Saving Creation

Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston III

Christopher J. Preston

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781595340504
• eBook ISBN: 9781595340986
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Holmes Rolston III has long been recognized as the "father of environmental ethics." Internationally renowned for the synthesis he has found in evolutionary biology and Christianity, Rolston has followed an immensely interesting life course. In this compelling biography, Rolston's story is traced from childhood to the present, detailing the process by which he has come to hone his profound philosophies. Culled from countless interviews with Rolston himself, along with his family and colleagues, this biography is both an engaging life story and a compendium of Rolston's thoughts on the value of nature, resource management, aesthetics, international development, and the relationship of culture to nature, wilderness, and natural theology.

PART I

Southern Grounding

dp n="17" folio="8" ?dp n="18" folio="9" ?

1

Shenandoah Valley Childhood

The logic of life is both biography and geography. The etymology of “biography” is to graph a life; the etymology of “geography” is to graph that life on Earth.... Biology requires geography. Life is always taking a journey through time and place.

[1998 ]

FEW DOUBT THAT THE WAYS we think about the world are shaped by the barrage of instructions we endure from all manner of teachers and elders on the journey into adulthood. Fewer still take the trouble to note that the landscape itself is the grounding substrate upon which all of these cultural forces rest. Living beings enjoy what Rolston likes to call a “storied residence” in some environment. The philosopher’s own storied residence begins firmly in the geography of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

The Shenandoah Valley is a gentle, diagonal crease in the landscape lying a hundred and fifty miles inland from the mid-Atlantic seaboard. The Blue Ridge Mountains bound the valley to the east and the Alleghenies mark its limit to the west. Over the crest of the Blue Ridge, the central and eastern portions of Virginia spread out across the Piedmont toward the coastal plain and the Atlantic Ocean. These flat and fertile landscapes supported the large tobacco plantations once responsible for Virginia’s colonial wealth. The valleys of the Shenandoah and the highlands of the Cumberland Plateau to the west remained much poorer because of the harder topographies, the colder climates, and the barriers to transport created by ridges and valleys formed during the Alleghenian orogeny some 350 million years ago.

The roots of the word “Shenandoah” have long been lost to the past. The origin account the locals prefer talks of an indigenous word that means “Clear-Eyed-Daughter-of-the-Stars.” The sparkle of the collected Appalachian rains coursing over beds of limestone in the valley bottoms suggested to the Shenandoah’s first indigenous residents a landscape with its origins in the spirit world. The Scottish-Irish Presbyterians colonizing the valley in the eighteenth century were similarly convinced their chosen home had been blessed by the divine. Spring temperatures beginning in early March, summer afternoon skies rent by nourishing rainstorms, and a rich soil capable of germinating just about any seed you cared to throw at it created a landscape that appeared heaven-sent when contrasted with the bleak Scottish highlands from which they had come.

Holmes Rolston III was born on an unusually chilly mid-November night in 1932. An early winter storm had dusted the tops of the barns with a light snow. His father, the pastor at Bethesda Presbyterian Church in Rockbridge Baths, had been getting ready for evening service when word came his wife was in labor in nearby Staunton. He quickly canceled the service and jumped into his Ford Model T. The pastor sped the thirty-four miles into town, sliding to a stop in front of the hospital shortly before 8 p.m. By the time he had raced up the steps to his wife’s bedside, the contractions seizing Mary Long Rolston’s abdomen signaled the imminent arrival of the couple’s first child.

Rolston drew his first breath in a building now part of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. Theron Rolston, the pastor’s brother, was the attending physician. The newborn and his mother spent the next six days recuperating at a tidy red brick house on New Street not far from the hospital. The owner of the house, the baby’s widowed grandmother, assisted by preparing hot baths, washing diapers and linens, and cooking for her two charges. A few days before the end of November, the pastor drove the newborn and his mother back to Rockbridge Baths and the baby was carried into the building that would be home for the first nine years of his life. Once inside, he was set down on a simple wooden cradle not far from a blazing wood stove tended by Miss Ida Whitsell, the practical nurse the Rolstons had hired to help out in the early months. For the next few days, Holmes Rolston III nursed, cried, and slept as thin patches of snow melted on the ground outside.

