“We do not suddenly discover that the whole world is beautiful; it is our engaged interrelation with the world, our caring about it, which nurtures beauty. Beauty or any other aesthetic category resides in the bridges we build while engaging experientially with the world; it is neither ‘here’ on our side (accessed internally) nor ‘there’ on the other side (passively awaiting to be discovered).”
Nikolaos Gkogkas – “Aesthetics and the Environment: Repatriating Humanity”
Let’s begin with a brief exercise of the imagination. Try to construct a picture in your mind of the following environments: Lush alpine meadows of the Himalayas. Vivid coral reefs off the Australian coast. Dynamic jungles of the Amazon rainforest. The scenes you imagined are likely of pristine vistas and stunning wild reaches teaming with vibrant colors and textures. Now what do all of these diverse habitats have in common? They are each regarded as places of exquisite natural beauty rich with flora and fauna. And they are under threat – experiencing habit loss, pollution, extinction – from climate change and environmental degradation. Most of us are familiar with the arguments, the calls to action and the work being done to protect and restore these and other critical habitats. Many of us perhaps are even helping to carry out this work, adding our voices to the rallying cry around ecological stewardship.
Why care?
Typical environmental arguments cite the goods and services that natural habitats provide – climate regulation, coastal protection, waste management, not to mention the provision of food, water, medicine, and fuel – as primary reasons that we, as humans, should not only care about the well-being of the environment, but should actively work to preserve it. While ecological arguments are compelling and point to concrete, measurable outcomes of further degradation, there is another type of argument that is also used to great effect, often as the hook, the launching point for debate and discussion. This line of reasoning draws on something more instinctual and subjective but often just as stirring – humanity’s universal yet highly personal affinity for the beautiful.
While tastes and perceptions of beauty can and do vary widely on a cultural and individual level, there remains a common appreciation for the lovely, the precious, the picturesque and a compulsion to seek, acquire, and cultivate beauty. An argument that asserts that the redwoods or glaciers or snow leopards should be saved because they are beautiful and noble immediately resonates with most people. After all, there aren’t many of us who would take a trip to the Grand Canyon and come away without a sense of awe, a feeling that this magnificent natural wonder is worthy of preservation. Of course, basing an argument for the conservation of a species or the preservation of a tidal marsh on aesthetic grounds alone is not enough. Indeed, environmental ethics, the branch of philosophy that examines what moral duties humans have with respect to the environment, typically steers clear of or even outright rejects such aesthetically grounded arguments.
There are those within philosophy, however, like Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, who have tried to reconcile the aesthetic with environmentalism, to understand how we can appreciate nature through the lens of environmental concerns. While both men represent different understandings of how we should aesthetically relate to natural environments, as born out in the cognitive versus non-cognitive debate (more on that later), there is general agreement within the field that an aesthetic experience of the environment is characterized by an active and engaged approach. It thus involves a whole body immersion within the environment and the stimulation of not only sight and sound, but all the senses.
Having emerged in the 1960s as a sub-field of aesthetics and a sort of tangent to environmental philosophy, environmental aesthetics is a relatively new field. It draws from three historical areas of study: Philosophical aesthetics; Landscape design, both broad theoretical and practical applications, including romantic literature and poetry; and Early conservation and nature writing. We’ll take a brief look at each of these below.
The aesthetic appreciation of nature
The philosophical cannon here has coalesced around three overarching understandings of how nature is experienced aesthetically – the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque. Each theory developed over varying periods of time but came to coexist by the eighteenth century, though the picturesque was to become the dominant system of thinking. The beautiful has long been attributed to “nature” as it applies to cultivated gardens and tame landscapes, while the sublime, with its reverence for the awesome and inexplicable aspects of the natural world, came into full force in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School.
