Objectivity in Environmental Aesthetics

& Protection of the Environment

Ned HettingerCollege of Charleston

July 2006

The Worry:Natural beauty’s subjectivity & relativity make it unsuitable

for justifying environmental protection

Contrast John Muir’s description of a sunset:– “The sunset [was] glorious. To the east the water was a rose

lavender, the sky at the horizon blue, eight or ten degrees above a red purple. In the west gold and purple on horizontal bars of cloud, shading off into lilac. Islands dark purple.”

John Muir, Journal (1899)

With his contemporary Oscar Wilde’s:– "Nobody of any real culture . . . ever talks nowadays about the

beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. . . And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over- emphasized."

Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1889)

The Response

• Along with a pluralism of acceptable judgments about natural beauty come constraints that specify better and worse aesthetic responses to nature

• Such constraints provide sufficient objectivity for the aesthetics of nature to play an important role in environmental protection (i.e., aesthetic protectionism)

Beauty of the environment motivates environmental protection

Env. beauty matters to people

Magnificence of Live Oaks draped in Spanish Moss sprouting Resurrection Fern

Sprawl’s vulgarity

How aesthetically valuable is the Arctic Refuge?

• “Godforsaken mosquito-infested swamp shrouded in frozen darkness half the year”

Former Interior Secretary Gail Norton

• A place of “solitude, unmatched beauty, and grandeur”

Jimmy Carter

Aesthetic Protectionism

• Environmental beauty not only motivates but also provide significant justification for environmental protection

Worries about Aesthetic Protectionism

• Natural beauty is weak and trivial compared to utilitarian values used to protect the environment (such as health, recreation) or to exploit it (jobs, growth)

• Natural beauty counts for little in assessing how we should treat humans; why think it amounts to much in determining how we should treat the environment?

• Aesthetic value is anthropocentric and instrumental (it’s simply pleasurable experiences for humans) and the best defenses of nature should be intrinsic

Environmental aesthetics too subjective to help with

environmental protection?

• “If aesthetic value judgments are merely personal and subjective, there will be no way to argue that everyone ought to learn to appreciate or regard natural beauty as worthy of preservation.”

Janna Thompson, "Aesthetics and the Value of Nature" Environmental Ethics (1995)

Environmental aesthetic

• Great aesthetic value lost when– Tranquil, tree-lined roads

punctuated by farmhouses, small fields, and ponds

– Symbolic of human harmony with nature

• Are replaced with – Aggressive, strip-highway

sprawl of auto dealers, gas stations, and parking lots

– Symbolic of our society’s careless exploitation and disregard of the natural world

• Better slide for MT

Development aesthetic

• Great aesthetic value is gained when – When monotonous and

boring, weed-infested dirt roads

• Are replaced with – Useful and well-built stores– That express and reward

hard work, determination, and entrepreneurial ingenuity

If beauty in the eye of the beholder

• How can aesthetics help us adjudicate between developers who like strip malls and environmentalists who don’t?

• W/o some objectivity, aesthetic responses to environment would be a poor basis for environmental protection.

Carlson’s Science-Based Objectivity

• The leading model for environmental aesthetic objectivity is Allen Carlson’s– He provides for objectivity by arguing

that:

o Aesthetic appreciation of nature must respond to what nature is (rather than what it is not)

o Because science tell us what nature iso Aesthetic appreciation of nature must be

informed by science (or more broadly natural history)

o Just as aesthetic response to art must be informed by art history

o Because science is objective, an env. aesthetics informed by science will also be objective

Carlson’s monism

• Carlson frequently characterizes his view thus:– The “appropriate” or “correct” or “true”

aesthetic appreciation of nature must be guided by science

– Aesthetic responses to nature uninformed by science or natural history are therefore “inappropriate,” “incorrect,” or even “false”

Resistance to Carlson’s scientific monism

• Not plausible that acceptable nature appreciation must be guided by science– Rather than by other sorts of cognitive, emotional or

imaginative responses

• Nor is it helpful to limit our assessment of aesthetic judgments about nature to the language of – “Correct or incorrect” – “True or false” – “Appropriate or inappropriate”

