Browsing by Author "University of Chicago Press, publisher"

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Open Access
After preservation? Dynamic nature in the Anthropocene
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; University of Chicago Press, publisher
We have entered the first century in 45 million centuries of life on Earth in which one species can jeopardize the planet's future. Since Galileo, Earth seemed a minor planet, lost in the stars. Since Darwin, humans have come late and last on this lonely planet. Today, on our home planet at least, we are putting these once de-centered humans back at the center. This is the Anthropocene epoch, and this high profile discourse comes to showcase the expanding human empire. Humans will manage the planet. We need to figure, perhaps re-figure conservation in this novel future in which we celebrate a new epoch and name it after ourselves.
Open Access
Immunity in natural history
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1996) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; University of Chicago Press, publisher
Immunity, involving a struggle for health, is also the defense of biological identity, and, in advanced species, of an idiographic self. The identity of any such "self," though protected by immunity, is enlarged by kin selection, sexuality, reproduction, and caring for offspring. The environment "foreign" from the perspective of immunity is "home" from the perspective of ecology. Immunity makes evolution possible. Immunity, in which an organism acquires information during its biography, is the evolution of ordered control and results in values shared as well as selves defended. Errors here are intrinsic to trial and error learning, a process with analogies in the science of immunology.
Open Access
Is there an ecological ethic?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; University of Chicago Press, publisher
The environment is on the world agenda, also on the ethical frontier, for the foreseeable future. Environmental ethics is about saving things past, still present. Environmental ethics is equally about future nature, without analogy in our past. Living at one of the ruptures of history, modern cultures threaten the stability, beauty, and integrity of Earth, and thereby of the cultures superposed on Earth. Environmental ethics must find a satisfactory fit for humans in the larger communities of life on Earth.