The Last Refuge Of The Unquantifiable:
Aesthetics, Experience And Environmentalism
Michael Hannis
"To reassert the place of the aesthetic in experience is to recognise the preeminence of the immediate. It is to realise that we live first and foremost in an extended present, which is the primary reality. And the quality of that present should be our greatest concern." (Berleant 1992, p. 187) 
On arrival in a place, whether it is an ancient forest or a supermarket car park, an aesthetic response of some sort will follow quickly on the heels of our initial physical perception of our surroundings. We may find them beautiful, ugly, awesome, bland, inviting, or repugnant, among innumerable other possibilities. This response may be an intense experience, or it may be scarcely noticeable; it may not remain constant; nevertheless it provides a valuable barometer of how we feel about what is around us, whether it be "natural" or "artificial". These are evaluative responses, involuntary qualitative judgements which lead us to take a certain attitude towards what we perceive, which in turn may guide or suggest action. 
By contrast, judgements of, for example, size, position or (more controversially) colour are non-evaluative; we experience them as the discovery of "objective" quantitative facts about the world. They do not require us to take any particular attitude towards what we perceive. If I say that a tree is a hundred years old, or a hundred feet high, I am not saying anything about my attitudes, nor am I saying anything which, on its own, makes me likely to take or avoid any particular action. If on the other hand I say that the tree is beautiful, this is a statement not only about the tree but about an attitude I hold towards it which may well result in my sitting under it, photographing it or arguing against chopping it down. On a personal experiential level, it is apparent that only these qualitative, "subjective" sorts of judgement can ultimately give rise to action. Judgements of fact, quantification, categorisation and identification give rise to action only contingently, in the context of a pre-existing evaluative framework. "X is the last rhino" only entails "save X" if we already hold "rhinos are valuable" (for whatever reason). 
Similarly, "this new road will lead to increased economic activity" only entails "build this new road" if we already hold that "increased economic activity is desirable / necessary for our well-being". This may seem obvious to the point of banality: yet in modern public "environmental" debate and decision-making the emphasis is firmly on objectivity; verifiable facts are the only universal currency, and underlying evaluative frameworks are rarely open to question. In this paper I aim to show, drawing on the methodology and theoretical insights of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, that this inevitably leads to an under-representation of the qualitative judgements, based on subjective experiences, which shape how we really feel and act in the world. 
I focus specifically on the aesthetic appreciation of landscape, taking aesthetic values as subjective in the sense that they inevitably involve something of the unique perceiving subject. I initially allow, despite possible metaphysical problems, that verifiable quantitative data can be objective in the conventional sense of being only about the object, but question the assumption that this quality privileges such data over subjective values in the decision-making process, and go on to suggest that in at least some contexts the subject / object distinction is itself untenable. I do not therefore attempt to defend any general idea of intrinsic value (in the sense of value independent of valuers), whether aesthetic or otherwise; such attempts, although tactically and intuitively attractive, seem to me to be an example of what I am arguing against, namely the attempted translation of a subjective experience into an objective fact in order to increase its status. This is not intended as a denial of the possibility of intrinsic value but an attempt to circumvent the metaphysical arguments about it by giving more weight to subjective experience of value. There can be no neat mathematical proof of the existence of intrinsic value; to wait for such proof is to fiddle while the world burns. 
Mary Midgley (in Chappell, ed., 1997, p.96) notes recent research (Craig, Glasser & Kempton 1993) indicating that senior environmental policy advisers to European governments "articulated deeply held personal environmental values [but told researchers that] they normally keep these values separate from their environmental policy activities." She comments: 
"The present position, in fact, is rather like what we would find in a ministry charged with running prisons if all humane talk about what life was like for the prisoners was banned and proposals for reform had always to be couched in terms of efficiency in preventing crime. This sort of indirectness is obviously misleading and wasteful." 
When even the environmental values of such powerful figures are scrupulously kept out of policy-making, those held by ordinary citizens are evidently left even further out in the cold; and they will stay there forever if their consideration remains dependent on proving their objectivity. Aesthetic values are some of the slipperiest and most subjective of all; but this does not justify ignoring them- they are directly personal and intuitive contributions to the urgent debate about what sort of world we want to live in. 
