Ideas - 'Dialogue between science and religion matters to the planet'

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Holmes Rolston III began his career as a Presbyterian minister. But his love of the natural world — and his belief in evolution — didn't sit well with his congregation. He was ultimately fired. The late philosopher spent much of his career working to bridge the gap between science and religion because he said "the future of Earth depends on it." Rolston is the pioneer of environmental ethics, a turning point in philosophy. His ultimate goal was to define the moral worth of the planet. Rolston died in 2025 at the age of 92. In this episode, IDEAS explores his legacy and the continuing resonance of his work.Guests in this documentary:Christopher Preston is a professor of environmental philosophy at the University of Montana, Missoula. His books include Tenacious Beasts and Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston III.Stephen Scharper is an associate professor in the department of anthropology and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.Kerry Bowman is a Canadian bioethicist and environmentalist who teaches bioethics and planetary health at the University of Toronto.Nathan Kowalsky is an associate professor of philosophy at St. Joseph's College at the University of Alberta.Karen Beazley is a professor emerita in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University.Simon Appolloni is an assistant professor in the Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto's School of the Environment.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. The astronaut Edgar Mitchell saw Earth from space as a sparkling blue and white jewel, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And he continued, my view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity. The late philosopher Holmes Ralston III devoted his life to two passions, God and nature.

His ultimate goal to define the moral worth of the planet itself. I've been lucky enough that my own personal agenda, figuring nature out, as during my lifetime, turned out to be the world agenda, figuring out our place on the planet. Ralston passed away in 2025 at the age of 92. He spent some 40 years as a philosopher at Colorado State University, winning the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2003 in creating a whole new academic discipline. He really made a big contribution to philosophy.

He's often credited with being one of the founding fathers of environmental ethics. He really focused on the moral worth of non-human life and the environment itself. So he represented a turning point. But if not for a turning point, in Ralston's own life, those singular achievements might never have come to pass. I've gotten to be a pretty good naturalist, but a lot of these people thought I was spending too much time in the woods.

So essentially, I got fired from that job. That job was a position as a Presbyterian minister in rural Virginia, and his firing, for spending too much time in the woods, set him on a path that would change philosophy forever. Today on ideas, we're exploring the remarkable career of that minister-turned philosopher. We're calling this episode The Gospel and the Landscape, Inventing Environmental Ethics. Well, Rosson was a tall, slender man. He spoke slowly. Holmes Ralston, born in the Shenandoor Valley of Virginia, on a wintry, snowy,

night in November. It made sense that he had been a Presbyterian pastor. I'm Christopher Preston and I'm the author of Saving Creation, Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes-Rolston-3. He wasn't flashy at all. He had thick glasses. He would often, when answering your question, bring his hands together and look at the ground. He would answer your question to the ground. And then he would deliver his punchline. Then he would look up and meet your eyes. So he had this interesting way of being rather understated. He could be funny, though. That was the surprising thing. He could really pull some pretty good cracks. I once started a class in science and religion with a claim that these are the two most important things in the world. The student's hand

promptly went up and he said, no, professor, you're wrong. That's sex and money. he was not a person who was magnetic one wasn't drawn instantly to this charismatic thinker but he was a person to whom you were drawn slowly when you recognize his thoughtfulness and how considerate he was my earliest memories were in rockbridge baths virginia a rural area and I waked up in those circumstances so seeing mountains on the skyline

jump mountain in one direction a hogback mountain another direction his uncle was an orchardist he had a fruit farm his dad loved the outdoors would take him hiking they were into growing their own vegetables so living close to nature was something that was with

Ralston from the beginning from our house we could hear the Marie River, one of the forks of the James River down below. So there was really no time in his childhood when he wasn't in close contact with nature. And it just, it always fascinated him. He always had a deep love of it. And I think it was a curiosity. There was something there that he wanted to describe that he wanted to learn about.