In differentiating the three traditions, Allen Carlson draws on historian John Conron to specify that:
“objects experienced as beautiful tend to be small and smooth, but subtly varied, delicate, and ‘fair’ in color, while those experienced as sublime, by contrast, are powerful, vast, intense, terrifying, and ‘definitionless’. Picturesque items are typically in the middle ground between those experienced as either sublime or beautiful, being complex and eccentric, varied and irregular, rich and forceful, and vibrant with energy.”
The picturesque lives in this middle ground of complex, irregular, and vibrant characteristics that are abundant in nature. Carlson speculates it is for this reason that the picturesque has overtaken both the beautiful and the sublime in our primary understanding of the aesthetic experience of nature and the value it provides.
While nature enjoyed pride of place in aesthetics in the eighteenth century, the natural environment began to disappear from aesthetic thought during the nineteenth century, as philosophers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came to regard art, not nature, as the pinnacle of human imagination and the height of aesthetic value. It was during this period that the philosophy of art began to take hold, and scholastic thought turned its attention to art as the aesthetic object worthy of study.
Landscape design
Interest in nature by means of classical landscape paintings, particularly the works of Baroque artists Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was translated through theories of the picturesque to the real-world context of landscape design. The movement prized qualities in both landscape gardening and painting that reflected the “ideal” landscape (à la Claude Lorrain) and centered around the idea that the beauty of a natural landscape is best appreciated through the medium of painting. In fact, a special device called a “Claude Glass” was utilized in the eighteenth century that allowed users to observe landscapes through a tinted convex mirror that worked to frame and reflect the view into something that resembled a miniature painting. Of course, this “scenery model” of aesthetic appreciation, coupled with the idea that art and other human interventions improve upon nature, present challenges to the ideals of environmental aesthetics.
Nature writing
Though far-reaching, the influence of theories of the picturesque was largely limited to Western Europe. In North America there was a preference for an aesthetic favoring untamed wilderness that influenced the conservation movement developing in the US during the late nineteenth century. The work of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau was highly influential to the public’s growing receptivity to untamed landscapes and the idea of nature as a font of spiritual well-being and a medium of moral truths. This wilderness aesthetic is central to conservationist John Muir’s writings. Well-versed in natural history, geology, and botany, Muir’s appreciation of nature went beyond scraping the surface to an active, engaged experience of nature’s sublimity from within.
Similarly, conservationist and forerunner of environmental ethics Aldo Leopold joined ecological knowledge with aesthetic concerns to promote a “land ethic” – that is, a framework for how we should consider and treat the natural world from an ethical standpoint. Through the conservation work of these and other pioneers, a theme began to form that would become a key component of contemporary environmental aesthetics. It advocates a positive aesthetic such that all of the natural world is beautiful and that nature unspoiled by humans is intrinsically good and aesthetically edifying.
Back to nature
The supremacy of art within aesthetics began with the fall of romanticism and carried well into the expressionism and abstract art movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It wasn’t until 1966, with the publication of Ronald Hepburn’s pivotal “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” that nature began to be seen again as a serious subject of aesthetic inquiry.
Hepburn argues that when we are aesthetically engaged with a natural environment, we are fully immersed in that setting and experience a broader range of sensory inputs than we typically would when viewing a work of art. This total immersion allows us to interact in more varied and novel ways with the environment than is usually possible with art, as art is often contained within a frame and bounded by walls. Hepburn’s writing helped to spur a renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature, aided concurrently by the public’s growing awareness of the degradation of the environment and the burgeoning modern environmental movement in the US the 1960s and 1970s.
Cognitive approaches
Alongside Carlson, Arnold Berleant has cultivated a reputation as a prolific and influential, if at times controversial, philosopher of contemporary environmental aesthetics. Berleant is perhaps the best known of those aestheticians advocating for a non-cognitive approach to nature appreciation, most notably through his engagement model. These two broad camps – cognitive and non-cognitive – which crystallized at the end of the twentieth century, are opposing ways of understanding how we might have an aesthetic appreciation of nature.