A scientifically uniformed aesthetic response need not be

unacceptable

– A child or a uneducated adult may not know that a glacier is a river of ice, but there is nothing incorrect, false, or even inappropriate about their being wowed by the sight of a calving glacier

Yet informed responses are often better responses

• Knowledge about the nature of glaciers can deepen our response to them

• For example, we might begin to listen and hear the groaning of the ice as it scrapes down the valley

I propose a

Constrained PluralismIn Env. Aesthetics

• There are a plurality of better and worse aesthetic responses to environment

• Better and worse should be understood in a variety of ways

• Not just correct/incorrect, true/false, appropriate/inappropriate

• Most plausible type of objectivity

• Hopefully, it provides sufficient objectivity to make aesthetic protectionism viable

Constrained pluralism falls between extremes about objectivity/subjectivity

• Naïve monism:

– There are uniquely correct and appropriate aesthetic responses to environment

• Anything-goes subjectivism: – Any aesthetic

response to environment is as good as any other

Virtually everybody in env. aesthetics distinguishes between better and worse

responses• True of thinkers with drastically divergent approaches to

aesthetics

– Science-based (cognitive) theories like Allen Carlson’s

– Emotional-arousal theorists like Noel Carroll

– Imagination-based theorists like Emily Brady

– A good source: Ronald Hepburn’s "Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (1993)

Varieties of better and worse aesthetic responses

• Deep• Multisensuous• Lively, active

• Discriminating• Attentive• Mature• Unbiased• Patient, careful• Perceptive• Thoughtful, reflective • Knowledgeable• Experienced

• Superficial, Shallow• Ocular-centric• Feeble, lazy, passive

– Including perceptually passive• Undiscriminating • Inattentive, inappropriately attentive• Immature• Biased• Hasty• Confused • Unthinking• Ignorant, distorted• Inexperienced

Doubts about the objectivity of environmental appreciation

• Nature appreciation lacks the objectivity of art appreciation

• Art appreciation is much more objective than nature appreciation

• An initially plausible and relatively popular idea in the philosophy of art – Held by—among others:

• Malcolm Budd• John Fisher• Kendall Walton

• I have my doubts about this claim

Fisher’s relativism about environmental aesthetics

• “A great mountain, Mt. Fuji or the Grand Teton, would probably strike us as noble and strong . . . , but it is perfectly conceivable that it might strike an observer from an alien culture as comical or agonized. In the case of a natural object, such as a mountain, such relativity of perception is no real problem, because the mountain itself isn’t really noble or comical. We can only say that there are different ways to regard the mountain. . . . There is no real fact of the matter about whether Mount Fuji is noble or comical. . . .”

Fisher on art’s objectivity

• “It is harder to swallow such relativism when it comes to the expressive properties of art. . . . What I am suggesting is that the emotional qualities that artworks express are not dispensable facts about them, although the emotional qualities are dispensable facts about natural objects.”

• Edvard Munch’s The Scream is truly frightening . . . The fact that The Scream might strike a viewer from another culture as cheerful should not make us think that The Scream is a cheerful painting. . . .

John Fisher, Reflecting on Art (1993)

The typical argument:

• The constraints on art appreciation provided by artistic design and social convention are absent in nature appreciation

– Natural beauty lacks an artist whose design and intentions put limits on appropriate appreciation

• E.g., Cubist paintings are not intended to be judged in terms of their representational accuracy

• In contrast, nature does not intend you to appreciate it one way or another

– Additionally, there are no social conventions for the appreciation of nature as there are for art appreciation

• E.g., One should ignore the coughing during a concert, but one can choose whether or not to make the sound of a distant train part of environmental appreciation

• E.g., Words in literature have a meaning dictated by convention, but whatever meaning nature has (if any) is created by the individual

• Further, there are no nature critics in the mold of art critics

Fisher on sounds of nature:"What The Hills Are Alive With--In Defense of the Sounds of Nature“ (1998)

• “The person who listens to nature is simply free of the criteria that govern appreciation of music and that function to rule out many possible ways of listening”