And that stayed with him for sure all his life. When you appreciate nature, it's not just a matter of using eyeballs. You need to know what's going on underground. You need to know what's going on in the dark. You want to look at a pine cone, and you don't just look at the pine cone, but you think of the potential that's in the pine cone. Each of those little seeds in the pine cones can become a pine tree. So if you have a comprehensive understanding of what's going on in the natural world, the aesthetic

appreciation of nature is an inexhaustible kind of thing. He always had a little notebook in his top pocket. So he'd pull out the notebook, pull out a little pen, and start scribbling away. He was a scientist as well as being a humanist. And so any plant, however small, he wanted to know the details. He would go home and he would key them out in his reference books. He was just fascinated by what could be found around him under his feet. I was born Scotts Presbyterian in the Valley of Virginia and those people they

said, loved gospel and landscape. They couldn't always figure out which one had priority. Those people who love gospel and landscape, they used to also say when they looked back over life, God writes straight with crooked lines. I can see a lot of that in my career. By the time Ralston was in a parish in the late 50s and early 60s, the environmental movement had started to take off. And so this idea that nature mattered, somehow mattered for what it was in itself, was new. And Ralston had to find a way to express that. I mean, he was on board with it. So he had to find a way to express that in his church community.

Now, he was doing that in a context where the natural world was secondary to the divine world. In Christian theology, the afterlife was more important than the materials in this life, in the bodily everyday world. As a pastor, he was used to standing up in front of his congregation and preaching something, and he felt like the natural world had something to say and something that wasn't yet being articulated. So somehow, Ralston had to square that circle and figure out a way that what impressed him about this world was also something consistent with his theology.

consistent he hoped with his parishionist theology, but that was where he ran aground a little bit. I think it's been a lifetime of crooked lines, and yet there's a certain continuing straight line interest in the conservation, preservation, interpretation of the natural world. I think the message from the people who fired him was you're focused on the wrong thing, Holmes. There's one place you should be focused, and that's. on the human relationship with God. It wasn't a very good fit in the community where we were living. I believed in evolution, and I was studying science to learn some of these things.

I've gotten to be a pretty good naturalist, but a lot of these people thought I was spending too much time in the woods or I wouldn't preaching the old-time gospel, right? So essentially I got fired from that job. There was another piece that was absolutely non-negotiable. This was something that Charles Darwin himself had run into. Rawson knew evolution was true. And this was something that was very difficult to square with Christian theology.

And so since Rawlsson was pretty keen on understanding evolutionary theory and ecological theory, he really was putting quite a distance between himself and his parishioners. If you like, I might not want to call myself a pioneer so much as an explorer. I've been looking around thinking about new directions in the interpretation of the natural world. I think he felt that a rural church in Virginia didn't give him the avenue to express what he believed about the natural world. he felt like there was always somebody looking over his shoulder. There was always some guardrails that he wasn't allowed to cross. And remember, he was breaking new territory.

He was at the forefront of developing an environmental ethic. So he needed to cross the guardrails. And so he needed an avenue where he could do that with a certain type of intellectual freedom without people telling him to straighten up and stay focused. He needed the freedom to explore. And I think that's why, even though it would have been a shock to be asked to leave his parish, it wasn't necessarily something that destroyed him.

In fact, it offered him an opportunity. He eventually came to understand that his role is more of environmental ethicists, putting everything together. I'm Simon Apollone, assistant professor teaching stream at the School of the Environment, University of Toronto. Holmes Ralston was someone I admire because he seems to have come from many disciplines, and I always admire the interdisciplinary thinkers, someone who was seeped in foremost religious milieu, and then because of his passion for the environment around him in the Blue Ridge Mountains,

he went further into the sciences, the biological science, to find out how it all works. So I would put him as one of those major thinkers of the time who helped us realize we're in a big transition period and we have to rethink how we approach environmental issues. So I decided to go back and get a, take a year at the University of Pittsburgh, which had in those days a kind of a world-class school in philosophy of science. It was more philosophy of physics I now know than philosophy of biology. But anyway, I went there and spent a year taking, I already had a PhD in theology, but I spent a year and took a master's degree in philosophy of science.

