Christopher J. Preston is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Research Fellow at the Mansfield Center’s Program on Ethics and Public Affairs at the University of Montana. His writing focuses on the new epoch of the Anthropocene.

His academic publishing is in environmental philosophy, climate ethics, the ethics of emerging technologies, rewilding, and feminist philosophy. His books include Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston, III (Trinity University Press 2009) and Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology, and Place (University of Georgia Press 2003). His newest book, The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World was released by MIT Press in March 2018. A paperback edition of this book together with translations into Japanese and German are forthcoming. He is also editor of two collections on the ethics of climate engineering.

Author of more than three dozen articles in environmental philosophy, Preston has been co-PI on two National Science Foundation grants on ethics and emerging technologies. He has been an external reviewer for the IPCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity. He is also the recipient of a Templeton Foundation grant and a participant in a Research Council of Norway’s SAMKUL grant on genetic technologies. He maintains a blog with accessible essays on his research interests.

Selected publications

Wickson, F., Preston, C.J., Binimelis, R., Herrero, A., Hartley, S., Wynberg, R., Wynne, B. (2017). Addressing Socio-Economic and Ethical Considerations in Biotechnology Governance: The Potential of a New politics of Care. Food Ethics, Vol 1(2): 193-199.

Wylie, C. & Preston, C.J. (2017). Skewed Vulnerabilities and Moral Corruption in Global Perspectives on Climate Engineering. Environmental Values, Vol. 26, no.6.

Preston, C.J. (2017). De-extinction and Taking Control of Earth’s „Metabolism“. Recreating the Wild: De‐extinction, Technology, and the Ethics of Conservation, special report, Hastings Center Report 47, no. 4: 37‐42.

Preston, C.J. (2015). The Multiple Anthropocenes: Toward Fracturing a Totalizing Discourse. Environmental Ethics, Vol. 37: 307-320.