented in Antarctica, an uninhabited continent, wilderness in deep freeze. Antarctica is peripheral to the main focus of environmental ethics, sustaining life on Earth. Yet Antarctica could set the pace for thinking about the common heritage of humankind. We must stay busy at work on the other six continents, but we ought to set this seventh continent aside. Don't nationalize it. Don't internationalize it. N…
A Theological Watershed Barth's Römerbrief a Digest with Notes
Responsible Man in Reformed Theology: Calvin Versus the Westminster Confession
The Confession of 1967 in the United Presbyterian Church marks the official end of the four-century Presbyterian venture into covenant theology. Now past that milestone, perhaps we have reached a vantage point where we can turn dispassionately to survey that curious but historic route. Seen from its concept of responsible man, we here argue, that route has been a prolonged detour away from the insights of the Reformers.
Schlick's Responsible Man
A criticism of the concept of responsibility in the work of Moritz Schlick. The solution, or dissolution, of moral responsibility is not nearly so simple as Schlick has proposed. Upon analysis, his hope of retaining responsibility under ethics as an applied science collapses
Can and Ought We to Follow Nature
"Nature knows best" is reconsidered from an ecological perspective which suggests that we ought to follow nature. The phrase "follow nature" has many meanings. In an absolute law-of-nature sense, persons invariably and necessarily act in accordance with natural laws, and thus cannot but follow nature. In an artifactual sense, all deliberate human conduct is viewed as unnatural, and thus it is impossible to follow nature. As a result, the answer t…
Values in Nature
Nature is examined as a carrier of values. Despite problems of subjectivity and objectivity in value assignments, values are actualized in human relationships with nature, sometimes by (human) constructive activity depending on a natural support, sometimes by a sensitive, if an interpretive, appreciation of the characteristics of natural objects. Ten areas of values associated with nature are recognized: (1) economic value, (2) life support value…
Are Values in Nature Subjective or Objective
Prevailing accounts of natural values as the subjective response of the human mind are reviewed and contested. Discoveries in the physical sciences tempt us to strip the reality away from many native-range qualities, including values, but discoveries in the biological sciences counterbalance this by finding sophisticated structures and selective processes in earthen nature. On the one hand, all human knowing and valuing contain subjective compone…
Environmental Philosophy
The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation
Valuing Wildlands
Valuing wildlands is complex. (1) In a philosophically oriented analysis, I distinguish seven meaning levels of value, individual preference, market price, individual good, social preference, social good, organismic, and ecosystemic, and itemize twelve types of value carried by wildlands, economic, life support, recreational, scientific, genetic diversity, aesthetic, cultural symbolization, historical, character building, therapeutic, religious, …
The Natural Environment: An Annotated Bibliography on Attitudes and Values
The compilers make serious effort to include different perspectives, and this edition is more adequate to environmental ethics and values than an earlier edition. For both the editors, now retired librarians, this is largely a labor of love
Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World
Preface 1. Humans Valuing the Natural Environment Values Carried by Nature * Value Ownership * Following Nature 2. Higher Animals: Duties to Sentient Life Natural Rights, Goods, Interests * Human Dominion over Animals * Domestic and Hunted Animals 3. Organisms: Duties to Organic Life Objective Value in Organisms * Objective Life versus Subjective Life * Human Interests and Organismic Values 4. Life in Jeopardy: Duties to Endangered Species Duties…
Before It Is Too Late
Can the East Help the West to Value Nature
Eastern religion mixes uncertainly with Western science. It is doubtful whether Taoist and Buddhist views can be successfully exported to value the nature described by evolutionary ecoscience or to prescribe values for technological science. Specifically examined are the relations between karma, reincarnation, and biological value; binary complementarity and evolutionary nature; nondual union and biological integrity; and nirvana, emptiness, and …
Human values and natural systems
What human values are carried by natural systems? I can answer that question directly while I indirectly address a deeper question. Are values in nature objective or subjective? Some values (the nutrition in a potato) seem objectively there, while others (the eagle as a national symbol) seem merely assigned. Either way, certain experiences that humans find to be valuable require and are carried by natural things. As we examine the types of natura…
What Deserves Appreciation
Andrew Brennan: Thinking about Nature
Brennan, a Scottish philosopher, seeks to keep philosophy ecologically honest. He is keenly attentive to what sort of environmental ethics has scientific support. He calls this eco-humanism. Yet there is nothing in scientific ecology that grounds any metaphysics. There is, however, supervenience, genuinely emergent properties. This results in an ethical polymorphism
South African Environments into the 21st Century
Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy
Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes Need to Be Science-Based
Address at "Meeting in the Landscape," the First International Conference on Environmental Aesthetics," Koli, Finland, June 1994
Evolutionary History and Divine Presence
The genesis of life is keyed to genes evolving in organisms. There is remarkable debate about randomness and probability, the inevitable and the contingent, actualities and possibilities, as these result in increasing diversity and complexity. The generated biological information displays a cumulative creativity that, described by science, is nowhere implied by biological theory. Such genesis invites an account of God as the Ground of Information
Environment and the Moral Life: Towards a New Paradigm
Environmental ethics on Antarctic ice
An environmental philosopher gets disoriented in Antarctica, an uninhabited continent, wilderness in deep freeze. Antarctica is peripheral to the main focus of environmental ethics, sustaining life on Earth. Yet Antarctica could set the pace for thinking about the common heritage of humankind. We must stay busy at work on the other six continents, but we ought to set this seventh continent aside. Don't nationalize it. Don't internationalize it. N…
Environmental Ethics
This chapter contains sections titled: The Environmental Turn Humans: People and their World Animals: Beasts in Flesh and Blood Organisms: Respect for Life Species and Biodiversity: Lifelines in Jeopardy Ecosystems: The Land Ethic Earth: Ethics on the Home Planet
Environmental Ethics in Antartica
The concerns of environmental ethics on other continents fail in Antarctica, which is without sustainable development, or ecosystems for a “land ethic,” or even familiar terrestrial fauna and flora. An Antarctic regime, developing politically, has been developing an ethics, underrunning the politics, remarkably exemplified in the Madrid Protocol, protecting “the intrinsic value of Antarctica.” Without inhabitants, claims of sovereignty are proble…
Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half the Truth but Dangerous as a Whole
Philosophy (32 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Environmental ethics (18 works) · Applied philosophy (17 works) · Contemporary philosophy (17 works) · General interest (17 works) · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics (15 works) · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Sociology (10 works)