• “Suppose you are sitting in a hot tub in a city in the Arizona desert listening to the sounds around you. Do you just listen to the Western Warblers and the wind in the fruit and palm trees or do you (should you) also notice the sounds of hot tub jets and popping bubbles making a pleasant hissing on the water? Do you add or ignore the sounds of ventilator fans spinning hot air from the attics and occasional jet planes overhead? . . . In the Tuscan countryside do I ignore the high pitched whining of mosquitoes? Shall I just focus on the loons from across the lake in Minnesota or shall I strain to hear others from more distant parts, and do they go together with the chattering of squirrels and the buzzing of flies?”

• “Nature does not dictate an intrinsically correct way to frame its sounds in the way that a composer does . . . There are a large multiplicity of structures and relations that we might hear and all seem equally legitimate.”

Budd generalizes this point

– “The aesthetic appreciation of nature is . . . endowed with a freedom denied to artistic appreciation”

Malcolm Budd, “The Aesthetics of Nature” (2000)

Freedom and relativity in framing nature appreciation

• Fisher and Budd suggest that nature appreciation—unlike art appreciation--involves full framing freedom

• Unlike art, where the artist (or art category) frames the aesthetic object, how to frame the aesthetic experience of nature is up to us

• E.g., One doesn’t look at the backside of a painting or knock it to see how it sounds

• But these are perfectly permissible approaches to appreciating a tree

Budd argues that

• No proper level of observation for nature• One can look at nature though a telescope or a microscope, or with

one’s unaided eye

• No proper or optimum conditions for observation• One can observe nature when it is foggy or clear, bright or dark,

from near or far

• Permissible to use any sense modality or mode of perception

• Can choose to look, hear, touch, taste, or smell nature

• In general, we are free to frame and appreciate natural objects as we please

Full framing freedom?

• Budd overstates the freedom involved

• There are constraints on framing nature appreciation

• Once one has settled on a particular natural object as the object of aesthetic attention

• Many other framing choices are ruled out

Constraints on framing of nature

– One should not appreciate trout in a mountain stream with a telescope or microscope

• So there are better and worse levels of observation in particular cases

– Aesthetically appreciating a cliff is not best done from an airplane six miles high or in one’s Winnebago on a pitch black night

• Thus there are better and worse conditions of observation

– Are we really free to use any sense modality in appreciating a mountain?

• Taste? Touch?

Framing pluralism exists• Environmental appreciation does have greater framing freedom than art• Artists and art forms direct our attention to properties of the aesthetic object in a way

nature does not

But some pluralism need not be a problem for aesthetic protectionism

• The aesthetic freedom to– Focuses on one loon or forty, or to listen to wind in the trees alone or along with

warblers• Seems irrelevant to the possibility of using environmental beauty for environmental

protection

• Whether I look at mountain – Through the fog in the early morning light – During the middle of the afternoon on a perfectly clear day– Or instead focus on the smell of the mountain’s spruce trees after the rain or

savor the taste of its wild huckleberries • Does not seem a threat to aesthetic protectionism

Some pluralism might even support aesthetic protectionism

• When the multiplicity of acceptable ways to appreciation nature are virtually all aesthetically positive

• And when such responses are of greater aesthetic value than the aesthetic responses to degraded environments

But other framing pluralism creates trouble for aesthetic protectionism

• Consider whether or not human intrusions should be included in environmental appreciative judgments

Snowmobiles in Yellowstone?

An appropriate and compatible winter use?

Race track next to Cypress Swamp Nature Preserve?

Helicopter/airplane flights over National Parks

Houses on ridge tops

Environmental vs. anti-env. framing

• Environmentalists: Engine noise degrades natural tranquility

• But if framing choice is arbitrary

• Anti-environmentalists can argue that such sounds can be framed out of the experience:– The Yellowstone skier can be asked to frame out the stench and whine

of snowmobiles– The developer can ask those on the Beidler Forest owl walk to ignore

the sounds of the nearby Friday night races– Hikers in the National Parks can tune out the aircraft noise– The developer can ask those hiking in the forest to ignore the trophy

homes on the ridge tops

• And if there are no better or worse ways to frame these aesthetic experiences, why shouldn’t they?