The house in which the baby lay was a white, two-story wooden manse built at the turn of the nineteenth century. It stood just a few hundred feet to the east of the brick church where Holmes Rolston II preached his Sunday services. The living room windows looked out upon a near-perfectly composed image of Virginia’s rural landscape. The Maury River ran by the church less than a quarter mile to the west and a hundred feet below. A rolling tapestry of small fields punctuated by creeks and woodlands covered the valley bottoms in all directions. Fields that in summer bristled with corn and wheat alternated with cow and sheep pastures, creating a soft, pastoral scene. In the hedgerows and woodlands, signs of deer, wild turkey, and bobcat announced that, underneath its Anglo-Saxon surface, this was indeed a landscape of the New World.

The manse and surrounding garden bore many of the hallmarks of rural life in 1930s America. There was no electricity in the house and the heat came from wood. A cistern nearby supplied the family’s water. The Rolstons’ home was one of only two in the area with rudimentary plumbing, but the system never worked very well and the family used the outhouse most of the time. Fifty feet from the back door rose a tall woodpile, most of it in the open air but enough under cover for kindling in rainy weather. Axes, wedges, a chopping block, and a crosscut saw stood nearby. Chickens scratched in the surrounding dirt. On a hill to the east, his father had built a backup water supply, connected to the house through a gravity-fed pipe. Rolston took numerous soggy trips in the years ahead up “Bunkum Hill,” as the locals called it, to poke the water pipe clear after a rainstorm. Life was simple but comfortable. His parents assured him they were blessed to live within the Shenandoah.

When old enough to dream of his own adventures, Rolston gazed from the yard toward Jump and Hogback Mountains on the skyline to the northwest. Each of these rounded Appalachian peaks rose to just over three thousand forested feet, bringing deep evening shadows to the valleys carved beneath their flanks. The two mountains were separated by the upper reaches of the Maury, part of a river system containing what are thought to be some of the oldest rivers in the world, their flow occasionally cutting at right angles to the direction of the mountain ridges. These “water gaps” where the rivers crossed the mountains kept the passes low and made it possible to wade into a sizable river to fish, while behind each shoulder stood the highest peaks in the county.

The gap between Jump and Hogback was known as Goshen Pass. Rolston recalls many happy hours fishing and hiking there with his father. At Goshen Pass he discovered a broad array of flora and fauna challenging his senses. Mountain laurel and rhododendron shrubs were shaded by hickory and chestnut oak. The forested canopy was a haven for catbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, and indigo buntings. Beetles, slugs, and salamanders thickly populated the leafy forest floor. An average annual rainfall of thirty-eight inches, much of it falling during crashing afternoon thunderstorms, kept the ground damp and ensured that the woodlands harbored a rich community of ferns and mosses.

When looking back on those early years, Rolston recalls the Shenandoah Valley as a teeming biotic ark for a barefooted young boy to explore. He spent long childhood days investigating the Appalachian ecology that enveloped him, finding little reason to doubt his parents’ claim that the Lord had indeed blessed the landscapes in which they dwelled. From the age of five Rolston wandered alone down to Hays Creek, half a mile from home, with his mother’s permission. The young explorer would set out in search of the wildlife that left its signs along the banks. He stuck his nose close to the mud and examined the footprints left by otters and raccoons. He scrutinized dragonflies on azalea bushes and beetles plodding slowly between tree roots. He fished the creeks for hours at a time, hurrying proudly back to the manse to show his parents what he caught. In the family kitchen, his mother would often have to unhook the brook trout or smallmouth bass from the end of her son’s fishing line. Though he was brave enough to explore the fields and woods alone, the thought of trying to grasp the flopping and slippery creatures he had caught remained for now beyond the bounds of Rolston’s courage.

Rolston was mostly comfortable around water. He and his two younger sisters, Mary Jacqueline and Julia, learned to swim in the Maury just below their home. The river provided welcome respite from the humidity of Virginia’s long summer afternoons. But the playfulness did come with an edge. Hays Creek had earlier come close to bringing an abrupt end to the young Virginian’s life. One wet spring afternoon when Rolston was still an infant, his father had tried to drive the family car across a bridge washed with floodwaters. The motor drowned and the car spluttered to a halt midstream. With wife and child marooned, the pastor waded off for help. A team of horses fetched from a nearby farm pulled the Model T, an alarmed Mrs. Rolston, and a screaming infant from the deluge. Passersby in later years would see a freckled young boy standing transfixed on the banks of the Maury watching the hydraulic ram pumping water to nearby farmhouses or staring at the single flickering electric lightbulb, powered by a generator attached to the mill wheel a quarter mile upriver, the only such light in the community. The curious child already sensed there were mysterious powers lurking beneath nature’s surface.

