Perpetual Perishing, Perpetual Renewal (Northern Review, Yukon) 2005, 2008

"Perpetual Perishing, Perpetual Renewal," The Northern Review, number 28, Winter 2008, pages 111-123.
Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/36772
Yukon College, Yukon. Government of Canada, Government of Yukon. Paper grew out of Rolston attending a Conference on Rapid Landscape Change and Human Response in the Arctic and Subarctic in the Yukon, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, June 16-19, 2005. Rolston gave a presentation on "Dynamic Nature and a Conservation Ethic," published in Weathering Change: Newsletter of the Northern Climate Exchange 3(no. 4, spring 2005):8. Published by Yukon College, Government of Canada, Government of Yukon. ISSN 1703-4256, print. ISSN 1703-4264, online: www.taiga.net/nce

Darwinian nature is in dialectic: conflict and resolution. Human life evolved out of such dialectical nature. If that began in Africa, it continues when humans migrate far North. Religious encounters with such nature, whatever their differences with Darwinism, also find that life is perpetually renewed in the midst of its perpetual perishing. Life is ever "conserved," as biologists might say; life is ever "redeemed," as theologians might say. In this generating of new life, nature is cruciform, beyond the dialectical. Such processes, set in their ecological settings, perennially transform disvalues in nature into prolific values, generating the global richness of evolutionary natural history and its exuberance of life. Such sombre beauty in life is nowhere better exemplified than in boreal and Arctic nature.

Kaskawulsh Glacier, Kluane National Park, Yukon