Environmental Ethics: Anthologies and Journal Articles

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Open Access
Hewn and cleft from this rock: meditation at the PreCambrian contact
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1971) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, publisher
Encounter with the Precambrian contact exposed at Pardee Point in Doe River Gorge, East Tennessee, brings reflections about human origins, evolving and cleft from ancient rocks. Geochemistry has its sequel in biochemistry. The hiker crosses that fossil sequence recorded in the strata. A discontinuity is crossed with the coming of humans: A sheriff crossing the contact in search of moonshiners. The rocks are a sacrament that overlie a Presence.
Open Access
Community: ecological and ecumenical
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1973) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Iliff Theological Seminary (Denver), publisher
The era of ecology brings a vision of one world environmentally. The ecumenical movement hopes for a community and dialogue of faiths. Both have a common etymological root in the Greek word "oikos," household. These two contemporary concerns, one in science, one in religion, offer the possibility of a more comprehensive sense of community. In the Bible, the earliest sin is ecological, humans despise their garden earth, and the sin of brother against brother follows. Our charge is to live on earth and keep it. Keeping Eden requires that we be our brothers's keeper.
Open Access
Philosophical aspects of the environment
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1973) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Environmental Resources Center, Colorado State University, publisher
Ecosystem science is being often offered as an ultimate science that synthesizes even the arts and the humanities. Like the laws of personal health, the laws of ecosystemic health may be obeyed or broken, only to be reckoned with at length. The ecosciences are underscoring the continuities so as to humble the pride of the muscular West. Kept in its environmental context, our humanity is not absolutely "in" us, but is rather "in" our world dialogue. Humans may and must moderate or mind their world, yet the more competently and effectively they manipulate, the more urgently they must respect the worth of their Earth. Any human dominion ought to be a commonwealth that provides for the integrity of all its component members, with humans governing with care and love.
Open Access
Is there an ecological ethic?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, 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.
Open Access
Lake Solitude: the individual in wildness
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, publisher
Lake Solitude, in remote Rocky Mountain National Park, offers a solitary traveler a place to seek continuities and discontinuities with nature, a communion of opposites. To travel into the wilderness is to go into what one is not, so that in returning to its natural complement, mind grasps itself. Nature thrusts humans into an immense solitude, but that is her grandest gift. This environmental resistance frees us for and impels us toward centered personality.
Open Access
Nature and human emotions
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; The Applied Philosophy Program, publisher
Our encounter with nature is as passionate as it is cognitive. We have emotions of discontinuity before a nature we resist and fear. Our centripetal self maintains its integrity against the centrifugal wildness. There are also emotions of continuity, a nature we embrace and love--our country, the hills and rivers of home. Human emotions defend the self, aloft and transcendent over nature, but they ought also fit us to the surrounding natural environment. These are emotions that we all live by; they are emotions that some of us live for.
Open Access
Can and ought we to follow nature?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, publisher
"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 to the question, whether we can and ought to follow nature, must be sought in a relative sense according to which human conduct is sometimes more and sometimes less natural. Four specific relative senses are examined: a homeostatic sense, an imitative ethical sense, an axiological sense, and a tutorial sense. Nature can be followed in a homeostatic sense in which human conduct utilizes natural laws for our well-being in a stable environment, but this following is nonmoral since the moral elements can be separated from it. Nature cannot be followed in an imitative ethical sense because nature itself is either amoral or, by some accounts, immoral. Guidance for inter-human ethical conduct, therefore, must be sought not in nature, but in human culture. Nevertheless, in an axiological sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by viewing it as an object of orienting interest and value. In this connection, three environments are distinguished for human well-being in which we can and ought to participate-the urban, the rural, and the wild. Finally, in a tutorial sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by letting it teach us something of our human role, our place, and our appropriate character in the natural system as a whole. In this last sense, "following nature" is commended to anyone who seeks in his human conduct to maintain a good fit with the natural environment-a sense of following nature involving both efficiency and wisdom.
Open Access
The Pasqueflower
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; American Museum of Natural History, publisher
The Pasqueflower surviving through winter, blooming at the Pasque, Easter, offers a glimpse of the precocious exuberance of life, a token of the covenant of life to continue in beauty despite the wintry storms. To pause at first encountering it in spring is to find a moment of truth, a moment of memory and promise. Let winters come, life will flower on as long as Earth shall last.
Open Access
Values in nature
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1981) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Environmental Philosophy, Inc., publisher
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, (3) recreational value, (4) scientific value, (5) aesthetic value, (6) life value, (7) diversity and unity values, (8) stability and spontaneity values, (9) dialectical value, and (10) sacramental value. Each is analyzed and illustrated with particular reference to the objective precursors of value as these are described by natural science.
Open Access
Are values in nature subjective or objective?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1982) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Environmental Philosophy, Inc., publisher
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 components, being theory-laden. On the other hand, in ordinary natural affairs, in scientific knowing, and in valuing, we achieve some objective knowing of the world, agreeably with and mediated by the subjective coefficient. An ecological model of valuing is proposed, which is set in an evolutionary context. Natural value in its relation to consciousness is examined as an epiphenomenon, an echo, an emergent, an entrance, and an education, with emphasis on the latter categories. An account of intrinsic and instrumental natural value is related both to natural objects, life forms and land forms, and to experiencing subjects, extending the ecological model. Ethical imperatives follow from this redescription of natural value and the valuing process.