A world of value 
In dividing the world into human and non-human, Neil Evernden argues, we have turned nature into Nature, reinterpreted the real experienced world into a system of laws and measurements which the "behaving matter" that is not us must obey, and by which we can know, predict and control it (Evernden 1992). Such knowledge must be objective, must be knowledge only of the object, not of the perceiving subject; the distinction must be maintained in order for the system to work. We must not anthropomorphise Nature or empathise with it, for this would be to confuse the categories, to imagine that it is like us, which by definition it is not. With Galileo, said Husserl, began 
"..The surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experiencable- our everyday life-world." (quoted in Evernden 1992, p.61) 
This mathematical "modelling" of the world has of course been the foundation for all the spectacular predictive and explanatory successes of empirical science; and today's computer techniques continue to demonstrate its power. We have models of fantastic and ever-increasing complexity, representing everything from the human genome to the global climate "system"; no wonder we consider this to be the best way to gain knowledge. We seek to better "understand" the world (although "stand over" might be more accurate), and in order to do so, we constantly refine and develop our models of what is "out there". 
But any model is only as accurate as the data that goes into it; and if the model is to be of use to more than one person, then that data must not contain anything whose meaning is person-specific or "subjective". It must all be verifiable information about the object of enquiry- it must be objective. And mathematics is the paradigm case of objective knowledge. It is also the common language into which observations of the world must be translated in order to be mutually commensurable. Hence the need to quantify anything which is to go into the model, purging it of extraneous interpretation and rendering it susceptible to mathematical processing. 
This positivist epistemology has escaped from the laboratory and taken a firm hold on our wider social decision-making processes. As it both presupposes and maintains a strict human / Nature distinction, it is structurally incapable of accommodating any subjective experience of the natural world, since such experience cannot be effectively represented as objective quantitative data. As Joseph Grange says: 
"What is wrong with positivism is what it makes of the object facing us. It reduces this object to shape, extension and, where necessary, motion. This extreme quantification of place strips the world of Being and value. In place of a textured environment holding worth in itself, we are given a blank array of objects whose only significance lies in their measurability and observability." (Grange1989, in Seamon and Mugerauer 1989, p.76) 
The rise of "environmentalism" is due not only to concern over the "environmental crisis" but also to this fundamental discrepancy between the attitude towards the natural world inherent in prevalent economic and political practice and that reflected in personal experience. As Neil Evernden points out, the real agenda of many campaigners and activists is nothing less than the restoration of value to the non-human world; value which for many, and perhaps for all, was never really lost, but whose expression was repressed as it became socially illegitimate. The many persuasive theories about when and how it was lost in Eurocentric culture (see e.g. Evernden 1992 ch. 4) must be seen as such, not as positing or explaining some genuine deficiency in the human capacity to perceive it. For the world of our experience is not a mechanistic Cartesian collection of value-free objects, just as we do not genuinely perceive ourselves as pure detached points of consciousness. We experience emotion about, relation to, and connection with non-human realms continuously and from these, as well as from "sense-data", we construct our private pictures of "ourselves in the world". 
Yet in the field of public society as reflected in mainstream political, legal, and economic decision-making, the sacred principles of rationality and objectivity demand the ruthless separation of subject and object, of experience and observation, of fact and value. Noses stuck in the fine detail of our world of objects, we subdivide, quantify and model the earth, craving meaning but seeking it only, since Descartes, in the uncorrupted mind, not in the physical world of experience (Evernden 1993 p.85). Human constructs and concepts are the bearers of value and meaning in our science-orientated culture; observations of the world, data, may prove or disprove theories but it is the theories that gain meaning in the process. 
"As we are no longer in nature conceptually, purpose is no longer intermingled with the stars and the birds. With the great divorce between humanity and nature, purpose and all other species of willing came to reside with us: we have sole custody of these offspring and are pleased to regard them as the consequence of a virgin birth- perhaps the last miracle we have been able to accept." (Evernden 1992, p.30) 
Data is just data; one value-subtracted datum is much like another, apart from its vital quantitative component. 
"One million trees were cut down today": this fact can be entered into calculations of timber yield, profit or paper demand, or equally into calculations of climate change, soil erosion or smog generation, but it can never convey the majesty of the slain giants, the ugliness of the denuded land, the devastation of the dispossessed peoples of the forest or the passion of those who tried in vain to stop it happening. These phenomena are not data, they are what is stripped away in the process of making data; they cannot be expressed as mathematical formulae or analysed by statisticians because they are in the wrong language, they are not objective in the sense of objectification, separation, demarcation. They speak of a different world, a colourful world of subjectivity and emotion in which there is illicit experiential fraternisation between human and non-human, a world in which meaning and value can be ascribed to what is perceived, and indeed can be revealed through such perception. 
