This paper explores the practice of rewilding and its implications for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences. First, we consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regard to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic appreciation of these. Second, we discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences, such as the unscenic and the ugly. Finally, we make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while (...) resisting the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses. (shrink)

Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field ofphilosophical aesthetics. It arose within analytic aesthetics in thelast third of the twentieth century. Prior to its emergence,aesthetics within the analytic tradition was largely concerned withphilosophy of art. Environmental aesthetics originated as a reactionto this emphasis, pursuing instead the investigation of the aestheticappreciation of natural environments. Since its early stages, thescope of environmental aesthetics has broadened to include not simplynatural environments but also human and (...) human-influenced ones. At thesame time, the discipline has also come to include the examination ofthat which falls within such environments, giving rise to what iscalled the aesthetics of everyday life. This area involves theaesthetics of not only more common objects and environments, but alsoa range of everyday activities. Thus, early in the twenty-firstcentury, environmental aesthetics embraced the study of the aestheticsignificance of almost everything other than art. Together with thisbroader scope of environmental aesthetics, the twenty-first centuryhas also given rise to renewed and more intense investigations of therelationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism aswell as to several new interests and directions. (shrink)

This essay is an overview of recent research aimed at establishing a link between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics. I review the work of several prominent environmental philosophers and environmental aestheticians, spelling out some of the difficulties confronting various attempts to find such a link. While I argue that a case can be made for a connection between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics concerning human‐created and human‐influenced environments, I find that there are (...) a number of problems facing attempts to establish a similar connection for natural or pristine environments. I examine some attempts to support such a connection, including each of two different accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature in contemporary Western environmental aesthetics as well as the union of these two accounts, sometimes called ecoaesthetics. I briefly discuss two Western versions of ecoaesthetics and then turn to research by Chinese aestheticians, who defend a more robust version of ecoaesthetics. I suggest that this latter work may succeed in connecting environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics, although not in exactly the way in which such a link has been pursued by Western philosophers. (shrink)

China is currently afflicted by enormous environmental problems. This book, drawing on ancient and modern Chinese environmental thinking, considers what it is that makes an environment a desirable place for living. The book emphasises ideas of beauty, and discusses how these ideas can be applied in natural, agricultural and urban environments in order to produce desirable environments. The book argues that environment is both a product of nature and of human beings, and as such is potentially alterable by (...) culture. The book explores the three aspects of environmental beauty whereby such alteration might be beneficially made: integrated and holistic; ecological and man-made; and authentic and everyday. (shrink)

Since aesthetic experience is vital for the protection of nature, I address the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism. I first review two traditional positions, the picturesque approach and formalism. Some environmentalists fault the modes of aesthetic appreciation associated with these views, charging they are anthropocentric, scenery-obsessed, superficial, subjective, and/or morally vacuous. In light of these apparent failings of traditional aesthetics of nature, I suggest five requirements of environmentalism: that aesthetic appreciation of nature should be acentric, environment-focused, (...) serious, objective and morally engaged. I then examine two contemporary positions concerning appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, the aesthetics of engagement and scientific cognitivism, assessing each in terms of the requirements of environmentalism. (shrink)

What are the aesthetic transformations taking place through the effects of global warming and human responses to these effects? How should we conceptualize aesthetic environmental change, especially in the context of intergenerational concern for both nonhumans and humans? As the earth’s systems and its organisms experience climate change, these kinds of questions require an understanding of the aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of lost species, places, and landscapes, as well as those which emerge through mediation and adaptation. The experience (...) of aesthetic value or “aesthetic appreciation” is central to the study of aesthetics and, in practical terms, offers a more intimate scale for understanding the concrete interactions people have with changing environments and places. To explore these issues, the chapter discusses the tools of environmental aesthetics which can assist in grasping shifts in natural and seminatural aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values across both shorter and longer time scales, including intergenerational and future temporalities. The chapter moves on to address the kinds of aesthetic qualities of the earth’s systems which are demanding more attention in order to better understand and uncover what is being lost or affected by environmental change. Negative values are then discussed to address how aesthetics is placed with respect to the range of environmental phenomena caused by climate change, such as wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and so on. The chapter closes with a discussion of the interrelationship between aesthetics and ethics in the context of environmental change. (shrink)

