Aesthetic Appreciation and Environmental Virtue

Aesthetic Appreciation and Environmental Virtue

David E. Cooper

I

This talk is about the integrity of natural environments, and argues that
greater prominence than is usual should be given to the contribution of
aesthetic concerns – ones, say, with the beauty of natural places – to
environmental protection, to the exercise of environmental virtues. Public
documents on environmental protection – such as the Rio declaration, the
Bruntland Report (Our Common Future), and the manifestoes of 'green'
political parties – generally concentrate on three kinds of reasons for
responsible and sustainable treatment of nature. First, a host of economic
and technological considerations demonstrate that, without such treatment,
the world will someday be plunged into economic crisis, with various
natural resources having been exhausted. Second, there is an emphasis on
the implications for human health of a relentless exploitation of nature –
the destruction, for example, of plant species that would have proved
valuable in treating diseases. Thirdly, various moral considerations are
advanced, especially ones that invoke rights that are allegedly violated by
the degradation of environments – the rights, say, of future generations of
human beings, or of the indigenous peoples and perhaps animals whose
habitats are being destroyed.
There is little room in such documents for aesthetic aspects of the
natural environment. Nor is much more attention paid to these in the
publications and rhetoric of organizations whose special remit is to
protect the environment. The UK Countryside Agency, for example, now
focuses on monitoring and guarding the 'character' of landscapes, where
'character' is understood primarily in geological and historical terms, to
the extent, according to one critic, of 'deliberately eschew[ing] aesthetic
value judgements' on the landscapes.1 In both the UK and the USA, National
Parks are more commonly defended on ecological or wildlife management
grounds than on aesthetic ones.
This neglect of the aesthetic in debates on environmental policy is,
perhaps, surprising. To begin with, it is obvious that the ordinary public
is very much concerned with the beauty or ugliness of landscapes and
developments, especially those close to home. While, for instance, policy
makers may emphasise the energy efficiency of wind-farms, it is the impact
of these on the look of a landscape that opponents are most likely to
stress. Second, there is a long tradition of writing and reflection on
nature in which aesthetic appreciation figures as a main reason for caring
about natural environments. One thinks, for instance, of Romantic poets,
like William Wordsworth, whose opposition to extending a railway line to
the English Lake District reflected his love for the unspoilt, sublime
character of the area. Or of the early pioneers of the National Park
movement in the USA, like John Muir, for whom the Yosemite Valley was the
most beautiful landscape he had ever beheld, and one to protect for the
spiritual health of those who would visit the Valley and share his
experience. For several twentieth-century champions of environmental
protection, too, aesthetic considerations were significant. Aldo Leopold,
for instance, famously wrote that we act rightly when we 'preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community'.2
The third and most interesting reason why neglect of aesthetic
experience of nature is surprising is that, on the surface at least, it
looks to be an important ally of enlightened attitudes towards natural
environments. Two general factors, noted by many environmentalists, that
are responsible for unsustainable exploitation and degradation of nature,
are worth articulating. First, there is the tendency, in an age dominated
by economic imperatives, to regard the natural world simply as a resource,
as so much 'stuff' or 'equipment' to be made instrumental use of by and for
human beings. Second, there is the sheer indifference of many men and women
– most of whom, in the developed world, live in cities – to the fate of
natural environments, except to the extent that these serve as holiday
destinations. It might seem that these two attitudes – instrumentalism and
indifference – are at odds, but in fact they are in league. If nature
doesn't matter except as an economic resource, then people won't care about
the fate of environments which do not, as it were, pull their economic
weight. And the less people care about environments, the more these stand
open to unconstrained exploitation.3
Aesthetic experience of nature looks to be an antidote to both
instrumentalism and indifference. Arguably, it is definitive of aesthetic
appreciation that it is not appreciation of something's practical or
instrumental 'pay-off'. A certain 'detachment' or 'disinterestedness' is
essential to the appreciation of a forest for its beauty rather than for
its potential as timber. In aesthetic experience, something is appreciated,
as it is often put, 'for its own sake'.4 This 'detachment', however, does
not mean that someone who appreciates nature aesthetically does so without
feeling or emotion. On the contrary, it is intrinsic to any serious
experience of something's, someone's, or some where's beauty that one cares
for and about it, even that one has a certain love for it. Such care or
love is something, one might think, that environmentalists would surely
want to enlist on their side.