An overall aesthetic assessment must include these sounds, smells, and

sights• Fitting and natural to include--and even to focus on--these sensual

properties

• To ignore them would be like standing in the Snake River Valley of Wyoming and refusing to look up to the West:

– Not a serious attempt to aesthetically appreciate Grand Teton National Park

• Aesthetic judgments about environments that frame out human intrusions similarly distort

– A developer who insists that putting a sky scraper in the Snake River Valley will not detract from the aesthetic beauty of the valley and neighboring Teton Park because it can be easily framed out

– Relies on a mistaken conception of how free framing choices in environmental appreciation can legitimately be

– Like a symphony companion saying: “Don’t worry about that foul smell or machine-gun fire outside, just listen to the music”

Some framing decision are more natural, fitting and appropriate

(given circumstances)

• “Certain natural expanses have natural frames or what I prefer to call nature closure: caves, copses, grottoes, clearings, arbors, valleys, etc. And other natural expanses, though lacking frames have features that are naturally salient for human organisms -- i.e., they have features such as moving water, bright illumination, etc., that draw our attention instinctually toward them”

– Noel Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature” (1993)

Consider scale-dependence of aesthetic response

• “The mountain that we appreciate for its majesty and stability is, on a different time-scale, as fluid as the ripples on the lake at its foot”

Ronald Hepburn, “Trivial and the Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (1993)

– But this should not make us think that the aesthetic qualities we enjoy in the mountain are not appropriately appreciable.

• Clear-cuts are a paradigm of environmental-aesthetic disvalue, but if one scales up, they are temporary blips in an ongoing and aesthetically-exciting process of forest recovery– But this should not lead us to agree with the forest-industry executive

that they are not ugly because we should adopt the 200 year scale

• Aesthetic qualities can be made to vanish and aesthetic judgments can be undermined by taking a different perspective

• But this does not show that—from a particular perspective—any aesthetic responses is as good as any other

• Nor should we accept the idea that any perspective is as appropriate as any other

Some framing of env. appreciation is awkward, forced, and myopic

• Given the kind of beings we are• Scales on which we operate• Legitimate purposes of aesthetic appreciation

• Some ways of framing environmental appreciation are not acceptable– Including the anti-environmentalists demand

• To frame out human intrusions• To appreciate nature form irrelevant or distorted scales

Not denying some relativity in aesthetic value judgments

• “One person finds the “coo coo” sounds of a flock of doves to be extremely harmonious and to express a soothing calm; a friend may find the same sound to be insistently obtrusive” (Fisher)

• Perhaps the Grand Tetons will appear puny rather than majestic to someone who grew up in the Himalayas or comical to one contemplating the meaning of the French word ‘teton’

• The sound of an approaching snow mobile may well be soothing--rather than obnoxious--if one is lying hypothermic in the snow waiting for help, or if one is the owner of a snowmobile rental business threatened by a proposed ban on snowmobiles in national parks

Clear cuts may not appear to be eyesores to those who hunt the deer feeding off the new growth or to the logger who cut the

trees

Resources to constrain aesthetic appreciation of environment

• I now turn from doubts about objectivity in env. appreciation to factors that help with such objectivity and with aesthetic protectionism

• (1) Cognitive factors

• (2) Objectivity in emotional responses to nature

• (3) Disinterestedness of aesthetic responses

(1) Cognitive factors as constraints on environmental aesthetic response

• For example:– Sometimes there are correct and incorrect categories

with which to appreciate natural objects and they help distinguish appropriate from inappropriate aesthetic responses

Cute woodchuck or massive, awe inspiring rat?

• Which aesthetic qualities are appropriate –is it massive and awe-inspiring or is it cute?--depends on correctly categorizing the object

Spectacular full moon or obnoxious satellite dish?

• Amazing lime green creek or revolting mine runoff?