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time 'beyond' modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of (...) the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds. (shrink)

Discussion of sublime response to natural environments is largely absent from contemporary environmental aesthetics. This is due to the fact that the sublime seems inextricably linked to extravagant metaphysical ideas. In this paper, I seek to rehabilitate a conception of sublime response that is secular, metaphysically modest and compatible with the most influential theory of environmental aesthetics, Allen Carlson’s scientific cognitivism. First, I offer some grounds for seeing the environmental sublime as a distinctive and meaningful (...) category of contemporary aesthetic experience of nature. Next, from historical and contemporary sources, I reconstruct two philosophical accounts of what I call ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ sublime response. Finally I show how these responses are compatible with scientific cognitivism, though the latter more so than the former. (shrink)

As overdevelopment, noise pollution, and land use become considerations in modern life, we become more thoughtful of the quality of our environments, whether the space is for recreation, education, or residential living. Demonstrating how such tenets as "to each his own" have contributed to the demise of our public spaces, Environmental Aesthetics is the first integrated study of this emerging field. Beginning with a brief history of aesthetics, the author explores the concept of landscape, the psychology of (...) human-environment relations, the influences of literary, artistic and legal activism, and the roles of public policy and of planning. Clearly written and lavishly illustrated, the book will prove invaluable to anyone interested in how the physical environment can and should be improved. (shrink)

In the age of Anthropocene, can aesthetics propose a not prevaricating behavioural model towards nature, leading to a new conception of humanity based on our being moved by nature? In this article, we will try to answer this question, exploring how some exponents of contemporary Environmental Aesthetics have examined the significance of human emotional responses to nature. Starting from the assumption that Kant defines the sublime as a motion of the soul, we wonder how aesthetics can (...) reinterpret this concept to affirm not human superiority over nature but his being part of it. To do so, we will turn our attention not only to some exponents of Environmental Aesthetics but also to Schopenhauer's concept of the sublime and the thought of Arne Næss, the father of the Deep Ecology movement. (shrink)

We argue that environmental aesthetics, and specifically the concept of aesthetic integrity, should play a central role in a public environmental philosophy designed to communicate about environmental problems in an effective manner. After developing the concept of the “aesthetic integrity” of the environment, we appeal to empirical research to show that it contributes significantly to people’s sense of place, which is, in turn, central to their well-being and motivational state. As a result, appealing to aesthetic integrity (...) in policy contexts is both strategically and morally advisable. To provide a concrete illustration of the ways in which such appeals can play a role in policy making, we examine a specific case study in which attention to aesthetic integrity contributed to blocking a proposed development. The case yields at least four lessons: (1) aesthetic integrity can be a practically effective framing device; (2) local deliberative settings are particularly conducive for addressing it; (3) it can serve as an umbrella under which multiple other issues can be brought to the fore; and (4) judgments about aesthetic integrity need not be entirely objective in order for them to play a productive role in the policy sphere. (shrink)

Analysis of Chinese landscape design offered a challenge to test the concepts of environmental aesthetics developed in the West. With comparative approach we improved our understanding of art and environment, and of different strategies in designing forms of Chinese gardens. In order to describe the "hidden" symbohsm of Chinese landscape design we applied various concepts and metaphors: completeness, large and small, mirror and mirroring, garden as entrance and separate reality, disclosure and concealment, and returning to the source.

In this paper, I lay out a case for why those objects of aesthetic attention which are principally characterized as natural objects should be understood not statically, as existing in merely a three-dimensional fixed state, but as dynamic, as existing in a space-time context, complete with change, movement, and flux. After this, I explain why this is important, how the dynamic nature of natural objects raises a concern for aesthetically evaluating natural objects, and how that concern may be addressed.