II

Why, if there are good reasons for attending to aesthetic experience, is it
nevertheless marginalised in contemporary debate about environmental
protection and sustainability? What explains this neglect of, even
hostility to, the aesthetic among environmental policy makers?
While there is, as I'll suggest in a moment, some justification for
this neglect or hostility, most of it is due to misunderstandings or
confusions about the nature of aesthetic experience. These
misunderstandings are apparent, it seems to me, in the accusations that
aesthetic concerns are 'superficial' and 'effete', and in the frequent
complaint that aesthetic appreciation is too 'subjective' and 'trivial' to
provide any basis for adopting environmental programmes. So let me spend a
little time exposing some confusions that encourage these accusations and
complaints.
There is a sense in which aesthetics is concerned with the
'superficial'. In enjoying the beauty of what I see, I attend to how it
looks – to its surface appearance, rather than to its internal chemical
composition. But it does not follow that my enjoyment is 'superficial' in
the pejorative sense of being casual, flippant and easy. My enjoyment may
have been made possible only by close attention to what I see, by
exercising my imagination, or by the achievement of openness to what, at
first, seemed alien. In the volume of his autobiography where he recounts
his experiences in the Ceylon Civil Service, Leonard Woolf eloquently
evokes the 'austere', 'immobile' and 'melancholic' beauty of those arid
areas in the north-west and south-east of the country that eventually 'got
into [his] heart and … bones'. He makes clear that these almost
'featureless' places are ones whose beauty is not immediately apparent: it
reveals itself only to those who 'live with' and become 'absorbed in' such
places.5 Here is a beauty whose hard-won enjoyment is not, in the crucial
sense, superficial.
The charge that aesthetic concerns are 'effete', even 'elitist',
surely reflects an unwarranted equation of aesthetic appreciation and art
appreciation. Actually, it is hard to see much justification for the
accusation that enjoyment of art is effete: but even if there were, this
would be irrelevant since, plainly, aesthetic experience is not confined to
art-works. Beauty, for example, is a quality that things of many diverse
kinds may have: paintings and pieces of music, yes, but also men and
women's faces and figures, people's characters, mathematical theorems, and,
of course, natural phenomena – from mountains and valleys to birds and
deer, from rainbows and cloud formations to reflections in lakes and the
sound of waterfalls. It would be absurd to accuse all or most people for
whom these beauties matter of effete elitism.
There is a further confusion in the complaint that aesthetic
appreciation is too hopelessly 'subjective' to provide reliable guidance in
environmental policy. Admittedly, there is a sense in which aesthetic
experience is 'subjective': for it is the experience of human subjects, and
of a sort, as we saw, to involve emotion and feeling. But this does not
imply that the experience is 'subjective' in the sense of being
idiosyncratic, purely personal, or whimsical. Empirical studies show much
greater agreement among people, and across cultures, on what is beautiful
than slogans like 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' suggest.6 And even
if they didn't, that would not be a reason to doubt the robustness of some,
at least, of our aesthetic judgements, or to doubt that we can recognize
beauties – like those of Woolf's arid terrains – to which we are at first
blind. There are, I suggest, very few people who would not find the sight
of the undulating Cheviot hills beautiful, and virtually none incapable of
finding them beautiful.
Confusion also lurks in the complaint made by several environmental
ethicists that an aesthetic stance towards nature is not only subjective,
but viciously 'anthropocentric' – for it is to regard nature as a resource
for our own pleasures. In one sense, aesthetic appreciation may well be
anthropocentric, for things are beautiful, graceful or whatever only in
relation to the experience of creatures like ourselves. But it can't follow
from this that aesthetic enjoyment is anthropocentric in the pejorative
sense of registering a purely instrumental, utilitarian attitude towards
the beautiful and the graceful. It is perfectly compatible with the
relativity of beauty to human experience that we enjoy beauty 'for its own
sake', and not for some pay-off.
A different explanation of an environmentalist neglect of aesthetics
is the absence of a perceived connection between aesthetic and
environmental issues. According to one designer, 70% of his colleagues 'saw
virtually no connection at all' between the two sets of issues.7 Such
findings reflect a widespread feeling that, unlike people's moral
commitments, their aesthetic tastes do not really engage with and guide the
activities of everyday real life. This feeling, however, is entirely
inaccurate. Many of the decisions most of us make on most days of our lives
are made at least partly on aesthetic grounds: decisions on what to wear,
eat, buy, throw away, plant in the garden, put on the mantelpiece, insert
in the CD player, read in bed, and so on.
The immense role of the aesthetic in everyday life is conceded in a
more persuasive explanation of the neglect of aesthetic experience in
environmental debate. Aesthetic appreciation indeed shapes environmental
policy, but, so it is then argued, this influence has on the whole been
thoroughly unfortunate so that, in consequence, environmentalists have
quite properly tried to marginalize the aesthetic dimension when adopting
environmentally responsible strategies. Consider, for example, the way in
which a preference for cute and cuddly, or striking and dramatic-looking,
animals affects funding for species conservation programmes - without any
regard for the ecological importance of different species. Or think of the
way that a taste for sublime, scenic and grand landscapes – mountain
ranges, say, or canyons – militates against attempts by ecologists to
protect such endangered, but less appealing, environments as deserts and
tundra regions. Or consider the tendency among many people to focus
aesthetic attention on wildernesses, with the result that the degradation
of cultivated, inhabited environments gets overlooked.8
Nor, in this connection, should one ignore the many ways in which the
aesthetic tastes of consumers indirectly, and often adversely, affect
environments. A fashion for a certain sort of furniture, for instance, can
encourage the over-logging of forests that supply the wood for this
furniture. And we don't need to be reminded of how several species of
animals, such as tigers, elephants or whales, have been brought close to
extinction as a result of tastes in clothes, ornaments or food.
What all this indicates is that, while aesthetic concerns figure
only modestly in environmental debate and publications, 'the power of the
aesthetic', as Yuriko Saito calls it, in shaping environmental attitudes
and practices is enormous. The issue to address, then, is not whether the
aesthetic impacts upon the environmental, but what this impact should be.
When it comes to 'creating sustainable environments', the issue, as one
American philosopher puts it, is 'not just what people do find beautiful
but what they should find beautiful'.9 The sensible ambition is not to
expel the aesthetic from the discourse of environmental responsibility, but
to align the aesthetic appreciation of nature with environmental wisdom and
virtue.