Information about environment can improve our aesthetic responses

• For example, knowing that one has encountered an ivory billed woodpecker thought to be extinct until recently, enhances and deepens one’s aesthetic response

• Lacking information about the env. can impoverish our aesthetic response to it

Are Swamps Yucky?

• A negative aesthetic response to swamps based on a stereotyped and ignorant belief that they are bug-infested wastelands

• Unacceptable because the aesthetic attitude rests on false beliefs about swamps

False beliefs don’t necessarily disqualify an aesthetic response

– “I may be excited by the grandeur of a blue whale. I may be moved by its size, its force, and the amount of water it displaces, etc., but I may think that it is a fish. Nevertheless my being moved by the grandeur of the blue whale is not inappropriate.”

– Noel Carroll, “On Being Moved By Nature” (1993)

• But this aesthetic response remains appropriate only because the false beliefs have no bearing on the aesthetic response

• When false beliefs affect an aesthetic response, as in some of the above cases, they do undermine that response

Judgment about whether the trans-Alaska pipeline enhances or detracts from Alaska’s beauty needs to be informed by knowledge of the environmental and social impacts of our society’s oil addiction

More generally, knowledge of environmental problems should inform environmental aesthetic appreciation

• In a world where human dominance over nature was not so extensive, perhaps the sight of an 800 mile-long pipeline through wild lands need not be appalling

• But in today’s world--at least for those informed and properly appreciative of the massive human impact on the planet--the appropriate response to these types of human intrusions in nature should not be positive

No apartheid for aesthetics

• These points depend on rejecting formalistic and other narrow conceptions of aesthetic experience

• Aesthetics is not separate from the rest of life, and this means that there is no strict separation of aesthetics, ethics, and cognition

Are cognitive approaches best for aesthetic protectionism?

• Marcia Eaton thinks they are

• She identifies numerous flawed environmental policies that are based on ecologically-ignorant appreciative responses– For example:

• The sentimental Bambi-image of deer as sweet and innocent ignores the ecological devastation they can cause and this makes it hard for forest managers to convince the public of the need to reduce deer populations

Forest fires have been prevented in part because blackened forests strike

people as ugly, with the result that fire-adapted species are dying out and many forests are tinder boxes

• “As long as people want large, green, closely mowed yards no matter what the climate or soil or water conditions, they will continue to use polluting gasoline mowers and a toxic cocktail of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.”

Marcia Eaton, “Professional Aesthetics and Environmental Reform”

• Presumably they would not find these lawns so appealing once they consider their ecological consequences.

Cognitive approach to environmental aesthetics is a

double-edged sword

• Insisting that aesthetic responses to nature be informed by correct environmental knowledge can also lead to environmentally harmful behavior

• Some popular--but fallacious--ecological ideas are often environmentally beneficial

• Claims about – Deep interconnections in nature– Nature’s delicate balance – Are significantly overstated but quite useful for environmental

protection

• Thus insuring that one’s aesthetic responses to nature are informed by scientific facts will not necessarily contribute to aesthetic protectionism.

(2) Objectivity in emotional responses to nature

• Noel Carroll argues that objectivity is possible not only in a knowledge-based environmental aesthetic, but also for one based on emotional arousal

• Just as it is inappropriate – To be amused when a dog is hit by a car– To dance gaily to somber music

• So it is inappropriate – To be bored by a thundering waterfall crashing down

on one’s head – To be soothed by the hum of snowmobiles

Better and worse emotional responses to environment

• Emotions are underpinned by beliefs and have more or less appropriate objects

• For those properly sensitive to the massive, harmful human impacts on the planet– Sounds of chainsaws will alarm – Belching smokestacks will disgust – Pollution sunsets will not strike them as appealing

Positive emotional responses to environmental degradation

– Glee at the sight of a polluted river and the smell of its dead fish

– Satisfaction from seeing trophy homes on top of mountain ridges

• Manifests ignorance about the human impact on the planet, a skewed emotional constitution, or blinding self-interest

(3) Disinterestedness and positive aesthetic responses to environmental

degradation

• Many argue that aesthetic appreciation requires disinterestedness – A freeing of the mind from self-interested and

instrumental attention toward the aesthetic object

• E.g.: If we react favorably to a play because we stand to make a lot of money from it, this is not an aesthetic response to the play– Because it is not properly disinterested

