EHC Special Event in cooperation with the Faculty of Theology
Friday 13 January, 13.15 – 14.45h
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Main Building, room 10A20
Christopher Preston
Climate Engineering: When Humans Enter the Domain of God(s)
Proposals to engineer the climate in order to push back against warming global temperatures are gaining increasing attention in the light of the significant challenge of adequately controlling emissions. The prospect of deliberately engineering the climate, however, takes humans deeply into new levels of intervention into the natural order. For reasons that are both practical and philosophical, a number of commentators have suggested that climate may not be the type of thing that humans should seek to control. This presentation probes the whole idea of ‘artificing’ the climate and offers some suggestions about how such a practice might (or might not) fit within an ethics for the Anthropocene.
Christopher Preston is the first VU Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Ethics of the Anthropocene: Religion, Ethics, and Global Environmental Change in the academic year 2016-17. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Research Fellow at the Program on Ethics and Public Affairs at the University of Montana. He works in environmental philosophy, climate ethics, the ethics of emerging technologies, and feminist philosophy. His research has recently focused on the major ethical and conceptual issues raised by climate engineering, synthetic biology, genetic modification, and nanotechnology.
Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam 
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