Critique and the World Outside Us
In a recent interview, philosopher Christopher Preston (Montana) notes that we are presently at a crux wherein we are in danger of losing contact with what he refers to as “the world outside of us, the world outside our control” (“Reengineering Our World: A Cautionary Tale,” Vision.org). At first blush, Preston is a thinker out of time with this sentiment--the kind of loss he refers to has more in common with the “back to the land” ethos of what is often called second wave environmentalism than it does with current analyses in the environmental humanities, many of which argue that the present intuition of the fading of the “world outside of us” is little more than an ideological distortion.