Other lasting lessons about nature’s productive power were available closer to home. In the yard surrounding the house, Rolston’s father tended a large vegetable patch. After finishing his pastoral duties on weekdays, his father would spend part of the afternoon at work among the greens, weeding and turning the compost. Rolston learned from his parents how to pick tomatoes, shell beans, and husk corn. In late summer and early fall, the family would gather together to can the homegrown produce for winter. Like most other children in the valley in the 1930s, Holmes Rolston III grew up with the idea that food came from the ground not from the grocery store.

dp n="23" folio="14" ?

His father told him that working the land created character. Farmers “did not write bad checks for seed corn,” the older Rolston said. Once, years later, worried that the gardener living at the trailhead had seen him leave the car unlocked, Rolston asked his father if he should run back and lock the vehicle. His father told him to relax about the car. Had he seen how the man kept his tomatoes?

In addition to the vegetables, Rolston’s father also grew fruit. The pastor and Uncle Theron owned a five-acre apple orchard handed down to them through the family. Rolston fondly remembers the family trips to the orchard. His father was immensely proud of his Stayman-Winesaps. Father and son would scrape droppings from the chicken run at home and spread the manure around the base of the trees. At harvest time, with the girls’ help, they picked the boughs clean, placing the apples in baskets delivered to a cold storage warehouse in Staunton. Every few weeks through the fall someone visited the warehouse to restock the cellar at home. The orchard was a productive one, and there was rarely a shortage of apples at the manse, with plenty more to give away. The family always spent a couple of days in late fall pressing some of the apples to make cider. They placed the cider in a big barrel in the basement with the door left ajar so the children could help themselves from the fragrant subterranean storehouse.

Without the benefit of electricity, Rolston’s young body lived the passage from humid summer into the snows of winter. In January, residents of the valley hiked down to the Maury to cut ice, which they placed in their cold cellars to keep the stores cool. Rolston recalls frequent winter anxiety about whether the temperatures would get cold enough for good ice to form. He remembers putting river ice chips in early summer tea when the temperatures started to climb again. The ice was not always the cleanest, but it was widely believed by the locals that freezing the water purified it. In the days before industrial agriculture hit the valley, evidence against this folk wisdom was scarce. Valley residents drank from the springs and creeks without a thought.

The Shenandoah Valley provided Rolston with his first instruction on the fullness and fertility of the natural world. He was gripped by the miniature worlds of insects and amphibians he encountered in virtually any spot he stopped to explore. The valley had the right kind of natural richness to stimulate a curious young mind. By some standards, it was not an easy place to live. The winters could be cold and the summer humidity was stifling. Poverty took its toll. More than a few parishioners in his father’s church died prematurely from disease or from alcoholism. In a letter from this period to his mother-in-law on the gulf coast, Rolston’s father had written: “Times are mighty tight in Virginia and I suppose are even tighter in the far South. But we still have enough for the necessities and a little bit over.” Like most of the Presbyterians who dwelled in the valley, the Rolston family was convinced this was a chosen place. His father, raised in the Shenandoah Valley himself, was deeply attached to the landscapes of home and passed on this sense of pride to his children, telling stories of family adventure in every district they visited. The verses from Psalms his father preached in Sunday service seemed as if they could easily have been written with the Shenandoah Valley in mind:

You visitest the earth and waterest it,
You greatly enrich it . . .
You waterest its furrow abundantly,
settling its ridges,
Softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth . . .
The pastures of the wilderness drip,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy. (Psalm 65: 9–13)

For the rest of his life, even when living half a continent to the west in the Rocky Mountains, Rolston would still claim that in April and May there was no place on earth he would rather be than in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

dp n="25" folio="16" ?

The Shenandoah was not the only landscape that had a formative influence on Rolston’s childhood. His mother had grown up on a farm in Perry County, in central Alabama. She had met Rolston’s father at the local Presbyterian church, when he had moved to Alabama to teach mathematics at the Marion Military Institute after graduating from Washington and Lee. Mary Long Rolston took her children by train back to the family farm each summer to spend six weeks with her parents and sisters. Her twin sister, Willie Lee, had three children of her own and another sister, Carrie, had three more. There could be up to nine young cousins together on the Alabama farm. Rolston’s father usually stayed the first few weeks back at Bethesda Presbyterian, grateful for some quiet time to gather his thoughts and write his sermons in peace. He would typically join his wife and children on the farm for a couple of weeks before vacation’s end.