Positive responses to env. degradation are often self-interest and thus not properly aesthetic

• Clear-cuts may appear attractive to loggers or forestry executives

• Snowmobiles in the wilderness may sound harmonious to someone for whom it means more business or perhaps soothing to a person lying hurt and in need of evacuation

• But such responses are so infused with self-interest as to be disqualified from disinterested aesthetic response

• The “developer’s aesthetic” mentioned at the beginning may not be an aesthetic at all

Conclusions

• Environmental aesthetics should play an important role in environmental protection

• Aesthetic relativity and subjectivity do not cripple such a project

• Legitimate pluralism and relativity in responses to environmental beauty do not prevent distinguishing between better and worse aesthetic responses

• Env. aesthetics contains numerous resources for objectivity that allow it to play a useful role in environmental protection

Follow are hyperlink slides

Natural Beauty only a tie-breaker?

“An attempt to justify a ban on logging in the Pacific Northwest’s remaining old-growth forests solely in terms of these forests’ special beauty would be on very shaky ground if the ban would cause economic dislocation of thousands of loggers and mill workers….Only in this context (i.e., other things being equal) [do] aesthetic considerations seem compelling.”

Gary Varner, In Nature’s Interests (1998)

“If a doctor had to choose between giving one of two patients a heart, she could not justify her decision by saying that one of the patients was more beautiful than the other . . . But if a doctor cannot make a decision regarding who gets a heart based on aesthetics, how can environmentalists ask thousands of loggers to give up their jobs and way of life on the basis of aesthetics?”

Rob Loftis, “Three Problems for the Aesthetic Foundations of Environmental Ethics” (2003)

• A guide in Lewis and Clark Caverns kept introducing the stalagmites as Disney characters:

“Look there’s Pinocchio’s nose”

• Such responses are superficial, irrelevant and distracting

“Scenery Cult” as Shallow Nature Appreciation

• Well-developed literature criticizing the inability of many to appreciate unscenic nature

– An aesthetic vice• Scenery cult: Appreciating only

nature’s dramatic landscapes – A trip to the national park involves

driving though the park, stopping at scenic viewpoints for snap shots and the gift shop for postcards of the scenery

• A lazy appreciation interested only in “easy beauty,” the “picturesque,” and in visual appreciation rather than deeper, multi-sensuous engagement

Stereotyped responses are worse

“Ah, look, it’s Bambi!

Isn’t she cute?”

Multisensuous and active

• Contrast appreciating a mountain lake by:– Gazing from the shore

or

– Going for a swim

• Consider watching a storm through a window or appreciating the storm while outside

Self-indulgent responses are worse

• “Look at the rainbow placed here for me!”

Responses that distort, ignore or suppress important truths about the objects of

appreciation

Consider the romanticized view of wolves that ignores their predatory lifestyle

John Donne on mountains

• God originally made the world a smooth sphere but then warped it in punishment for human sins

• His aesthetic judgment:– “Warts, and pock-

holes in the face of the earth”

• Following are slides that are extra and cut from earlier versions of the presentation

Carlson’s view that aesthetic appreciation of humanized

environments should focus on their functionality

• If environmentalists are right that many human env. are unsustainable hence dysfunctional

• Then on Carlson’s account of aesthetic appreciation of human envs, such environments are aesthetically negative

Carlson 2

• Thus sustainable developed human environments or undeveloped nature (assuming one holds some version of positive aesthetics)

• Are to be preferred aesthetically to typical human environments that are not sustainable

• Note that the issue of the functionality of human environments has significant dimensions of objectivity

Slides to insert

– Westvaco pollution slide– Beach rip rap slides– I of p house in marsh

Cuts

• If items in nature (trees, countryside, wilderness) were of low or negative aesthetic value, both practice of and justification for of environmental protection would be far weaker– Show pict of trash

• Clear cuts, strip mines, toxic waste dumps, spewing sewage pipes, fish belly-up in the creeks, belching smokestacks, urban blight, junkyards, billboards, tacky neon strip-developments, and suburban sprawl.