Inspectors at public enquiries listen politely to emotive testimonies about valued natural features and then quietly dismiss them as "subjective opinions". A community's love of a threatened landscape becomes "admissible evidence" only if it can be quantified; exactly how many people love it, and how much? (Evernden 1993 p.54) Only then can it be translated by "contingent valuation" into the acceptable form "how much it is worth to keep it". (Of course, once priced in this way, it is for sale: and when the benefits are shown to exceed the costs it will be swiftly sold.) 
Scientific ecology seems to offer a source of "hard facts" to use in defence of meadows and mountains, with its well-researched stories of obscure endangered species and disrupted ecosystems; but the process all too often comes full circle with the question "what is this ecosystem worth then?" The only really effective tactic is to challenge the carefully formulated facts and figures of the "developers"- and while environmental groups have become very adept at this, it is still rather akin to having to defend oneself in court in a foreign language with access to only half the evidence. 
But the problem with allowing such debates to be conducted only in terms of "objective facts", whether ecological or economic, is deeper than a tactical disadvantage. It commits environmentalists to precisely the view of the world which legitimises the actions they oppose: a dead, value-free world of resources. Evernden argues that this predicament is encapsulated in the universal adoption of the term "environment". 
The beginning of ''the environment''- and the end of ''the world" 
The insights of phenomenology, and of Merleau-Ponty in particular, have a special relevance to the "environmentalist" project of re-examining our attitudes to the natural world. They emphasise the importance of examining direct experience. But more than this, they give philosophical weight to the contention that "environmental awareness" is not an optional bolt-on extra to our modern mind-set, but necessarily entails a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between ourselves as conscious physical beings and the world in which we live. The first step in this reassessment is to affirm and accept that this relationship exists, permanently and irrevocably. 
"Not even Descartes can just think" (Evernden 1993 p.58)- even as he doubted everything he was breathing the air, his heart was beating and his stomach was digesting his last meal. Consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty, is "incarnate in a body and inhering in a world" (Langer 1989 p. xv); and it is the actions of those bodies in that world which have resulted in what we persist in calling "the environmental crisis". World includes us; environment by definition does not. To locate the crisis in "the environment" is to locate it outside ourselves, to see it as another intellectually challenging problem to be solved by tried and tested scientific method, and to deny that it is at least partly our crisis- a crisis in our way of being in the world. 
Environment signifies what is around something (environ)-meaning what is in the background, where the action isn't; what doesn't come under any of the categories of foreground objects or actors; in other words, "our environment" is what is not us. Often we speak of "The Environment"; in this case the unspoken object being "environed" is again us, humanity; the sense is the same. The, or our, environment is the totality of the non-human background to human activity. 
"Reform" environmentalism, as it is now piously embraced even by governments and corporations, when it goes beyond simply conserving resources for human use, could be said to aim at bringing this "background" out of the shadows and into the "foreground", in order to make it an object of care and concern. But this attempt to "attend to the frame instead of the picture" inevitably perpetuates the "us and it" separation which underlies the crisis and which, unless addressed, will continue to exacerbate it. Foregrounding "environment" necessarily backgrounds the only thing it can be contrasted with, namely humans and their activities, rather than examining the relationship between the two allegedly separate categories, which is where the problem really lies. The cynic might say that this explains the appeal of such a move to those who wish to appear "environmentally friendly" while continuing with "business as usual". 
"But environmentalism, in its deepest sense, is not about environment. It is not about things but relationships, not about beings but Being, not about world but the inseparability of self and circumstance. In talking about the mountain the environmentalist seems to be defending a physical entity. But implicitly and emotionally he or she protests the categorisation of 'mountain'- protests the isolation of portions of the world as things to defend or consume." (Evernden 1993 p.142) 
"Environment is not a life-world, but simply a surrounding. Indeed it is not a thing at all, but a statement of anthropocentricity: the planet, now expropriated as ours alone, is our surrounding, our environment."( ibid., p. 152) 
This is not to suggest that we charge into an abstract battle about terminology. The important thing to notice is that we will not get far with the project of reforming attitudes to the natural world by colluding in its dualist objectification. Uncovering and celebrating our continuity with the world is essential to learning to live well and sensitively within it, escaping our destructive detachment. Experience of such continuity is necessarily subjective- and its expression, whether in simple personal testimony or through the expressive arts, is not effectively translatable into objective data. What is inevitably lost in such translation is not only colour and depth but meaning. 
