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This chapter examines the historical development of different conceptions of health among environmental activists in the postwar United States.

The historical analysis combines archival research with oral history interviews.

This study argues that applications of “health” to describe the environment are more diverse than generally acknowledged, and that environmental activists were at the forefront of connecting the two terms within broader public discourse.

This study provides a historical context for understanding the contemporary diversity of perspectives on the links between ecology and health. It illustrates the cross-fertilization between scientists, philosophers, and environmental activists in the 1970s that led to this contemporary diversity.

In this chapter, educational philosopher Michael Peters discusses the emergence of new movements in thought and educational research practice in an “epoch of digital reason” that encompass the posthuman and decentered intimate scholarship. Peters describes changes that have occurred at the juncture of philosophy, culture, and science, probing the notion of a “coming after” of postmodernism in a post-truth era that has seen a rise in reactionary, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant reaction across the Western world. Peters provides insight regarding this collection of changes in thinking, to which the decentering of subjectivity is critical, and even, as he suggests, one of the foundations of modern philosophy after Descartes. This shift in thinking across disciplines entails a turn to systems and ecological thinking; an understanding of consciousness as situated, distributed, and enacted; and a view of the world as constituted by productive difference. Other changes include connecting affect and cultural dimensions to research, which is expanding our view of science and what shapes science. Peters notes that these shifts turn us to new questions about rethinking concepts that are grounded in the liberal, intentional notion of the subject, such as agency and responsibility for one’s actions. As we engage in this rethinking, Peters suggests that we learn from indigenous studies, as indigenous peoples have been putting to work different forms of posthumanism for millennia.