Open Access
The irreversibly comatose: respect for the subhuman in human life
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1982) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A., publisher
In the case of the irreversibly comatose patient, though no personal consciousness remains, some moral duty is owed the remaining biological life. Such an ending to human life, if pathetic, is also both intelligible and meaningful in a biological and evolutionary perspective. By distinguishing between the human subjective life and the spontaneous objective life, we can recognize a naturalistic principle in medical ethics, contrary to a current tendency to defend purely humanistic norms. This principle has applications in clinical care in the definition of death, in the use of life support therapy, in distinguishing ordinary from extraordinary therapy, in evaluating euthanasia, and in the extent of appropriate medical intervention in terminal cases.
Open Access
Values gone wild
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1983) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Taylor and Francis, publisher
Wilderness valued as mere resource for human-interest satisfaction is challenged in favor of wilderness as a productive source, in which humans have roots, but which also yields wild neighbors and aliens with intrinsic value. Wild value is storied achievement in an evolutionary ecosystem, with instrumental and intrinsic, organismic and systemic values intermeshed. Survival value is reconsidered in this light. Changing cultural appreciations of values in wilderness can transform and relativize our judgments about appropriate conduct there. A final valued element in wildness is its idiographic historical particularity, and most surprising is the emergence of a novel morality when humans learn to let values go wild.
Open Access
Just environmental business
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1984) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Random House, publisher
Business and a humanistic environmental ethic, with ten maxims, such as the stakeholder maxim or the no-discount maxim. Business and a naturalistic environmental ethic, with ten maxims, such as the reversibility maxim, or the china-shop maxim. Ethical complexities in business and environmental concerns, with ten maxims, such as the buck-stopping maxim, or the burden-of-proof maxim.
Open Access
Duties to endangered species (BioScience)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1985) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; American Institute of Biological Sciences, publisher
Neither scientists nor ethicists have realized how concern for endangered species requires an unprecedented mix of biology and ethics. The usual approach says that there are only duties to other persons concerning species. Species are resources, rivets in ecosystems, a Rosetta stone for natural history. Direct duties to species requires analysis of what a species is, a dynamic life form, which the individual inherits, instantiates, and passes on. The wrong that humans are doing is stopping the historical flow in which the vitality of life is laid.
Open Access
Valuing wildlands
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1985) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Environmental Philosophy, Inc., publisher
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, and intrinsic. (2) I criticize contingent valuation efforts to price these values. (3) I then propose an axiological model, which interrelates the multiple levels and types of value, and some principles for wildland management policy.
Open Access
Review of Mary Anglemyer and Eleanor S. Seagraves' The natural environment: an annotated bibliography on attitudes and values
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Center for Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas, publisher
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.
Open Access
The human standing in nature: storied fitness in the moral overseer
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; The Applied Philosophy Program, publisher
Humans are the creatures that have evolved a conscience--stand-outs in the system in which they stand. This conscience can wisely direct the magnificent, fearful power of the brain and hand. An environmental ethic tries to maximize conscience in order to maximize fitness in the environment. Humans are worldviewers, with a sense of storied residence. Our role is to live out a spacetime ethic, a placetime ethic. In this ethic, knowledge is power, as also is love. There is a penultimate place for superior human standing, and the ultimate lesson is that the meek inherit the Earth. In this sense too, the fittest survive.
Open Access
The preservation of natural value in the solar system
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1986) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Sierra Club Books, publisher
Earth is, by one account, an accident, of great value in contrast with valueless astronomical worlds. The universe is, by another account, fine tuned with anthropic features that anticipate life and mind on Earth. Projective nature, a third model, interprets nature as an inventive system, driving the spontaneous appearance of diversity, order, and value. If so, we ought to preserve in solarplanetary nature: (1) places spontaneously worthy of proper names, (2) places of exotic extremes, (3) of historical interest, (4) of creative potential, (5) with aesthetic properties, and (6) of transformative value.
Open Access
On behalf of bioexuberance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; New York Botanical Garden, publisher
"Please leave the flowers for others to enjoy" versus "Let the flowers live!" A maturing environmental ethic ought to reach a concern for endangered plants past a concern for persons. A plant, as a normative system, grows, reproduces, repairs its wounds, and resists death, engaged in the biological conservation of its identity and kind. What conservation biologists ought to do is respect plants for what they are in themselves--projects in conservation biology.
Open Access
Beauty and the beast: aesthetic experience of wildlife
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1987) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, author; Westview Press, publisher
Wild lives are valued aesthetically in diverse ways: (1) Wild lives are spontaneous form in motion, appealing to human emotions. (2) They are kindred yet alien sentient life. (3) They struggle to make the potential actual. (4) Wild lives are taken up as symbols in the culture that humans overlay on the natural world.