Aesthetics, democracy and the character of a place 
In order to avoid this loss we must resist the cultural imperative to translate this personal experience of meaning and value into an objectively measurable commodity. Of course this pressure is present only in certain contexts; our insatiable appetite for art and images of all kinds inspired by, and expressing, subjective experiences of the natural world is ample evidence of this. But art is art, we say, and facts are facts. In a decision-making context, we must have facts, not opinions. For opinions to be fairly considered, they must be translated into something measurable. There are, as I have already mentioned, attempts to translate the perceived value of natural features directly into monetary value by "contingent valuation", by literally asking people what they would be prepared to pay to keep a place intact. This bizarre and controversial practice is unsurprisingly fraught with difficulties.(cf. Clark 1995, in Guerrier et al. 1995; O'Neill 1993, ch. 7). 
But even where this is not attempted, there is a genuine problem about how to accommodate subjective experience in a process which values objectivity above all else. One basic principle which informs any attempt to do so is the democratic ideal; if the question at issue can be framed in a simple "yes or no" form, then people's opinions can be categorised into two camps and the "votes" counted. In practice this forms only a small part of, for instance, a planning enquiry; "other factors" can be held to outweigh public opinion as measured by the number of objectors to, for instance, Sizewell B. It might be argued that this is a large part of what is wrong with the process: decision-makers should listen more to "what people want" and less to the whispering voices of commercial and political interests. This is probably true-but it is not the whole story. Those "other factors" might, for instance, be the constraints of environmental protection legislation. Besides practical problems of political bias, counting votes is a woefully inadequate way to measure perceived value. 
Aesthetic judgements of nature, as I will presently argue, often contain disguised expressions of meaning and value. Arguing against quarry expansion, for instance, I want to say "this mountain is beautiful"; as someone who experiences the mountain as beautiful this is, to me, a meaningful statement about the beauty of the mountain, with a subtext about its value. But to someone else, who does not share my experience, it is effectively a statement about my opinion of the mountain. In a collective decision-making context, I am "casting my single vote in favour of categorising the mountain as beautiful". My qualitative judgement has been translated into a quantitative datum. Of course there is a sense in which that is all it can ever be; I cannot "speak for anyone but myself". I am simply exercising my democratic right to have my opinion considered along with everyone else's. Yet there seems to be something wrong with this. If ten other people now also find the mountain beautiful, that will not make me feel that it has become, or been revealed to be, more beautiful than it was before; and if fifteen can then be found who do not, that will not make me and my ten friends accept that we were "wrong". No decision has been reached on whether the mountain is beautiful. We have just been outvoted. This might not seem a significant worry in the hypothetical context, say, of deciding by committee on the wording of a guidebook, where what we democratically agree to say about the mountain is irrelevant to my future experience of it. I may encounter it again tomorrow and still find it beautiful, despite the committee's verdict. But if, tomorrow, the mountain has become a quarry because of that decision, worries about the inadequacy of the process by which the decision was reached will become very significant. 
In practice, outside acadaemia, the consideration of aesthetic value usually takes place in the context of "weighing it in the balance" against, in planning parlance, "other interests of acknowledged importance". Here whatever it is agreed to say about the beauty of a natural feature may have very direct effects on future experiences of it; the most usual situation is one in which the onus is on those who find it beautiful to convince the decision-maker(s) not to do or allow something which will destroy, or at least reduce, that beauty. Some form of quantification is essential: is it, or is it not, so beautiful that we should not build our much-needed road through it? As the bulldozers scrape off the living surface of the land whose beauty she fought for, the defeated "protester" may well reflect that her one vote did not really capture the essence of what she had to say. Lying down in front of them is an attempt to say more, to physically demonstrate the experiential truth that was lost in agreeing to answer the question, namely that beauty transcends economics. 
The "tyranny of the majority" problem is a well-known shortcoming of democratic systems in general, but in societies in which democracy is held to be the "least worst" system of social organisation, it is a shortcoming we live with, and attempt to compensate for by means of laws and conventions about the treatment of minorities and respect for dissenting views. 
But no amount of respect for the views of those who lose a battle to save a landscape will bring it back; there is no effective compensation for a lost place. Twyford Down, for instance, is long gone now; it was deemed to be in the interests of society, of the majority, to cut a monstrous trench through it to carry a motorway. How then could we compensate the alleged minority who disagreed with this decision, who feel that the loss of a valued place is not outweighed by a few minutes of "journey-time saving", or in many cases, that the two are not even commensurable? There is no way. The only possible slight compensation would be the glow of good citizenship that may come to the gracious loser of a fair and democratic judicial process; but when that process is perceived as deeply flawed or even corrupt, this is not available. The feelings of bitterness and injustice engendered by such cases are due in large measure to the dramatic and inevitable failure of the decision-making process to adequately consider the power and significance of subjective personal experience of place. Those who resort to direct action after "due process" has failed them tend to regard that process as being just as blind to the experiential reality of the place as the proposed construction activities. 
