On February 12, 2025, Holmes Rolston III passed away at age 92. He has been called the “father of environmental ethics” because of his pioneering work that led to the creation of an academic field. What is perhaps less well known is that Holmes was a cradle Presbyterian. Both his father and his grandfather were Presbyterian ministers and Holmes, himself, was ordained as a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in the United States.
His academic lineage also reflects his Presbyterian roots. A graduate of Davidson College (physics and mathematics), he earned his Bachelor of Divinity from what is now Union Presbyterian Seminary and went on to receive a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His advisor there was the late Thomas F. Torrance: Reformed theologian, translator of Karl Barth’s Systematics and Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, and one of the founders of the contemporary science and religion movement. Holmes also earned a Master of Arts in the philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh.
“Father of environmental ethics”
Upon completing his MA at Pitt, Holmes began his academic career in the Philosophy Department at Colorado State University where he became the University’s longest serving Distinguished Professor, retiring in 2010 but, according to colleagues, remaining active on campus. In the course of his academic career, he lectured on all seven continents. Holmes was the founding associate editor of the journal, Environmental Ethics, and the founding president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. He was a Gifford Lecturer in 1997. Those lectures became Genes, Genesis, and God. In 2003 he was a recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Holmes was critical of the claim that human rights be extended to flora and fauna in the wild and even to domesticated plants and animals. In a 1991 essay entitled, “Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World,” he wrote:
When we try to use culturally extended rights and psychologically based utilities to protect the flora or even the insentient fauna, to protect endangered species or ecosystems, we can only stammer. Indeed, we get lost trying to protect bighorns, because, in the wild, cougars are not respecting the rights or utilities of the sheep they slay, and, in culture, humans slay sheep and eat them regularly, while humans have every right not to be eaten by either humans or cougars. There are no rights in the wild, and nature is indifferent to the welfare of particular animals. [In F. Herbert Bormann and Stephen R. Kellert. (1991). Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle. Yale University Press. pp. 73-96.]
Beyond his focus on ethics and the environment, he was also concerned about the relationship of science with religion. In his seminal work, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (1987, 2006), he wrote:
The interface between science and religion is, in a certain sense, a no-man’s land. No specialized science is competent here, nor does classical theology or academic philosophy really own this territory. This is an interdisciplinary zone where inquirers come from many fields. But this is a land where we increasingly must live. … The religion that is married to science today will be a widow tomorrow. … But the religion that is divorced from science today will leave no offspring tomorrow. [pp. vi, ix]
Holmes’s connection with the environment was not only academic. A practicing naturalist, who engaged in field studies in many of the places where he traveled to lecture, he also had the spirit of a poet.