Cognitive, or conceptual approaches propose that to properly experience a natural environment aesthetically, one must have the requisite knowledge. That is, an informed understanding of the environment through appropriate scientific learning in ecology, biology, geology, is paramount to facilitating a true aesthetic appreciation. The experience of art provides a useful analogy here. Just as some argue that an aesthetic appreciation of an artwork is mediated on an individual’s contextual knowledge of the artist and the time period in which he/she was working, as well as of art history and formal properties of art more broadly, natural objects – a tree, rock formation, or coastline – are only properly engaged with aesthetically through the lens of natural history.
Not only does a scientific awareness facilitate the discovery and deeper appreciation of aesthetic qualities, argues Carlson in his natural environmental model, but it helps us to make aesthetic judgments that are “true.” Carlson gives the example that a wale viewed under the category of “fish” seems clumsy and awkward. But when examined through the lens of the appropriate category of “mammal”, it appears magnificent and even graceful.
Proponents of cognitive approaches also contend that aesthetic perceptions conceived through scientific knowledge preserve objectivity by removing the arbitrary and subjective from our judgments and valuations. This is of particular importance when engaging with aspects of the natural world that seem ugly, dirty, grotesque, or horrifying. In this way, an image of an animal carcass, such as the one below, can be perceived as vital and beautiful because it is an essential part of a healthy and functioning ecosystem.
Non-cognitive approaches
Conversely, non-cognitive or non-conceptual approaches advocate for some dimension outside of scientific knowledge or other component relating to cognition as the central feature of an aesthetic appreciation. These approaches are subjective and pluralistic in their understanding of what that central feature is, but the common models put forward frameworks like engagement (through multi-sensory experience, à la Berleant), emotional arousal (receptivity to a visceral experience), mystery (separation from and incomprehension of nature), and imagination (employing associative, metaphorical, revelatory, and other processes).
While these non-cognitive approaches place an emphasis on different components of appreciation, they all employ nonscientific modes of understanding, including phenomenology and folklore. Though some “quasi-cognitive” approaches attempt to bridge the cognitive/non-cognitive divide, non-cognitivists agree that making scientific understanding a necessary condition of aesthetic appreciation not only restricts the range of acceptable aesthetic perceptions and judgments, but delegitimizes non-scientific modes of appreciation.
Building bridges
Returning to and concluding with Berleant’s engagement model, we recall that an aesthetic experience is predicated on a total immersion of the viewer in the environment, be that a natural environment or otherwise. Indeed, Berleant expands this model of aesthetic appreciation beyond nature to the built environment, art, and everyday life. Whatever the setting, this immersion cannot be achieved by simple passive observation, but through active, multi-sensory participation with and as a part of the environment. Berleant suggests that the “aesthetic mark” of experiences such as “canoeing a serpentine river,” camping out “beneath pines black against the night sky,” and “walking through the tall grass or a hidden meadow” is not “disinterested contemplation,” but
“total engagement, a sensory immersion in the natural world that reaches the still uncommon experience of unity. Joined with acute perceptual consciousness and enhanced by the felt understanding of assimilated knowledge, such occasions can become clear peaks in a cloudy world, high points in a life dulled by habit and defensive disregard.”
Environmental aesthetics does not provide us with the complete picture, the entire framework to thinking about environmentalism. We cannot understand through aesthetic appreciation alone the complex ways in which the natural world operates or our place in it, nor how human intervention changes these delicate systems in sometimes irreparable ways. It cannot provide all of the facts and figures on deforestation and global warming and what must be done to prevent further degradation of the planet.
What it does provide, however, is the impetus for why we should care. We can know everything there is to know about the catastrophic effects of environmental degradation and not be moved to action. We can intellectually understand this yet still be missing that crucial link that enables us to experience true concern – compassion, even – in a personal, visceral way. A real aesthetic appreciation for the environment, garnered through engaging with the beauty of nature around us, provides us with that necessary connection, the bridge to a duty of care for the natural world.