In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis is (...) that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses. (shrink)

: In this paper, I lay out a case for why those objects of aesthetic attention which are principally characterized as natural objects should be understood not statically, as existing in merely a three-dimensional fixed state, but as dynamic, as existing in a space-time context, complete with change, movement, and flux. After this, I explain why this is important, how the dynamic nature of natural objects raises a concern for aesthetically evaluating natural objects, and how that concern may be addressed.

This paper attempts to distinguish the aesthetic approach to environmental protection from the practical approach. The practical approach has a definite goal—the protection of present and future generations of human beings from harm and destruction. Protection of the environment is therefore only a means to an end—this means that if there were alternative and less painful ways to achieve the same goal, then we might opt for those other ways to preserve humankind. The aesthetic approach, on the other hand, (...) treats environmental protection as an end in itself. This is because certain aesthetic moods, feelings, or mental states can only be created by the objects we attend to; these objects are therefore unique, and their destruction must mean that we can no longer enjoy that peculiar feeling which it will evoke. (shrink)

The old, historical concept of ‘disinterestedness’ has dominated the tradition of aesthetics for almost two centuries. In environmental aesthetics, a rather recent branch of aesthetics, some scholars such as Arnold Berleant have criticized disinterestedness, claiming that it is not a satisfactory criterion since it views the environment as an artwork. As an alternative, Berleant proposes a theory of the ‘aesthetics of engagement’. I claim that although his main intention is to introduce a comprehensive perception of (...) nature, ‘appreciating nature as nature’, into the aesthetics of nature, Berleant misinterprets ‘disinterestedness’ and overlooks the fact that it can still be maintained within environmental aesthetics. Disinterestedness can guide our judgements with the notions of non-instrumentality, transparent self, and impartiality. In this sense, I argue that the proper opposite of engagement is not disinterestedness but a dominant concept of aesthetics left over from the eighteenth century, the ‘picturesque’, in contrast to holistic accounts of the philosophers who look for an immersion-of-self-in-a-bigger-Self, disinterestedness provides being devoid-of-any-empirical-self and disinterestedness is not anthropocentric, but anthropogenic, human-generated, which accepts the ‘otherness’ of nature and opens the way for respect and care in environmental ethics. (shrink)

This article explores John's Muir's writings in order to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. To this end, I draw out three key features. First is the aesthetic category of sublimity as it emerges in his explorations of Yosemite. Second, a distinctive, pluralistic environmental aesthetics is found through his interweaving of aesthetic, religious, and scientific ideas. Third, his journals from the Thousand‐Mile Walk reveal an active and situated aesthetics, shaped by his practice of exploring and communing (...) with nature. Together, these features support a perspective that is quite contemporary, in tune with environmental and everyday aesthetics, as well as with recent work in environmental ethics. (shrink)

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue (...) with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary. (shrink)

One extreme example of intergenerational environmental change is given by nuclear waste. The radiation from a typical nuclear waste assembly will remain fatal for humans for millennia, creating the problem of communicating a warning about hazardous repositories to people so far in the future that we cannot assume any common ground with them in terms of languages and cultural contexts. This poses limitations to solutions proposed in the context of semiotics. The need for communicating danger and for keeping future (...) people away from certain sites may be tackled from a more sensorial and aesthetic perspective. Given the size of nuclear waste repositories, and the problem of keeping people at a distance, the dimension at which the problem must be tackled is environmental. This work argues for an exploration of what environmental aesthetics, despite and perhaps thanks to all the ongoing definitional and conceptual debates in the discipline, has to offer. (shrink)