Objections to Carlson

• One might object to a number of features of this view:– Carlson’s cognitivism (the idea that aesthetic appreciation

involves thought, knowledge, and understanding) is controversial

• Carroll argues that uniformed emotional arousal is an appropriate type of aesthetic app

– Carlson’s idea that only science can provide the understanding of nature needed for aesthetic appreciation of it is also open to challenge

• ?To use an example from the literature• ?If I do not know that a whale is a mammal rather than a giant fish, my

awe at its size need not be an “incorrect” or “false” aesthetic response

Scenery cult

– There is a well developed literature criticizing the idea that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is appropriately limited to the, as if seeing nature from ready-made viewpoints (i.e., getting out of one’s car only at highway pullovers) was a serious way of appreciating the Natural Parks or nature in general.

– Ignoring (or worse) being unable to appreciate “unscenic” nature is an aesthetic vice

– A lazy response interested only in “easy beauty”– Pict of scenic versus unscenic nature?

Paul Bunyon example? Here or later?

Fisher

• “Suppose you are sitting in a hot tub in a city in the Arizona desert listening to the sounds around you. Do you just listen to the Western Warblers and the wind in the fruit and palm trees or do you (should you) also notice the sounds of hot tub jets and popping bubbles making a pleasant hissing on the water? Do you add or ignore the sounds of ventilator fans spinning hot air from the attics and occasional jet planes overhead? At Niagara Falls do I strain to hear birds in the forest over the constant roar of the water. . . . In the Tuscan countryside do I ignore the high pitched whining of mosquitoes? Shall I just focus on the loons from across the lake in Minnesota or shall I strain to hear others from more distant parts, and do they go together with the chattering of squirrels and the buzzing of flies?”

Drop slide: Permissible to frame out human intrusions?

• For above: Brady's multi-sensuous engagement– Add

• Sound of snowmobile (sound too?)• Teton valley with building superimposed on it? • Scale up to see clear-cuts from a 200 year time

scale• Carroll’s Teton large scale example; not large

scale when compared with the universe

Godlovitch

•The idea that certain framing decision in environmental aesthetic appreciation are more natural and fitting given the human constitution and our legitimate purposes also allows for a response to Stan Godlovitch’s idea that traditional human aesthetic response to nature is sensually parochial and that the temporal and spacial scale dependence of our aesthetic response to nature are arbitrary

Godlovitch’s relativity

• Smashing ice blocks heaved up by a river should be seen as no less aesthetically offensive than bulldozing the Navaho Sandstone Castles of Monument Valley, Arizona

• “If we were giants, crushing a rock monument . . . would be no more aesthetically offensive than is flattening the odd sand castle is to us now. If our lives were measured in seconds, then shattering ice blocks would count as momentously coarse as using Bryce Canyon as a landfill” (p. 18)

Hh

• Delete next two bullets? • Much as it is inappropriate to find it humorous

when a dog is hit by a car, so to it is inappropriate to positively respond to human intrusions into wild nature.

• Such a response is likely to manifest ignorance about the human impact on the planet, a skewed emotional constitution, or such strong self-interest as to blind one’s aesthetic responses (or to disqualify them)

Resistance to Carlson’s scientific monism

• Not plausible that there is only one appropriate, correct, or true way to appreciate nature or natural objects

• Nor is it plausible that if knowledge of natural history fails to inform an env. aesthetic response, it becomes inappropriate, incorrect or false

Avoid the false dilemma

• One true or correct or appropriate way to appreciate nature

• Any appreciation of nature is as good as any other

• There are a plurality of better and worse ways to appreciate nature

• Is such a pluralistic objectivity sufficient for aesthetic protectionism?• Seems repetitive?• Yes so I removed to end.

