Book Review: Place and experience: a philosophical topography

Abstract

idea of discourse belies their invocation of Foucault, and produces the sort of Whiggish history that makes their introductory claims about historicism ring hollow. In this way, the nineteenth-century painter of Indian portraits George Catlin becomes an ‘early preservationist’ (p. 63), a prototype of the preservationism of the contemporary Wilderness Society. Differences between the aims and objects of their preservationism (sublime savagery against ecosystems and biodiversity) are erased, while the recent rise of global environmental problems, like climate change, and the globalization of American environmental concerns to encompass far-off places are barely touched on, though the debate around trade and environment does receive some notice in a chapter on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Arguably some simplification is necessary to provide narrative coherence in an undergraduate text such as this one, but the result here is to suggest that nothing ever really changes. In both political and intellectual terms, this is not the message we should be conveying.