III

The task, then, in this final part of the talk, is to explore some
strategies of alignment. How might aesthetic experience of the natural
world be enhanced or transformed so as to integrate with a responsible
environmentalism? Two strategies are based on the plausible assumption that
an understanding by people of what they are experiencing typically enhances
their appreciation and enjoyment of it. This is true, surely, in the case
of art appreciation. Understanding the aims of artists, the context in
which they work, the traditions to which they belong contributes to a
fuller appraisal of their works. But it is true, as well, in the case of
the appreciation of natural phenomena. This may be due to something
stressed in Buddhist texts – that people 'delight' and feel 'joy' in
'knowing and seeing things as they are' (yathābhūtañānadassana), and also,
importantly, in recognizing that they are doing so.
One type of understanding of natural places that can enhance
appreciation is similar to an aspect of the understanding of art-works.
Most natural places we encounter have histories that are closely
intertwined with the histories of human beings: to the informed observer,
even pristine looking landscapes display the marks of human habitation or
intervention. Understanding such histories may contribute to one's feel for
and enjoyment of places. It helps, for example, to know that those piles of
stone on the otherwise bare hilltops near my home in the north of England
are the ruins of Bronze Age settlements. An important component in
aesthetic appreciation is the exercise of imagination: one thing we enjoy
when encountering many works of art and natural places is the scope for the
imagination that these provide. And, in the case of landscapes, this scope
is enlarged by knowledge of the culture of peoples who once lived there.
Looking at the remnants of buildings on hilltops, I can try to imagine what
is was like for the men and women who once ate and slept in those
dwellings, and how the world looked, smelled and sounded to them.
A different kind of understanding that enhances aesthetic appreciation
of nature is provided by ecology, biology and related sciences. The odd
movements of a bird that I might otherwise ignore fall into place, engage
my attention and invite my admiration when I understand that they belong to
a complex mating ritual. The inconspicuous little flowers in an alpine
meadow, which might barely be noticed, have a poignancy and pathos for
those who recognize how, to have survived at all, the flowers struggled
through thick snow to reach the sunlight. The questions of how central
scientific knowledge is to aesthetic appreciation of nature, and of how
expert this knowledge needs to be, are disputed questions.10 But it would
hard to deny that, typically, our appreciation of natural things is
enhanced when, as we look at them, we grasp what is going on and how it is
that they are related to one another and to their wider environment. In
nature, as in art, the perception of harmony among elements, and between
these and the wholes to which the elements belong, is one that we enjoy and
value.
Understanding – whether it is cultural/historical or
scientific/ecological – contributes to aesthetic appreciation of nature
through promoting our engagement with it. When understanding is achieved,
things no longer pass us by as easily as they did. But it is not only
through understanding and knowledge that engagement with natural
environments is promoted. And a third strategy for aligning aesthetic
appreciation and environmental wisdom is to encourage some of these other
modes of engagement. Consider something as simple as walking. Wordsworth,
we saw, objected to trainloads of tourists marching through the Lake
District, but Wordsworth knew very well that it was by hiking through
valleys and climbing up hills that people - alert to everything around them
– best develop a sense of kinship with nature, and a sense that nature
matters. It has been suggested that a reason why, in developed countries,
people's experience of natural places has become 'flattened out' is the
motor car. 'I inhabit the landscape where I walk:', writes one author, 'my
relation to it is intimate … whereas from the car, landscape and road often
exist as obstacles'.11 So, simply to spend unhurried time in natural
environments, perceiving them not as obstacles to a journey, but as
opportunities for looking, reverie and reflection is itself an engagement
with nature that enhances appreciation.
This form of engagement will typically be, if not solitary, then
something undertaken with just a few friends or family. But there is
another kind of engagement, primarily with cultivated and built
environments – with 'human landscapes' - which involves whole communities.
In 1923, the modernist architect, Le Corbusier, built a number of houses –
'undecorated boxes with rectangular windows, flat roofs and bare walls' –
for some French factory workers. The workers hated these houses, and within
a few years – by adding shutters, growing flowers on the walls, and so on –
made them resemble the traditional cottages from which they had been moved
out.12 The lesson of this and many other architectural disasters in modern
times is that people are unlikely aesthetically to appreciate environments
which they themselves have had no part in shaping. On the contrary, the
places are likely to strike them as strange, alien, and 'foreign'. An
important strategy, therefore, for encouraging a community's appreciative
engagement with a cultivated or built environment – a new housing project,
say – is by involving members of the community straightaway in discussions
of design and planning. People will take more pride in the appearance of a
place for whose design and development they have had some responsibility.