Already I was becoming an environmentalist, although environmentalism wasn't here in that way, shape, and so he first went to study philosophy of science. Ethics at the time was entirely a human-focused endeavor. There was no environmental ethics yet, at least in that Western tradition that Ralston was entering into. For now, he just wanted to understand what science, could say, and then out of that philosophy of science degree, turn that learning about what science could say into an ethic. So he was crossing new theological territory, but he was also entering new philosophical territory. He was taking it all on at once. It was actually a pretty bold move. In the academy and in philosophy in my experience, there is always a caution

around a faith perspective. My name is Stephen Sharper, and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, as well as the School of the Environment at the St. George campus at the University of Toronto. Rene Descartes, of course, was reputed to have said, I don't need the Pope to tell me how to think. Whether he said that or not, it expressed his kind of cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

don't need a theological overlay to know that I exist. And so ever since modern philosophy, there has been a suspicion of people with faith perspectives bringing that into traditional philosophy. Of course, you have had Christian philosophy that has run parallel to analytic and continental philosophies. But often they are seeing the ones who are speaking from a faith perspective as somehow tainted, you could say, by their lens of Christendom or what other faith perspective they have. So Holmes Ralston, as someone who's coming out of a Presbyterian background, as a minister, and his father was a minister and his grandfather minister, this is a tradition of prominent Presbyterian theologians that he comes from. So how to speak to that as a philosopher

was a big challenge for him, I imagine. helped him navigate this was his scientific background and his assiduous attempt to learn about evolutionary processes. And I think that gave him a kind of entree into some of these conversations that other philosophers who simply had a religious background would have trouble broaching. I interviewed for several things, several schools. Well, in April, maybe the phone rang and he said, would you like to take a job at CSU, Colorado State University? So I pretty quickly said yes. I sat in several of his classes at Colorado State University.

It's important to realize that he never wavered from his own Presbyterian theology. Even though he left the church, he stopped being a pastor, he still held those beliefs firm. So there was a little bit of a balance to keep the theological work out of the first. philosophy department. But he did in his spare time write essays in philosophical theology. He just had to make it very clear, I'm publishing this in a theology journal, and I'm publishing this in a philosophy journal. And one of the remarkable things about the classes I took from Ralston is they were not delivered as lessons in theology. They were delivered as lessons in why nature matters. And to me, that was utterly compelling.

There's millions of years of history, those evolutionary processes, those working of those systems to create complexity and to create diversity. To me, that's enough. That's amazing. That's impressive. It's moving. And if a person wants to add something theological there, I can understand why they would want to do that.

But I don't think one has to do that. His environmental philosophy isn't explicitly religious. of course, the further you read into it, you'll see that it's, I think, still shaped by a lot of his religious commitments. My name's Nathan Kowalski. I'm an associate professor of philosophy at St. Joseph's College at the University of Alberta. I don't think he would ever have said that nature and God are identical. Technically, that would be considered heretical in his tradition, I would think. It would be considered that in mind. But there is a close relationship between God and the world, and God is far greater than each individual human being is. And similarly, the natural

world is far greater, and in some respects, perhaps far more valuable than each individual human being might be. And so I can see echoes of that in Rolson's ethics, even though he's not writing as a religious author in those contexts. And I think sometimes it causes consternation, but I don't think that's a problem. I think it's a worthy idea to consider as whether or not human beings are actually supposed to find themselves occasionally in relationships of awe

and respect in the face of the other that is greater than them. And I think nature is that for sure, but I also think that for Rolston, God was that as well. Nature is cruciform, was one of his favorite phrases. Suffering through to something higher. Nature through death and decay and rebirth and life, it moves onwards through to something higher. And that is the cruciform nature for Ralston. But he could convey that without putting God in the story if his

audience was not interested in having God in the story. And I admire him for doing that. It's true they're dead trees lying on the forest floor, and it's true sometimes, the forest goes up in flames. It's true that the forest is full of death and dying, but there are themes of conflict and resolution integrated into a dynamic, ongoing forest ecosystem. I find it difficult myself in forest to escape the experience of gratuitous, beauty. The autumn leaves, or the montane peaks, or the trillions that you encounter unexpectedly along a woodland path. Maybe there are trial and error solutions. Maybe there's an element, there is an element of chaos and wildness, and yet there is a very integrated and beautiful

beautiful biotic community. When I'm reading his work, I can almost hear some sermon-like qualities in the way he speaks in terms of phrase. I am Karen Basley. I'm a professor emerita at Dalhousie University. Holmes Ralston really did bring a style to his writing that's somewhat unique. The oratory style that he has comes through. The other thing I noticed that he does is he often will make references to words in the Bible that call upon humans to care for nature and to make sure we save all the species and the ecosystems.