To suggest that the existence of other topographically or ecologically similar areas somehow mitigates the sense of loss is to miss the point, to ignore the essential uniqueness of a place, in terms not only of its geographical co-ordinates but of its character. All the feelings and aesthetic responses it typically evokes, all the mental images and memories of previous visits, all the folk history and myths associated with it, all the traces and stories of previous and current inhabitants, human and non-human, as well as the immediate sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures go to make up the character of a place; and it is this complete package which we value, and in which we find meaning. 
"Eric Dardel wrote that "a landscape is something more than a juxtaposition of picturesque details; it is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived- moment. There is an internal bond, an 'impression', that unites all its elements." The bond to which Dardel refers is one of human presence and concern; landscapes, therefore, take on the very character of human existence. They can be full of life, deathly dull, exhilarating, sad, joyful or pleasant."(Relph 1989, in Seamon and Mugerauer 1989, p.23) 
Australian aborigines whose sacred places have been literally destroyed by uranium mining are not placated by being told that "there's lots more desert like this all around here". Amazonian forest-dwellers will see their home area, cleared for timber and hamburgers, as very different from the apparently similar part of the shrinking jungle they end up in. The stories of places like Twyford are different only as a matter of degree. 
Even if we were to decide that we had made a terrible mistake at Twyford, and set about filling in the cutting and "reconstructing" the landscape, we could never in any meaningful sense undo what we have done- supposing for the sake of argument it were possible to "put it all back just how it was", we could not reconstruct its character, if only because part of that character was a quality of naturalness. This question of substitution is in itself a philosophical minefield which I do not propose to fully explore here-(see Katz 1992)- but I think it is safe to claim that the character of a place is irreplaceable. 
The character of a place is intimately connected with experience; it seems reasonable to claim that one cannot fully appreciate the character of a place without having physically been there. It thus undeniably has a subjective component- each person's experience is slightly different, and so each individual's story of the character of a place will be slightly different. But each will be tied to the same geographical location, as well as to the person, and there will usually be many more similarities than differences. Cultural factors will also tend to reduce the differences in experience between individuals within a given society- although there is always scope for a wide range of perfectly genuine responses, the person who finds an opencast mine beautiful, or feels no sense of mystery at the sight of Glastonbury Tor rising out of the mists, will probably find themselves outnumbered. 
So the character of a place is a real quality associated with that place, but is not susceptible to the complete and "objective" analysis that allows it to be quantified, measured and catalogued as a "resource" or commodity. There can be no decision-making equation of the form 
"1 unit of character = X units of time saved / money / electricity (etc)." 
Character thus defies "democratic" measurement by simple vote-counting, or by contingent valuation. The British planning system, to be fair, does to some extent recognise this and attempts to quantify it instead by "expert" designation, using primarily the notions of "natural heritage" and "areas of outstanding natural beauty". But neither of these is satisfactory. 
Heritage is something inherited, not something inherent: it is meaningless without an underpinning framework of property ownership and bloodline continuity. To extend the idea of the family silver to the landscape is to cast humanity in the role of aristocracy and nature in the role of our feudal estate. It inevitably makes the natural world an inventory of resources and amenities; while this may be a defensible way of categorising castles and cathedrals it can only ever underestimate the value of forests and mountains. 
"Areas of outstanding natural beauty" seems a more promising concept- but if some areas are outstanding, most must be "merely average" and some outstandingly unbeautiful. Perhaps this does reflect our experience- but to expect us all to agree with the "experts" as to which is which is asking too much. Part of the problem here is about the procedures and criteria of designation- but more fundamentally, privileging some areas in this way devalues the experience of others. Anyone arguing for the preservation of an undesignated site on grounds of its beauty will come up against the attitude that "while of course we respect your opinion, it can't be that beautiful or it would have been designated". In fact any system of expert designation shares this drawback. 
As well as these conceptual problems (both still rely on quantifying the unquantifiable) neither designation is effective in practice. As was seen at Newbury, AONB's are as vulnerable as SSSI's to the literal and metaphorical juggernauts of economic growth. Bath is not only a local or even national but a "World Heritage Site": but this did not stop the "Batheaston bypass" ploughing through Solsbury Hill. Nor did it help the City Council's failed bid to block the expansion of nearby Whatley quarry, which by lowering the water table in the surrounding hills may well stop the flow of water to the famous hot springs which gave the place not only its name but its raison d'etre. 