After half a century, environmental aesthetics successfully expanded the scope of modern art-centred Western aesthetic discourse. I argue that further expansion is in order. First, we should explore the aesthetics of the constituents of the environment, namely artefacts, human activities and social relationships, which determine the quality of life and the state of the world. Second, we need to cultivate aesthetic literacy as well as a normative discourse to steer our aesthetic practice toward a better world-making. Finally, (...) environmental aesthetics needs to be globalised to include rich aesthetic traditions of nature and environment from diverse cultures. (shrink)

Aesthetic debates within contemporary art have been tangential to the debates in environmental aesthetics since the 1960s. I argue that these disciplines, having evolved separately in response to the limitations of traditional aesthetics, may now usefully inform each other. Firstly, the dematerialisation of art as the focus of aesthetic experience may have environmentally useful consequences. Secondly, Gablik's 'connective aesthetics ', like Berleant's ' aesthetics of engagement', folds aesthetic experience into the social as a kind of (...) environmental aesthetics. Thirdly, contemporary art's flexible readings of ' framing ' can respond to 'frameless' natural environments, and finally, Kester's 'dialogical aesthetics ' may be enriched by Berleant's systematic account of ' contextual aesthetics '. (shrink)

The development and nature of environmental aesthetics -- Aesthetic appreciation and the natural environment -- The requirements for an adequate aesthetics of nature -- Aesthetic appreciation and the human environment -- Appreciation of the human environment under different conceptions -- Aesthetic appreciation and the agricultural landscape -- What is the correct way to aesthetically appreciate landscapes?

The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aesthetic experience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics, environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just natural environments but also human-made and human-modified landscapes. _Nature and Landscape_ is an important introduction to this rapidly growing area of aesthetic understanding and appreciation. Allen Carlson begins by tracing the development of the field's (...) historical background, and then surveys contemporary positions on the aesthetics of nature, such as scientific cognitivism, which holds that certain kinds of scientific knowledge are necessary for a full appreciation of natural environments. Carlson next turns to environments that have been created or changed by humans and the dilemmas that are posed by the appreciation of such landscapes. He examines how to aesthetically appreciate a variety of urban and rural landscapes and concludes with a discussion of whether there is, in general, a correct way to aesthetically experience the environment. (shrink)

Evaluation of the contribution that Allen Carlson’s environmental aesthetics can make to environmental protection shows that Carlson’s positive aesthetics, his focus on the functionality of human environments for their proper aesthetic appreciation, and his integration of ethical concern with aesthetic appreciation all provide fruitful, though not unproblematic, avenues for an aesthetic defense of theenvironment.

This paper investigates the connection between Henri Bergson’s biological epistemology and his moral theory. Specifically, it examines the distinction between the morality of what Bergson calls “closed” and “open” societies in his late work Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). I argue that “open” morality provides the moral correlate of a non-instrumentalizing orientation toward nature. Here Bergson’s thought is disposed toward a very specific kind of environmental ethic, an aesthetic one. Bergson’s characterization of open morality, especially in the (...) image of the mystic individual, indicates that through artistic consciousness open morality imitates the creative evolution of life. (shrink)

Many environmental aestheticians—most prominently, Allen Carlson—have drawn a distinction between “arts-based” and “nature-based” approaches to the aesthetics of nature and have argued that the widespread practice of using arts-based theories and categories to understand the aesthetics of nature is a mistake. This practice, they argue, should be rejected and replaced by a practice in which an aesthetics of nature based on a clear, scientifically grounded understanding of the environment is used to appraise nature. In this paper, (...) I will challenge important parts of this argument through a discussion of an example often used by these environmental aestheticians in developing their arguments: namely, landscape.. (shrink)

Food can provide an unique insight into both the human conditions of embodiment and interactive experience, and aesthetic education of environmental awareness. My project is to present an opportunity for a far-reaching pragmatic vision by treating aesthetics as having to do with the elements that make up an environment. This provides a sufficiently extensive ground on which to argue for environmental eating as one of the most profound meanings we can experience. Environmental eating, then, means tasting (...) a world - tasting the fundamentals of what constitutes a place. (shrink)