And he will make these references, but at the same time, he doesn't just hold to the appeal to the Bible. he'll say those kind of arguments work if you have the belief system. But it requires that you hold that belief in order for it to have any sway for you. So then he goes on to develop the stronger philosophical arguments. One of my early articles was called Is There an Ecological Ethic? And I had had to publish things in peripheral journals. And I thought, well, you know, Why not? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I sent it to Ethics, which is the main journal

in ethics in philosophical circles. And to my great surprise, they took it. The title of the essay, Is There an Ecological Ethic, Really States the Ground He was Trying to break here. There wasn't even an agreement that there could be such a thing as an ecological ethic because ethics till then had mainly been about humans. So what he was trying to say is that maybe we have some moral obligations that go beyond the obligations that we have to people. Maybe there are some obligations that extend to nature, to the natural world, to ecological systems. And to do that, he had to establish that there was some significance inherent in nature. There was something about nature that meant that it mattered. And so his answer to the question, is there an

ecological ethic, is yes, because nature matters in itself regardless of what humans might think about it. And that was a tall mountain to climb. He had to really prove something that hadn't been proved before in philosophy. I suppose the sort of main fundamental sort of theme is whether or not we humans have any ethical obligations at all to the natural environment as such or independently of what we humans have at stake in our own interest and welfare there. So no one would quarrel that we need clean air and clean water and that human beings are helped or hurt by the condition of their environment. Beyond that, though, the extent to which we might have obligations to endangered species or to prevent animal cruelty, like the hunting

questions, for example, or even to ecosystems, to land health, those are the questions raised in environmental ethics that are new and different. Stephen Sharper back again. When you look at the history of philosophy in the West, particularly beginning with Aristotle, You see the human under the divine as the apex of creation. Aristotle's Scala Natura has the human at the top, non-human animals, plants, etc. In the medieval world, this becomes the great chain of being, with God at the top, angels below, humans, animals, plants, etc.

In this great unchanging chain of being. In that sense, all nature becomes instrumental to this. human project. What Holmes did was absolutely emphasize the intrinsic value of nature outside its service to the human family. And he did this consistently, intellectually, with reference to science, religion, and environmental thought. Most people think that values deal with human's desires that value has to be chosen and maintained and so forth. And that's true of certain kinds of values. But I was beginning to see, I recall my visits into the natural world, hiking, backpacking, camping off and out for a week or so alone, that these plants and animals that

surrounded me had a good of their own. No, they weren't moral agents. They didn't deliberately think about and reflect on their choices, but they had lives that they were defending. And I began to call this intrinsic value in nature that's independent of humans. And I began to argue that and have become reasonably well known for celebrating this intrinsic value in nature. If nature matters only because of humans thinking, it serves certain purposes, then when humans change their interests, when humans change their purposes, then that value of nature becomes flexible.

It might go away entirely. But if value is in nature, if it's objectively there, if it's inherent in nature, then humans can change their interests entirely. but that value still is present, and nature still matters. And so Ralston wanted to make that argument, that kind of hard-line argument, that it doesn't matter whether humans are on the scene. It doesn't matter what human interests are. Nature is what it is, and nature counts.

That was his signature move. That signature move was made by environmental philosopher Holmes Ralston III. this documentary, gospel and the landscape, inventing environmental ethics. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Every day, your eyes are working overtime. From squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions, like glaucoma, cataracts,

or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Spex Savers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.caver's to learn more. Things at the precinct haven't been the same. I know we've been understaffed since Ellis left, but maybe today things will turn around. But now, the most unlikely fare is back on the case.

Hey, Max. You missed me? The dream team is back together. Yeah, I guess it is. And on each other's. Are you going to be able to keep it together on this one? I am nothing, if not profesh. Wildcars. New season.

