Environmental Ethics, by Holmes Rolston III, represents one of the most thorough and provocative works in the field of environmental philosophy to date. In addressing the essential question of the intrinsic value of the natural world Rolston is laying the groundwork for a new understanding of humanity's place in the world. Beginning with the simple premise of responsibility, Rolston argues that it is the duty of all humans by virtue of our existence as reasoning beings to protect and conserve the biodiversity and environmental health of the plant. This vital responsibility is intended to inform, not only for our relationship to the world vis a vis own consumptive needs, but in a way that enriches the existential potential of, not only all other forms of life, but the nonsentient ecosystem as well, i.e., mountains, sky, rivers, oceans, earth and rock.

The importance of this kind of radical subjectivity is that it represents the necessary acknowledgement of the interconnectivity of all being. You may be asking yourself, but what does this mean to me as an individual, and why should I care about deforestation taking place in a remote part of the world? The answer Rolston, puts forth is both complex and elegant, in which he argues that the individual values of nature cannot be isolated, due to the inherent connectivity, in a simple pragmatic approach to life. Because since the earth is one great system of interrelationships, with all of the individual constituents relying upon the others in order to function. Thus, if one part is disturbed or destroyed, for example the elimination of predators such as wolves and bears in a forest, there are serious repercussions that will eventually effect the entire ecosystem from, from the overpopulation of deer, increased spread of disease, loss of habitat due to overgrazing, which results in increased starvation of wildlife and the eventual loss of biotic diversity. These are things that are not apparent at a glance, nonetheless they do represent some of the most serious problems facing the health of the Earth, and it is precisely these nondescript consequences that makes understanding these relationships so important.

In Environmental Ethics, Rolston puts forth a new ethical paradigm that responds to this void in our consciousness. By illustrating the vital importance and necessary interplay between of all aspects of nature, and the aesthetic, economic, religious, recreational, scientific, historical, cultural and dialectical values that nature represents for humans this book offers many important insights useful to addressing today's environmental crisis.

Holmes Rolston provides a thorough overview of the vast topic of science and religion. The book is especially good at summarizing difficult issues for non-specialists and includes the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. A revised edition should be published.

It seems clear that the author knows his subject matter and the issues surrounding evolution and genetics as well as philosophy and ethics. It's much less clear that he has anything useful to add to the discussion. Instead, he devotes much of the book to quoting other scientists and writers, then criticizing their terminology and logic as being misleading or incomplete. Often it seems that he's missing the point of what those authors were trying to say; other times he's simply refuting an obvious misinterpretation.

The first 100 pages or so are spent in arriving at the following conclusions:
1. Life becomes more complex.
2. The word "selfish" should not be used about genes, because someone might mistakenly take it literally. Likewise the word "blind".

Regarding 1: Okay, I realize there is some debate about the reason for this and whether this is inevitable, but it seems clear that this has happened in our case, so why belabor the point?

Regarding 2: Well, if the intended audience for this book is those who might take it literally, I guess this was worthwhile. But then Rolston is doing a disservice to those of us who were never in danger of thinking that genes could be literally selfish. And, even worse, after firmly denouncing this terminology and taking shots at Dawkins for using it, he proceeds to infuse the entire remainder of the book with statements that genes are anything but selfish, rather they are "sharing". And far from being blind, genes are "smart". The author needs to read his own argument about mistakenly assigning human values to genes and apply it to this book.

On p. 141, Rolston asks "What is happening when a developed nation sends food to those underfed in a developing nation?" And responds with "...it no longer seems plausible to hold that the principal determinant is producing more offspring in the next generation." Again, does anyone actually think that? In a similar question on p. 267: "But then just where is Wilson getting these oughts that cannot be derived from biology, unless from the insights of ethicists (or theologians) that transcend biology?" The answer should be clear: all humans including scientists get their oughts from our genetic heritage. In the ancestral environment, it was an advantage to have these "moral" tendencies, and now we try to use logic to apply it to the whole world, even though it only evolved among small groups. Nothing more to it than that.

On pp. 192-211, Rolston contends that human minds evolved to use science, then argues that science is the result of "evolution transcending itself". But human minds did not evolve to use science. They evolved to help humans survive in the ancestral environment. Now we use them for other things, such as science, and again, I don't think the reader should ever have been in danger of thinking that this is the best way to use our minds in order to maximize our offspring. So what is the point of refuting this?

I'm afraid that much of this book falls into this pattern of quoting others, musing about possible failings in their logic, then moving on to the next subject as if the conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what the conclusion of this book is. If I had to guess, it would be "science is not sufficient to address moral questions". While that may be true in some sense, the criticism in this book leveled at scientific writings on the subject is not convincing, nor even particularly relevant to that issue. Science does have something to tell us about morality - though Rolston, and indeed many of us, might not comfortable with what it's telling us.

This work is well worth reading as a challenge to sociobiological thinking on values, ethics, and religion. One need not agree to the author's conclusions entirely to feel a breath of fresh air, and some common sense, applied to the Darwin debate, and the hopeless venture of deriving a genetic explanation for the religious evolutionary emergentism visible in world history and corresponding very little to the current regime of explanations. It is also true that challenging sociobiology is not so hard, and that by comparison almost any religious viewpoint looks superior! We still end back at square one, needing to find some resolution of the dilemma of naturalism, ethics, and evolution! That is, unless we abandon the scientific perspective and grant the exception of values altogether to any naturalistic account. Part of the problem is seen in the term 'naturalistic fallacy'. This is a fallacy in our own minds, but it would seem nature has few difficulties here for it does not honor this misnomer. Thus, the dilemma remains here of the boundaries of the natural and the transcendent, so-called. This is a point much clearer in a religion such as Buddhism, where no nonsense about man's 'spirit' is allowed to intrude on the 'self' whose phenomenology is assumed to be entirely natural. But this work cannot be faulted for not resolving the arcana of religion and does superbly as a challenge to the completely baffling oversimplifications of much ultra-Darwinian pontification of the subject of consciousness and ethics.

Rolston's 1997 Gifford Lectures and now book challenge the sociobiological orthodoxy. He interprets genetics and evolutionary biology to present the possibility of transcendent values operating in nature and culture. Unlike many other works of science, philosophy, and theology, Rolston's book is also well-crafted with powerful prose and provocative turn of phrases reminiscent of Loren Eisley. Whatever you think you know about the troubling interface between religion and evolutionary biology, prepare to be challenged. This book is a must read.

You can listen to Rolston discuss his book on the Internet as a RealAudio broadcast at http://www.pc4rs.org . Rolston is also "appearing" on the Meta List on Science and Religion to discuss the book in May of 1999 http://www.meta-list.org . On the Meta List in the archives, you will also find a lengthy review written by Michael Ruse (see Meta 073:1999).