One of the world’s leading environmental ethicists, Holmes Rolston III has devoted his career to interpreting the natural world from a philosophical perspective. His work is unusually accessible to a wide audience, and he has been a pioneer in the application of ethical theory to actual environmental problems through consultancies with conservation and policy groups, including a Presidential commission and the United States Congress. A graduate of Davidson College, where he majored in physics and mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he earned a B.D. from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Edinburgh in 1958 before spending nearly a decade as a Presbyterian pastor in rural southwest Virginia. He learned the natural history of his surroundings in splendid detail and became an activist on local environmental issues. In his search for a philosophy of nature to complement his love for and curiosity about nature, he entered the philosophy program at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master’s degree in the philosophy of science in 1968. He then embarked on a teaching career at Colorado State University where he was named a full professor in 1976 and University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in 1992. Dr. Rolston delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1997-98, and in the course of nearly four decades, invitations to lecture or teach have taken him to all seven continents. His work has been recognized by the 2003 Templeton Prize and the Mendel Medal, which he was awarded last year by Villanova University. President of the Rocky Mountains - Great Plains Region of the American Academy of Religion and past president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, Dr. Rolston is a founder and the associate editor of the influential academic journal Environmental Ethics and a member of the editorial boards of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Public Affairs Quarterly, Environmental Values, Conservation Biology, the South African Journal of Philosophy, and the International Journal of Wilderness. He is the author of some seventy articles published in professional journals, fifty chapters in volumes of collected essays, and six books, including the groundbreaking Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World (1988), a systematic presentation of his developed views that provides a philosophical defense of policies aimed at preserving wild species and wilderness, Conserving Natural Value (1994), and Genes, Genesis and God (1999). With Andrew Light, he edited Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, which was published in 2003 by Blackwell.