Watch free on CBC Jam. Those of you just came in, I'm Holmes Ralston, a philosopher in Colorado State and University. Holmes Ralston III launched his career in 1975 by asking, is there an ecological ethic? You need an earth. You need a sense of residence on the planet. Within the academy, that was a radical new idea.

But the broader public was well on board with Ralston's view that the environment deserved protection. There was this public sense of nature mattering, this public sense that got people to gather on the first Earth Day in the 1970s, for example. The Endangered Species Act had been signed into law in the United States just two years earlier in 1973. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were also newly established. I think the Endangered Species Act is one of the miraculous pieces of legislation in the 20th century.

For a nation such as ours to say that we don't intend without overriding considerations to put a species in jeopardy, it seems to me to be essentially an ethical state. Ralston's environmental ethic seemed to arrive at just the right time. But as the field gained momentum, so did critical. of his work. We've got to get into what's generally called nowadays a more sustainable relation to our landscape. The next few hundred years just can't be like the last few hundred years in terms of

the escalating growth and escalating appetites of consumption that we've had. I always think there's an interesting question here about who was following who, whether philosophers leading and then politics. was following them, or was the politics leading? And then the philosophers were learning to pick up the pieces and put them together into a coherent hole. I'm not sure which is the case. I tend to think there was this public sense, the sense that this stuff outside of the human domain mattered, this desire to protect wilderness in the Wilderness Act in the U.S. or endangered species in the Endangered Species Act. I think that was rising, a rising

sentiment in the public. It was starting to appear in this legislation. But there wasn't a concise set of words. There wasn't a concise language to capture that. And so I think the philosophers recognized you needed a way to capture that eloquently. And so this language of intrinsic value, intrinsic natural value, or objective value in nature, this language was a way to capture that sentiment. So I tend to think that the philosophers were recognizing something that was going on in the public domain already, and they were finding ways to tidy it up and capture it in a convenient handle, a convenient way to talk about this new sentiment that was showing up in legislation. For the most part, the Endangered Species Act sets certain kind of benefits like educational

and scientific and ecological, sort of over against untempered economic interest and so forth. So there can indeed be conflicts of this kind. I like to argue these are short-range conflicts, that in the end, if you work out a better way of doing it, setting aside more green space, for example, the realtors may not like that now, but I'll bet you 10 or 20 years from now, they're going to be proud of the kind of things they worked out. It's landscape with lots of green space in it. They're going to be bragging about it. We've found that to be true in times past. If you think about the massive economic expansion at the end of World War II, the great acceleration, as it's sometimes called, of the 1950s, where use of

natural resources was exploding across the world, wealth was being generated, people were doing well in certain countries of the world. What Rolson was trying to introduce into the conversation was the idea that however good those instrumental values are, however important they are for human well-being, there's a limit and there's a cap. And that limit comes when you recognize the intrinsic value of nature, intrinsic natural value. And that's a moral value that says stop. That's a moral value that says, we've gone far enough, we've got to step back, we've got to recognize that nature has value in itself.

I think longer range, the quality of life will not be jeopardized by an increasingly intelligent relation to ship to the landscape. I think that's true in the Pacific Northwest, right? You can cut those forests, if you like, but they're going to be gone in 10 or 20 years with the previous rates of cutting. You might as well solve that problem early and have some of these forests for your children and great-grandchildren. And in that sense, the long-range conflicts, I think, have to do with a deeper sense of quality of life than short-term economic interest.

There was this simultaneous movement around the world of recognizing that there were things outside of the human domain that mattered. And so there was a Norwegian philosopher Anna Ness who was into the intrinsic value of nature. There were Australians talking about it. And then there was also people like Peter Singer talking about the importance of non-human animals. Now, initially, all of these philosophers around the world sounded like they were on the same side because it sounded like they were all saying, something other than humans matters. And we've got to change our behavior to recognize that moral significance of these non-human features of the world.