Character and beauty 
Although I have said above that the character of a place includes typical aesthetic responses to it, it is nevertheless true that when we speak colloquially of the beauty of a place, we are often in fact speaking about its character. There is a close analogy with people- when we speak of "a beautiful person" we do not simply mean that their body has a beautiful physical form. Even in the objectifying world of the "beauty contest", where the physical aspect of beauty is, in fact, paramount, the bikini-clad contestants have to proclaim that they like giving to charity and being kind to animals. This is to enable the promoters to claim that they have not departed from the popular idea of beauty as something more than physical appearance. Whether we believe them is irrelevant here: the fact that they make the claim is simply offered as evidence of the pervasiveness of the notion that beauty is more than "skin-deep". Something like this notion also applies to our perception of non-human beauty in, for instance, a landscape. 
(Confusion may arise here over the special sense in which we use the word "character" when speaking about people, to mean something like "personality"- an aggregate of specifically non-physical "characteristics" (even though we also speak of their "physical characteristics"). This is different from what I mean by the character of a place, which includes its physical attributes- although to the extent that a place has a personality its character would include that as well.) 
It might be objected that beauty, in aesthetics, is supposed to be connected with physical perception, not abstract knowledge. On this view, the popular sense of "a beautiful person" would be seen as a misuse, or more generously an alternative use, of the word "beautiful". If I say "the beauty of Buddhism is its compassion" then the word "beauty" is a long way from home; it is almost a metaphor- it just means "good quality". I do not physically perceive Buddhism, therefore technically I cannot judge it to be beautiful. But the case of the "beautiful person" is not like the case of "beautiful Buddhism". I do physically perceive people, and if I consider someone to be "a beautiful person", this may well increase the likelihood of my finding them physically beautiful. 
Knowledge, emotions and impressions about people have an effect on our aesthetic appreciation of them, just as knowledge about the genre and the artist have an effect on our aesthetic appreciation of a work of art. Equally our aesthetic appreciation of a place is informed by everything we feel, know and remember about it- almost inevitably, we judge its character, not only its physical appearance. And of course, my story of its character will be subtly different from yours. 
This is not to say that "aesthetics doesn't exist", that there is nothing genuine about the distinction between the aesthetic value of a place and the broader value of its continued existence as a repository of memories, associations and possible future use and enjoyment. Aesthetic value may be subjective but that does not make it imaginary. 
An aesthetic response is not reducible to a feeling of satisfaction at the possession of any resource, tangible or otherwise, and aesthetic value cannot therefore be considered as a type of "amenity value". Preserving a forest for its beauty is qualitatively different to preserving it for its timber, even though the effect may be the same in the short term; preserving it purely for its usefulness to dog-walkers is analogous to the latter. The aesthetic value I consider a place to have is connected to but distinct from the value I place on my being able to go there and appreciate it; aesthetic valuation, although acutely personal, is not purely a matter of self-interest. 
In this specific sense of "interest", Kant's "disinterestedness" remains a useful distinguishing characteristic of aesthetic experience. I am reluctant to use the term, however, since in modern English, whatever Kant intended, it inevitably has other connotations of a lack of intensity and engagement, both of which are essential to aesthetic experience. But in keeping considerations of personal gain out, we can build at least some defence against relativism: for Kant, disinterestedness grounds a claim to universality (cf Kemal 1992, ch. 3). My judgement of a painting or a landscape as beautiful is subjective, but I may still make a case for its being likely to be shared by others. I can communicate it to them and they, having made their own similar (though on my model not identical) judgement, may well agree with me. This is not like the way in which my dinner looks good to me when I am hungry. 
Aesthetic enjoyment of a place also contrasts with abstract contemplation of it, with any pleasure that can be gained from calling a place to mind without being there; if there is no physical perception involved, we cannot properly call an experience aesthetic. 
So to sum up, I am suggesting that when I feel and declare a place to be beautiful, I am not talking about any "resource value"; I am describing an experience I have when I go there, and saying that I have that experience because of my perception of the total character of the place, including but not limited to its physical appearance. Although this experience is deeply personal, I expect something similar to be available to another person, to the extent that they have a similar perception of its character. In expecting this, I am assuming not only that we will broadly agree about the physical appearance of the place but that there is some congruence in our background concepts and sensibilities, if only by virtue of our both being human beings. 