So far, the strategies addressed are attempts, primarily, to enhance
people's aesthetic experience of environments through closer engagement
with them, whether through increased understanding of them, more physical
contact with them, or greater responsibility for shaping and caring for
them. I now turn, in conclusion, to two strategies that are, in a sense,
more ambitious, for they aim to transform or re-educate – not simply to
expand, enhance, or activate – aesthetic sensibilities to nature.
The first is to encourage what has been called 'aesthetic
disillusionment' with whatever is discovered to be environmentally damaging
or unsustainable. 'To appreciate genuinely destructive situations is to
approve of them', writes the philosopher who coined that expression: hence
if we can be got to disapprove of them, our aesthetic appreciation of them
will evaporate.13 Examples given include the sunsets one admires only until
realizing that they are produced by dangerous emissions from a factory,
effluence from which is also killing fish and plants in the local river.
This strategy, when articulated in the bald way I have just done, strikes
me as unrealistic, and perhaps confused. Surely a person's aesthetic
appreciation of a sunset – of the colours on the horizon, the effects on
the edges of the clouds overhead, and so on – cannot be reversed simply as
a result of discovering that these colours and effects have an
environmentally unacceptable cause. True, one may cease to 'approve' of
such sunsets occurring, but contrary to the author's claims, approval and
aesthetic appreciation are not the same thing.
There is, however, a suggestion related to the idea of 'aesthetic
disillusionment' that is more plausible. Consider the human face. It is
true, I think, that an otherwise ugly face can look beautiful because of
the compassion, say, or grace or humility that it expresses. Faces and
bodies can be beautiful because of the goodness, the virtues that they
embody or express. And the same applies, I suggest, to things, buildings
and natural phenomena. Think, for example, of hotels or university campuses
that are built in rural areas. Some of these not only do damage to the
natural environment, but look as if they do: stark, towering, gleaming, box-
like, they wear their incompatibility with their environment on the sleeve.
Others not only are, as far I know, 'environmentally friendly', but look
it. They express or embody their environmental virtues, and for that reason
invite and deserve aesthetic appreciation – the appreciation, at any rate,
of those whose tastes have been educated to harmonize with environmental
wisdom.
The second 'transformative' strategy is that of cultivating and
fostering the appreciation of a so-called 'higher beauty' – 'higher' in the
sense that it goes 'beyond', or 'above', the beauty that we contrast with
ugliness or plainness. Periodically – in Buddhist literature, for example,
but also in twentieth-century art criticism – hostility is often expressed
towards 'discriminative' beauty, the sort that we find only in some people
and things and distinguish from what is not beautiful. This discriminative
concern, it gets argued, reflects prejudices, self-interested desires, and
the like. And many environmentalists have attacked our familiar aesthetic
views of nature on the ground that they encourage discrimination against
certain landscapes, animals and eco-systems – those which are deemed ugly,
dull, or plain. These environmentalists sometimes go on to argue for what
they call a 'positive aesthetics', according to which everything in nature
is beautiful – or, at any rate, everything in nature can and should attract
appreciation.14
This strategy of 'positive aesthetics', like the previous one, strikes
me as unrealistic in the stark form just presented. Perhaps there are
Buddhist adepts who really can detach themselves so entirely from the
tastes that make the rest of us prefer to look at some things more than at
others – at birds flying, say, more than at carcasses rotting, or at
bubbling mountain streams more than at fetid, mosquito infested swamps.
But, as such examples suggest, the degree of detachment and neutrality is
beyond the reach of most of us, who must therefore continue to
'discriminate' the beautiful from the non-beautiful.
Still, there is a more modest approach, related to the 'positive
aesthetics' strategy, that is also more realistic. While few people could
achieve the total detachment required for all aesthetic discrimination to
evaporate, most of us are capable of greater detachment than we usually
exhibit from the prejudices, interests, conventions, fashions, and inertia
that our aesthetic judgements tend so often to reflect. Recall those
passages from Leonard Woolf's autobiography. The austere, largely
featureless, even melancholic places he came to admire were not ones that
would feature in any tourist brochure: a love for such places ran counter
not only to the fashions and conventions of nature appreciation, but to the
familiar predilections of most individuals. Woolf, in short, had to re-
educate his own aesthetic sensibility, to transform and not simply expand
the kind of aesthetic appreciation he had brought with him in his trunk
from England. There is not, I think, some single grand strategy for the re-
education of aesthetic sensibility, so that we come to appreciate
environments that might otherwise have depressed us or left us indifferent.
But in lots of little ways that, taken together, add up to something
significant, we can engage in this re-education – ways that range from
reading books like Woolf's to paying reflective attention to otherwise
neglected natural phenomena, from mindfulness and questioning of one's
indifference to certain environments to awareness of the power of fashion
in dictating popular tastes in landscapes, from talking to people who are
intimate with and love seemingly uninviting places to looking at paintings
by artists whose visions of the natural world are fresh and compelling.