We've never before thought of Earth as an object of ethical concern. But maybe we are increasingly thinking of a larger community. of life as we put the future of life on earth in jeopardy. After a while, a cleft appeared between what are called the environmental philosophers and the animal rights or animal welfare philosophers. And Peter Singer was an animal welfareist. Peter Singer thought that the happiness of animals mattered, the pain of animals mattered. And the thing that humans should be doing was seeking to,

minimize animal pain and maximizing animal happiness or animal welfare. Now, the environmental philosophers like Rolson, they cared about animals too, but for them, ecological systems took priority over the well-being of individual animals. And so what you had emerging from these two groups of philosophers who at first looked like they were on the same side, what you had emerging was this difference between those that thought that the whole system mattered more and those that thought that the whole system mattered more and those that thought that the individual experience of certain animals mattered more. It seems to me that the ethic which is concerned simply with sentient life and makes everything

else instrumental to the welfare of sentient life isn't a biological ethic. It doesn't appeal to the full range of biological experience. It appeals only to, in essence, psychological experience, the capacity to feel, pleasures and pains are the capacity to experience well-being. And so Singer was an animal welfareist, and it was individual experience that mattered. Rolson was an environmental philosopher, and so it was the value of systems that mattered. And so sometimes there's going to be cases where to make that system flourish, you actually have to harm individual animals.

So that would be a case where there was a non-native species, for example, overgrazing a certain error. You might have to remove that animal to make the system flourish. So very quickly, the environmental philosophers and the animal welfareists found that they weren't really on the same side. There was a famous article at the time titled something like bad marriage, quick divorce. Those two camps that started together came apart pretty quickly. We do agree on enormous amounts of material concerning the way that we value animals, but we disagree in the terms of what I consider to be a deeper biological position. And it's my experience, at least, in the biological world, having had some training in botany, for instance, that life is a much

bigger affair than simply the capacity of the higher animals, really, to suffer pains and pleasures. I want to respect all of life and not simply sentient life. Karen Basley here. So Peter Singer, Tom Reagan, David Aaronfeld, they were basing the importance of these species in their instrumental value to humans. For example, they made a sort of analogy that the species on Earth are like rivets in spaceship Earth, and we can only lose so many rivets before our spaceship will start to fall apart. And, you know, Holmes Ralston makes the case he's something like, if we can still fly with a few rivets missing,

then there's no imperative to keep those species. So he wanted to go beyond those instrumental values and establish an intrinsic value for keeping whole species, the inherent worth of species as a product and process of evolution. I think those are questions that the ethical past isn't very good at helping us answer. I mean, if you try to read the traditional philosophers like John Stuart Mill or try to read Thomas Aquinas or you try to read Augustine or whatever, they didn't think much about this. I sometimes say you have to go back early in the Bible to know in his arc,

which seems to be the first endangered species project. So really, our ethical past doesn't, I think, give us a lot of attention to this because for the most part, this wasn't a question people faced, okay? But we now do. If you are pushing a theory that nature matters for what it is in itself, you're probably pushing something about the importance of evolution, the importance of geological history, the importance of deep time, because you're talking about systems that matter because of what they have become over millions of years. And so if you're embedded in that thinking, if you're committed to the importance of these historical processes unfolding over such unimaginable lengths of time, then the places you see those processes at work the

most are places that humans haven't touched. And so wilderness for Ralston was the pinnacle of natural value. There was nothing that displayed natural value more clearly than a wilderness environment where there was little sign of human impact. Now, a forest wilderness, I'm saying, stimulates cosmic questions differently from what happens in town. Christians, I think, have a particular interest in preserving wildlands as sanctuaries. Wildernesses, he said, were the grandest historical museum of all. They were the way the world has been for 99.9% of time. That gives you a reason to value protected areas and wild areas, but it did get him into trouble

because Rawlson did not show much awareness of the presence of people on wild landscapes. Coming from his European settler mindset, he thought landscapes were wild when they showed no signs of roads or habitation or infrastructure. But of course, people can live on landscapes and people have living. on landscapes for millennia without creating those very visible signs. With Rolston's concept of the wilderness, he had, you know, many would now say a very western, maybe North American view of these things in which the wilderness was sacred. Having its stand-alone as strongly, strongly protected areas made a lot of sense.