Intentional design adds complexity that may increase pluralism

• Removed slide:• Design can constrain appreciative responses but also:

– Open avenues for interpretation – And enable additional types of appreciative responses

• Consider a sand sculpture produced by an artist and the same pattern produced by nature – May be a greater diversity in appropriate responses to the former than

to the latter– The sand sculpture has multiple meanings that the natural pattern of

sand would not have– Debates about what the artist was communicating and the relations of

this sand sculpture to other sculptures are examples of complicating factors

• Art appreciation can be more complex and thus allow for a greater plurality and flexibility in the appropriate types of aesthetic response

Glenn Parsons thinks not: “Freedom and Objectivity in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (2006) f

“Smell, touch and taste require close proximity and mountains are generally not the sort of things we ca

feel or taste”

So far I have argued:

• It is not clear that aesthetic of nature is less objective than aesthetic of art

• There are a plurality of better and worse aesthetic response to nature, even though there is not one best or appropriate type of response– Some relativity in aesthetic value judgments must be

acknowledged

• That framing freedom in nature appreciation has limits and that there are more or less appropriate ways to frame environmental appreciation

Types of objectivity• What objectivity is and is not• Brady: Not true, but reasonable, justifiable, communicable• Parson: Correct, true

• Add Parson paper quotes?– Carlson: true also?

• Objectivity: Letting object be the guide rather than the subject– Berleant: Subject's emotions, beliefs, and memories determine aes

response/judgment as much as does the env. appreciated.• Subject could be guide if we all agreed and this allow for aes

protectionism– Saito’s appreciating nature on its own terms

• Letting nature speak for itself; tell its own story– Carlson: guided by the object– Kind of objectivity I want is kind where we get judgments that

these aes responses are more rational and appropriate than others.

• Epistemic determinism or at least constraint

– is constrained by While there are a plurality of acceptable aesthetic responses

– Develop a position in between monistic objectivism and anything-goes subjectivism that allows for a plurality of better and worse aesthetic responses

• Arguments for subjectivity (and responses)• Lack of artistic design constraints

– Or audience conventions?• Framing freedom

• Constraints on the plurality of aesthetic appreciations of nature

• Cognitive– Limitations for env. protectionism

• Objectivity of affective response• Disinterestedness

• “Given the centrality of the duties of beneficence and nonmaleficence to our shared conceptions of morality, it is difficult to see how these prima facie duties [to protect natural beauty] could override duties generated by the existence of interests.”

• For example, an attempt to justify a ban on logging in the Pacific Northwest’s remaining old-growth forests solely in terms of these forests’ special beauty would be on very shaky ground if the ban would cause economic dislocation of thousands of loggers and mill workers….Only in this context (i.e., other things being equal) that aesthetic considerations seem compelling.”

Gary Varner, In Nature’s Interests

Lots of agreement

• Like in ethics, in aes disagreement is often overemphasized

• Would we take seriously the assertion that grand canyon or Sistine chapel was ugly– Eukletna lake slide

• But for the disa that exists, see below (why argue if like taste?)

• Also, Brady’s reasons to explain this disagreement and how it could be resolved

Brady: Why argue about aes judgments if mere taste, personal

preference• Contrast with mere personal pref

examples, like taste of coffee or favorite color

Donne mountain pock marks; correct-incorrect

• Use with cubists works in 1913 judged to be crude and aes worthless grounded on standards for representational paintings.

• Incoherent, incomplete, crude, messy

Relativism undermine worth/value of nature appreciation (compared to

art)• Superficiality problem• And this matters for aes protectionism, because if this is not serious nor

worthy, it can’t provide much value for protecting the env.– Dif from point that it can’t guide env. Decisions because all is relative and no

better/worse answer• But I’m now wondering what lack of worth/seriousness has to do with

relativism? Need to make this case• Is nature app “possess a seriousness and worth approaching art app?”

Parsons 28• Donne: Second rate Turner quote: Nature’s aes value is weak/trivial• Going to a art gallery or the concert is a more serious, deeper, more

valuable aes experience than is going for a walk in the woods.• Nature app is just not as worthwhile as art appreciation• What to make critical discourse possible• Need to have “responsible criticism and discourse” fisher• But Fisher and Budd turn lack of objectivity in nature app into a virtue; gives

us more freedom and responsibility, creativity, richer