There, then, are some suggested strategies – from promoting understanding
of the natural world to re-educating our sensibilities – for aligning
aesthetic appreciation with environmental concern and virtue. If those
strategies succeed, then aesthetic appreciation – patchy as its record may
have been in the history of environmentalism – is something that should be
taken seriously, not marginalized, by those whose remit it is to protect
and manage our environments.



Notes

1. Cited in Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2003, p. 233.

2. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1949, pp. 224-5. On Leopold and the other authors
mentioned in this paragraph, see Joy A. Palmer (ed.), Fifty Key Thinkers on
the Environment, London: Routledge, 2001.
3. For a classic statement of this diagnosis of our environmental ills,
see Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in his Basic
Writings , ed. D. Krell, New York: Harper & Row, 1996.

4. For a classic statement of this understanding of aesthetic experience,
see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. J. Meredith, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1954.

5. Growing, San Diego: Harvest, 1975, pp. 27, 34, & 78.

6. See Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty,
London: Abacus, 2000.

7. Cited in Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007, p.68.

8. For these and many other examples of an arguably baleful influence of
aesthetics on environmental policy, see Saito, op. cit, and Brady, op.
cit..

9. Marcia Muelder Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001, p.176.

10. For a balanced discussion of these questions, see Brady, op.cit.,
Chapter 4.

11. Pauline von Bonsdorff, 'Building and the Naturally Unplanned', in A.
Light and J. Smith (eds.), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005, p.79.

12. See Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness, London: Hamilton,
2006, pp.163-6.

13. Cheryl Foster, 'Aesthetic Disillusionment: Environment, Ethics, Art',
Environmental Values, 1, 1992, p.211.

14. For the 'positive aesthetics' proposal, see Allen Carlson, Aesthetics
and the Natural Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and
Architecture, London: Routledge, 2000.