You could secure biodiversity. You could respect it. Its beauty would continue to flourish. The application of the concept of protected environmental regions has not translated well globally. Kerry Bowman here, I teach bioethics and environmental ethics at the University of Toronto. The creation of these areas has been highly, highly problematic to local and indigenous people. And many people see there being a presupposition that non-human life actually is more important. than the lives of the people. And the lives of the people may absolutely be struggling.

The problem, too, is it's done a lot of damage because what has happened in many low-income countries is the reputation of protected environmental areas has now been labeled as a colonial pursuit. That's completely unrealistic. So struggling to find models that work while there's still time, because biodiversity loss is really, really mounting. I sound like I'm being a little harsh on Ralston, and he lived within his own era. But those types of models of the protected area like Yellowstone simply don't translate well into other parts of the world, including low-income countries. Priority given to human health raises a dilemma if health conflicts with the environment. Priority for human survival is first-order principle, respect for nature, is a

second order principle. Obey it, yes, but always put people first. Sounds humane. It means no tigers. It means no rhinos. You can always sacrifice a tiger sanctuary in order to

feed more people. At the extreme, I think he would have insisted to his dying day, at the extreme, there landscapes that are virtually unimpacted and that count as wild landscapes. So he was pretty happy to talk about removing non-native species in order to keep ecosystem integrity in place. And when you use that argument with the non-human world, not everyone is going to like it,

but people are going to understand perhaps that, okay, maybe this species doesn't belong in this place or maybe the species is having an outsized impact. and so it needs to be removed. But if you transfer that argument over to the human world, you're really in a whole different ballpark. And so Rolson's argument here was if there is a case where you have a very stark choice between feeding people and saving natural values

and if the natural values at stake are extremely rare and extremely high, and if the human benefits that you're going to secure are likely to be temporary, and if we're demonstrating in our other behaviors that we don't care that much for human lives or the lives of the poor, so if these very firm conditions are met, then, and this is the line that got him in trouble, then there are times where saving nature should take priority overfeeding people. And there was an instant uproar, and I don't think he ever really recovered philosophically from what he wrote in that article. I don't treat other human beings in the same way that I treat wild animals. I want to leave

wild animals in place in their ecosystems. I don't rescue the bison that's drowning in Yellowstone. I would rescue a child drowning in Yellowstone because the child is a member of the culture I share and the child is not subject to the forces of natural selection. So I have an ethic that's different for humans. In that sense, if there's someone who is about to eradicate an endangered species, I'm not going to shoot that person callously or indifferently. I'll do what I can to restrain that person in various other ways and try to see that person's integrity for what it is.

But in the end, I'm going to do what I can and think that it's vital to preserve life at the species level. And I can imagine myself in situations where I might kill to do that. It really is callous. And the environmental philosophy community immediately jumped in and said, no, this is too far. This is not where we go with this thought. You can feed people and you can save nature. It's not clear if Ralston embraced the full callousness that the position appears to contain.

He certainly wrote it as a provocation. He wanted people to react and think hard about it. And I do think those eight or ten caveats have to be read alongside the final line. you have to read why he thinks there are certain cases that show that we're not adequately caring for human lives in the first place. And so to pretend we are by sacrificing these very valuable parts of nature, he thinks is a mistake. He made the case that there are all kinds of things we do as a society and also as individuals where we spend money on things that are somewhat frivolous or not even healthy for us

instead of spending the money on feeding the poor or the starving of the world. So if we continue to choose to not reallocate the distribution of wealth so that we can feed people, if we still choose to buy luxury goods, If we still choose to take expensive vacations or travel, even very worthwhile things like choosing to do a postgraduate education, these things all cost money and do not help feed the poor. So we make many, many choices. Now, while a lot of those things are worthwhile things to do, so is maintaining our environment, which is our life support system, which would be good for both poor people. and hungry people, as well as the rest of us. The general world orders are such now, global capitalism and so forth,

that the rich tend to get rich and the poor tend to get poorer. We don't have good ways of getting the productivity of the world distributed in the right places. I admired his persistence, and that taught me a lesson. If you have a good message, find what. ways to keep articulating it. This was one of his big gifts, his gift of articulation. He was a fantastic writer. And he didn't stay within traditional philosophical styles. He was quite a poet. Towards the end of his life, I was urging him to write more poetic works about the natural world because he had that gift. And so I admired how he stayed with a message, he articulated