The Alabama farm was located on the fertile Black Belt soil near a swampy area on Bogue Chitto Creek. The drier land to the north of the creek was bisected by a railroad along which a locomotive rattled twice each day. A bluff overlooking the creek housed a small but impressive southern hardwood forest thick with pignut hickory, swamp bay, and black tupelo. At the bottom of the bluff, Will Long had built a pond where he taught his grandchildren to fish.

The children spent their summers immersed in the steamy ecology of the Alabama Black Belt, using the farmhouse as a springboard for childhood adventure. The youngsters spent most afternoons escaping the heat by swimming in the creeks and ponds. They would ride the running boards of the old farm truck the two miles down to the beaver dams where the water was best. After beating the surface with a paddle to scare off any reptiles, the children would scream and splash their way through the hot afternoon. On the drive home, the running boards provided a great place both to dry off and to survey the farmland as the truck bounced across the fields toward home. Back at the farmhouse, Rolston remembers the sweet taste of watermelon, cut fresh each day for a midafternoon snack.

Fishing was a serious pastime for the children in Alabama. The railroad trestles over the creeks made for some productive holes. The youngsters left baited trotlines out overnight to catch gar, shiners, eels, and suckers from the swamp water. Rolston and his cousin Bill Forbes also spent many exciting nighttime hours frog gigging. The two boys would launch a small rowboat and pan a searchlight across the surface of the water until a pair of eyes flashed back at them. While one cousin kept the light on the frog’s eyes, the other would paddle carefully toward the mesmerized amphibian until they were close enough to gig it. Not yet conservationists, Rolston and his cousin cut off the frog’s legs and threw the rest of it away. Their grandmother would fry the legs with butter and chives for the table the following day.

Rolston later wondered how close he came to getting himself killed on some of these nighttime escapades. While there were no alligators at the time in Bogue Chitto, cottonmouth water moccasins moved quietly above them in the branches of the oaks. Cousin Bill, later to become a farmer on that same land himself, remembers on one occasion quietly closing in on a frog with the gig, only to suddenly scream out in the night for his cousin to backpaddle away from a branch on which a cottonmouth lurked. In his panic, Rolston crashed them into another tree nearby on whose branches hung three more.

The children were given various tasks around the farm. Washbasins needed to be filled and porches had to be swept. There was a large kitchen garden by the farmhouse and the family ate nearly all of their food straight off the land upon which they lived. Their grandfather taught Rolston and his cousins how to milk. Water pumped from the cistern kept the milk containers cool during the day. If the children preferred their milk warm, they could drink it straight from the cow. Rolston was never a very good milker, though he stuck with it and got better. Summertime on the farm was not quite self-sufficient but it was close. “All you need from town is coffee and salt,” his grandfather used to tell them.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, convinced that ethics requires a story line from which to emerge, has drawn attention to the important role of family in shaping the initial contours of one’s moral point of view:

I am someone’s son or daughter . . . someone else’s cousin or uncle.... As such I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point.

Rolston’s family, like many others in the South, always attached great significance to its ancestry. Later in life, Rolston would feel an increasing influence of the first Holmes Rolston, his paternal grandfather, who had died eight years before he was born. During his early years, however, Rolston gained a large part of his moral starting point from Will Long, the grandfather with whom he spent the summers exploring the hot dirt surrounding Bogue Chitto Creek.

On late summer evenings, with the moon beginning to rise over the slash pines, Rolston and his cousins would sit on the porch of the Alabama farmhouse swatting bugs and watching intently as their grandfather settled himself down to tell a family story or two. On these evenings, Rolston learned from Will Long some of the cherished details of his family’s rootedness in the southern landscapes.

Long was the product of a line of farmers and adventurers. His own grandfather, Daniel Long, had followed a winding and occasionally hair-raising path to Alabama. Daniel Long had planned to be a medical doctor and was in training in Philadelphia when the war of 1812 erupted. Called into service as a medical assistant, he was dispatched to the gulf coast, where he tended the injured and dying as best he could with his incomplete skills. Returning home at war’s end without enough money to continue his studies, Daniel Long decided to see the country. He got on a horse in Philadelphia and rode it to the gulf coast of Texas, sleeping in hayricks and woodlots along the way. Like John Muir on his walk to the gulf half a century later, Daniel Long used the solace of an extended journey through the South to settle his mind, finding nourishment in the long days of cross-country riding and quiet nights gazing far into the inky blackness.

After two years work...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I - Southern Grounding
• PART II - A Pastor Gone Wild
• PART III - Rocky Mountain Philosopher
• PART IV - Global Environmental Ethics
• PART V - Theology for a Green Earth
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography of Rolston’s Work
• Index
• Copyright Page