Holmes Rolston III, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, has died.
Professor Rolston was well known for his work in environmental ethics—recognized by some as the “father of environmental ethics”—as well as his writings on science and religion. He is the author of Philosophy Gone Wild (1986), Conserving Natural Value (1994), Genes, Genesis, and God (1999), and A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth (2012, 2020), and many other works. In 2003 he was awarded the Templeton Prize. You can learn more about his work here and here.
Rolston taught in the Department of Philosophy at Colorado State University from 1968 to 2010, and, according to his colleagues, remained actively engaged with the university until recently. He earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh (where he later gave the Gifford Lectures) and his MA at the University of Pittsburgh (where he was celebrated with this profile). He held a divinity degree from Union Presbyterian Seminary and a BS in physics and math from Davidson College.
He died on February 12, 2025.
(via Ken Shockley)
A memorial notice has been posted by the Colorado State University Department of Philosophy here.
Note: The original headline listed an incorrect year for Rolston’s death. It has been corrected.
Rest in peace, Holmes Rolston III.
He did such excellent work; I’m a great admirer.
I regularly teach his paper on saving nature or feeding humans in my environmental ethics course. I am grateful for all the great work that he did.
Holmes Rolston really helped to define, shape and legitimize the field of environmental ethics and ecological philosophy. I recently re-read his very accessible essay on aesthetic appreciation of forests:
https://mountainscholar.org/items/8b53d1fc-dd8c-4cc9-9a0d-5d653604930f
Here are a few semi-randomly selected remarks by Rolston from his many works:
Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a
language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.
The first lesson of evolution was one of conflict. The lesson now is one of
kinship.
What humans ought to respect are dynamic life forms preserved in historical lines, vital information processes that persist genetically over millions of years, overleaping short-lived individuals. It is not form (species) as mere morphology, but the formative (speciating) process that humans ought to preserve, although the process cannot be preserved without its products.
Perhaps we humans are cosmic dwarfs; perhaps we are molecular giants. But
there is no denying our mid-scale complexity. We humans live neither at the
range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but we might well live at the range of the infinitely complex. We live at the range of the most
caring; we ourselves might embody the most capacity for caring.
We can be thrilled by a hawk in the wind-swept sky, by the rings of Saturn, the falls of Yosemite. We can admire the internal symmetry of a garnet crystal or appreciate the complexity of the forest humus. All these experiences come mediated by our cultural education; some are made possible by science. An Iroquois would have variant experiences, or none at all. But these experiences have high elements of givenness, of finding something thrown at us, of successful observation. The ‘work’ of observation is in order to understand the better.
In addition to him being a foundational figure in environmental ethics (at least. as it has been practiced in the English-speaking world over the last 40ish years), many of us can attest to how slowgoing it was to go on a hike with him. Not because he was a slow walker, per se, but because, like a wonderful student of the natural world, he would stop every 15-20 or so paces to point out some seen or mostly unseen plant or flower or bug alongside the trail. Once, we got hit by hail, and his description of how hail comes about made it seem not so bad. And I distinctly remember him telling a few of us about the pasqueflower, and ever since, it has been one of my favorite mountain plants. So even when we did not go far, or went in inclement weather, hiking with him was a pleasure. I will miss him and his endless delight for the marvels of the world.
Here’s a link to an article he wrote about the flower along with a 2 minute video of him hiking and encountering the plant:
https://mountainscholar.org/items/cb7b83ad-799a-4e50-a834-4a732aac42b0
Cool – thank you!
Actually, his essay on the flower is elsewhere and available for free as pdf. Not sure if this link will take you there. If not, you can google Rolston and Pasqueflower and find it easily.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/08eea6ff-97e2-46dd-bcb6-89b8cc426721/content
His Environmental Ethics (Temple 1989) remains the gold standard. He kept thinking to the end. And he was kind to the ignorant (like me).
I’m sorry to hear Holmes Rolston II passed. I remember walking with him into Johnson Hall from the parking lot at CSU and he always said, “Hi!”. He had an office down the hall from what used to be Future Earth, with lots of books to where he could continue his research. I will remember him fondly as he was a kind and gentle human.
I was sad to learn last week of the passing of Holmes Rolston III. His foundational influence on environmental ethics, especially in the USA, cannot be denied, and so the news has rather the feeling of being the end of an era.
For me, reading Rolston in the early 1990s at the start of my PhD was quite an experience, one that powerfully reaffirmed the worth of a philosophy that connected to the natural world. Both the plausibility of the cases that he brought and the poetic character of his philosophical writing were hugely liberating: much of the work going on around me in British academia seemed to be fixated on issues of language or economistic ideas of rational agency, and yet against all the talk about speech acts, warranted assertibility and game theory, here was this wonderful man from an ocean away who talked about values in relation to hawks and rocks and bison and other planets! It was inspiring, and I especially recall the first time I saw him give a presentation, at the Royal Institute for Philosophy conference in Cardiff in 1993. There was a definite sense that radical and exciting new ideas were coming together, with Holmes Rolston’s work in the vanguard. Back in those pre-internet days, it rapidly became a standing joke amongst my friends that they had to ask me for my wishes for birthday and Christmas presents a good six months in advance, since invariably I wanted US environmental ethics volumes like those by Holmes, and back then these needed to be specially imported by the UK booksellers. Those books still sit in a prominent place in my study at home.
Some years on from Cardiff, Holmes came to give a guest lecture at the University of Manchester, having been invited by my PhD supervisor Keekok Lee. She gave him a suitably laudatory introduction, to which he amusingly responded with the quip “I feel as if I’ve just gatecrashed my own funeral!”. As it happened my PhD defence was being held the next day, and after Holmes gave his talk, there could have been no better preparation than I was fortunate enough to receive, as I had dinner with Holmes and Keekok that evening. It was the first time that he and I truly spoke on a more individual and personal basis, and I was struck by his friendliness and humility, quite without any of the sort of ego that some people might show if they could claim even half of his accomplishments. It was a fine example to set to a new scholar just starting to make his way into the field, but of course, it’s also true that it was just who Holmes was.
Though we were never in each other’s orbits that often, after my emigration to the USA I was fortunate enough to join Holmes and others on a couple of his famous guided walks during the ISEE summer gatherings in Allenspark, Colorado. These were quite a treat, and I’m sure many fellow ISEE members also recall them fondly: while Holmes’ manner was always gentle, it was obvious that his knowledge of the local flora, fauna and geology was quite encyclopaedic, and he could, as it were, make the route sing with his readings of events from the natural signs around us. The breadth of Holmes’ knowledge and his ability to draw all the strands together for us manifested environmental philosophy at its most embedded, embodied and evocative. I shall miss him, as I think we all shall.
A special issue of the journal “Ethics and the Environment” is currently being planned to honour Holmes Rolston’s work and legacy. I shall pass on more details as we finalise them, but I hope that any environmental philosophers reading this will take note of the possibility of contributing something to mark Holmes’ immense contribution.
Rest in peace, Holmes.