it in a number of different ways. And then perhaps since his death, I've been reflecting a little bit on how he managed to bring three quite different disciplines together. So academic philosophy, which is the discipline I live and work in, theology, and natural science. He had published articles in each of those fields, and he wove the three together. in really a very impressive fashion. So there was a systematicness to his thinking

where he could synthesize these different fields, these fields that use different languages often and have different standards. He managed to bring them together and weave this worldview out of them. And that's a considerable achievement. You've got to put life into your worldview. You've got to put astronomy into your worldview.

Everyone has got to set what biology teaches into worldview. The big value systems, the big value questions, right, are a matter of setting it into a larger worldview. Amen. He was courageous because he found a way to make this field something of merit, substance, and value in an academic and cultural world that did not want to change that had been pretty happy with a human-centered anthropocentric worldview and had benefited greatly from it. One environmental philosopher calls environmental studies the subversive science. It is a subversive science because it topples not only the great chain of being, but also our sense of hubris that we are the apex of creation as humans. It then leads us into a path of

humility, questioning, curiosity, and vulnerability in terms of our relationship and ethical responsibilities toward the more than human world. When you begin to talk about our responsibility toward the natural world and our deep interdependence with it, it upsets the apple cart of business as usual. That's why he was both intrepid and very intelligent. He was able to combine his courage with a kind of craftiness in order to build an entire field called environmental ethics. One word we often use to describe the kinds of aesthetic appreciation you can have in nature is the word sublime. That's kind of an old-fashioned word. It's not a word that's here in everyday conversation because it's not the kind of aesthetic experience a lot of people have

much of their time. But it's this concept of an aesthetic experience that it takes you to the limits, or almost to the limits of capacity. That's what the word sublime means. You get that feeling often when you look up at the stars at night sometimes when you're feeling in the sort of complete majesty of the stars at night. It's sort of a feeling that takes you to the very limits of your capacity for experience. I don't think we get many experiences of the sublime indoors. You don't get that at shopping centers.

You don't get that even in art museums. You don't get that watching television at home. But the experience of the sublime is a kind of aesthetic experience that you frequently get out of doors when it thunders or when you look up at the night sky or maybe when the birds begin to sing at dawn or something of that sort. Or when you're on a mountaintop looking out at the night. So there are kinds of aesthetic experience that we can gain in the natural world, which you can't get in the cultural world.

And it's important for us to preserve those. I have a view of environmental ethics that I hope is not that unusual. And it's this, that environmental ethics is the most fundamental discipline of all, because it is about how we should interact with our surroundings. And to me, this is one of the most fundamental questions in life, how to behave, what matters in the the world. What is important such that I should refrain from doing some things and I should be encouraged to do others? And that's a, that's broadening environmental ethics out to give it its widest possible lens. But I often start there with my students and I say, since you got up this morning, how many choices have you made that involve environmental ethics? And it's usually

slow at first, but then once people get the hang of it, they are just ratified. off different choices about how they interact with their surroundings, the people who they live with the world outside of their homes, the world that they interact with economically through what they buy and what they choose to wear, what they choose to say. I think the question of what matters is the ultimate question. And what Rawson did is he said, at least part of what matters is the world outside of humans. That counts. That means something. And if all he did was just established that little inkling of a thought that the world outside of human interest matters, then I think that's a remarkable legacy. You might have thought when we started out that environmental ethics was about the chipmunks and the daisies or about those bears or the deer.

But environmental ethics becomes more comprehensive. It includes the larger community of life on Earth. Environmental ethics eventually fears that humans have placed life on earth in jeopardy. In that sense, environmental ethics is on the main agenda, along with issues of peace and war, development, sustainability, population, our care and concern for the environment is vital in the next millennium. Environmental ethics is an ethic for this marvelous home planet. You've been listening to Gospel and the Landscape, Inventing Environmental Ethics by Ideas, producer Annie Bender.

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senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayy. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com slash podcasts.