This is how, when we talk about the natural world, aesthetic terms such as beautiful come to carry so much extra baggage. They implicitly refer back not only to our knowledge, but to all our feelings, values and beliefs about nature and our relationship to it; feelings which in our culture we often do not or cannot express in other ways. In this sense, aesthetics has become the last refuge of the unquantifiable. 
Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscape: Ideas of Natural Beauty 
If we ask what sort of landscapes people find most aesthetically valuable, it is a fair bet that among a wide range of responses we will find recurring criteria of "wildness", "unspoiltness", "naturalness", all expressing a notion of a landscape exhibiting minimal signs of human "interference". Of course, particularly in a country such as modern Britain there is little if any landscape that is genuinely "untouched by human hand"; but this in no way invalidates this strongly expressed preference. Discovering that a breathtaking panorama of high moorland scenery has in fact been "created" from a previously forested mountainside by generations of sheep-farmers will certainly add another layer to my experience of the place, but it is unlikely to make me feel that I was wrong in finding it beautiful, to make me switch off my aesthetic appreciation of it and trek straight back down the hill to look elsewhere for some "real natural beauty". 
Diffey suggests that while for him not everything natural is necessarily beautiful, the South Downs are "undoubtedly" beautiful, and their beauty is rightly seen as natural, despite extensive human influence: 
"For a scene to be naturally beautiful is not so much for it to be in an unmanaged state as for it to look as if it were."( Diffey 1992, in Kemal & Gaskell 1992, p.48) 
While the exclusive emphasis on the visual seems unnecessarily to exclude the song of larks and the smell of wild flowers (we might want to substitute seem for look), there is a useful insight here. This focus on appearance leaves open the possibility of a scene which is obviously managed (like a garden, a farm, or a landscape art installation) being beautiful in a different way, while making the point that perception of "unmanagedness" is an important component of perception of natural beauty. It also gives an idea of varying degrees of natural beauty accompanying varying degrees of evidence of human intervention. 
There are many ways in which we find nature beautiful, and all, as I have already suggested, are shaped by our pre-existing individual knowledge, feelings and beliefs about our relationship to nature, both personally and as a species. An experience of nature which resonates with these beliefs will be more likely to lead to positive aesthetic appreciation. Differences of taste, preference or priority are at least in part explicable by reference to differences in these underlying conditions of perception. Within this continuum I wish to distinguish two broad streams of aesthetic preference. Without claiming that they are necessarily mutually incompatible, I suggest that they can be loosely associated with two contrasting views of the human / nature relationship. 
Essentially, those who broadly identify with the socially prevalent version of this relationship will be more inclined to find its manifestations aesthetically pleasing; surveying Diffey's South Downs, they will agree with him that neither the knowledge nor the evidence of benign human "management" detract from their natural beauty. The traces of thousands of years of habitation and cultivation do not make the place "unnatural", they argue; they have added to its character. Such people may denounce another visitor who complains that the landscape is no longer naturally beautiful, because humans have long since cut down the forest which "ought" to be there, as a misanthropic extremist. They may be committed, sensitive environmentalists, but they also consider themselves realists; they do not seek to return nature to a pre-human state but to progressively fine-tune the human presence through efficient and sustainable practices. Thus a bucolic English rural landscape formed and maintained by traditional agriculture is, to them, an example of unspoilt natural beauty. This is not to say that they do not find wilder places worth preserving, or beautiful; but they may well not find them more beautiful. They probably will not exhibit a compulsive passion for "untouched" nature. 
On the other hand, many "radical" environmentalists do exhibit just such a passion. For those who question everything about the presently dominant paradigm of human relationship to nature, the experience of truly wild places, no matter how hard to find, is often a deeply felt need, essential to the formation of a personal relationship with the non-human world untainted by the rejected anthropocentrism of the prevailing modern culture. Places where this is possible therefore come to be seen as the defining examples of natural beauty; Diffey's "looking unmanaged" will certainly not be sufficient. The ideal of personal unmediated experience of wild nature as a source of meaning and truth, not least about how to live as a human being, exerts a powerful influence in the realm of aesthetic valuing. 
This ideal, of course, is no modern invention but a clearly discernible strand in the history of European attitudes to the natural world. It was strongly evident in the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (cf Taylor 1989, ch. 21) and aesthetic experience connected with it was often then described in terms of the "sublime" qualities of nature. In using this term and associating it with one of two types of aesthetic perception I do not mean to oppose it, in a Kantian sense, to "beautiful"; it is precisely the fact that we find the sublime beautiful that I am pointing out here. A tamed pastoral landscape may be beautiful, but cannot be sublime: a dramatic mountain peak is sublime, and yet also beautiful to many, I am arguing, partly because of its sublimity. (Perhaps the fact that the two terms are no longer opposable in modern English reflects a loss of precision in the definition of "beauty"- but it is now probably our most common expression of positive aesthetic appreciation, and I shall continue to use it in this sense.) 
