Environmental Philosopher Christopher Preston

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Award-winning environmental philosopher Christopher Preston speaks 6:30 p.m. May 4 at Northwest Montana History Museum While in graduate school, Christopher Preston worked on fishing boats in Alaska. He would turn in his final papers and then head to Prince William Sound, where he immediately found himself among sea lions, killer whales, bald eagles, and bears. “The power of the landscape filtered straight into my core,” he says. “I was suddenly on the landscape and literally feeling these animals close by.” Preston’s book Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals (MIT Press, 2023) takes on “a vibrant biological world, where wildlife reclaims its place.” For example, he delves into beavers’ effects on revegetation after wildfire and the comeback of wolves in Europe, where the animals are returning on their own in a region with half the land and twice the people of North America. Questions of coexistence, conservation, technology, and ethics are central to environmental philosophy, which Preston embraced as a way to apply philosophy to something practical. A professor at University of Montana for 17 years, Preston grew up in England and earned graduate degrees in Colorado and Oregon.