Sublimity, otherness and wonder 
Consider a single tree which has grown from a fallen seed in an English woodland. Encountering this tree, my experience of it as beautiful has many components. The colour of the leaves, the texture of the bark, the graceful form of the branches, the rhythmic rustling and creaking it makes in the wind, the sight and sound of birds and squirrels feeding and sheltering in it, the sheer enormity of its great trunk, the dappled sunlight beneath its canopy all contribute to my aesthetic experience of the tree. But underlying and unifying all these is my awareness of its life, its being, its otherness, its having spontaneously come into existence and developed independently of any human agency. It can reveal something of the world beyond human culture. It can have a sort of meaning for me that no human artifact ever could. Any account of my experience of the tree or of why I find it beautiful which leaves out this quality will be incomplete. 
If I now focus in on a single leaf of the tree, this "otherness" will still be present, as it will if I transfer my attention to the caterpillar eating the leaf, or to the bird swooping in to eat the caterpillar. In all four cases the object of my attention is entirely "natural", in the paradoxical popular sense of the word which excludes all things human. No evidence of human "interference", no mediating culture, interrupts my timeless encounter with the "other" world. 
But if I lift my gaze to encompass the whole woodland, and the surrounding landscape, that particular spell, unless I am very lucky, will be broken. I may see roads, cars, pylons, houses and other paraphernalia; or perhaps just hedgerows and ploughed fields. Perhaps I simply see something which reminds me that the woodland has at some point been planted. The view may very well still be beautiful, even strikingly so, but that magical feeling of "just me and nature" will have been lost, or at least diminished. 
This goes some way towards explaining why the "wilderness experience" is a holy grail for some; to be alone and completely surrounded by "untouched nature" is as close as we can come to a world where this spell is never broken. Immersed in otherness, the accumulated personal identity of culture can be forgotten and the buried "I" of pure "body-subject" can encounter the world unmediated. 
Neil Evernden (1993, p.138) quotes Merleau-Ponty's comment: 
"The best formulation of the (phenomenological) reduction is probably that of Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world" 
and goes on to elaborate (ibid., p.139): 
"Relieved of the cultural context which declares this is important and that is not- a 'structure of meaningful distinctions', to recall Douglas's comment about any environment we know- one is simply aware of what is. Wonder is the absence of interpretation." 
I do not mean to claim that "wonder in the face of the world" can only happen in an environment free of human influence, nor that being in a wilderness will necessarily induce such a state. I simply suggest that the more free of human influence a landscape is, the more conducive it is to wonder, by virtue of better allowing the perceiving subject to be "relieved of cultural context". Of course as has often been pointed out, we can find wild nature in a weed poking up through the cracks of a city pavement (cf Cronon1995, p.89) and I would not wish for a moment to deny that, in finding it there, we may be overcome with wonder. But it will probably require more "effort" than in the wilderness case, more "bracketing" of preconceptions and distractions, to allow the focussing of attention on the "otherness" which is no longer all around us but concentrated in one small area of our perceptual world. It is, however, still there to be encountered, wherever there is anything that we have not made. 
It may be objected here that all this talk of otherness is missing the point. Surely "deep" experiences of nature are characterised by a feeling of oneness, a heightened awareness of connectedness, not of difference? I want to claim, with Merleau-Ponty's help, that it is possible, indeed essential, to have it both ways; that is to say that only by genuinely encountering nature's otherness can we come to feel a sense of connection with it. The key to this apparent paradox is the concept of incarnate subjectivity. 
The self and the body are not merely contingently related; in rejecting Descartes' mind/body problem I am set free to say that "I am what it feels like to be my body". Husserl realised that having pushed res extensa (matter) into the black hole of doubt, one could quite legitimately push res cogitans (mind) in there after it, whereupon they would come out the other side reunited. Despite the problematic status of the "transcendental ego" doing the pushing, this elegant move seemed to hoist Descartes on his own petard. Adding to this, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the very nature of perception links perceiver and percept so closely as to make it untenable any longer to describe them as subject and object in the Cartesian sense. A vital part of this link is the intentionality of our perception- and this intentionality is convincingly shown to be a bodily intentionality. Thus subjectivity is incarnate- "I" am not a disembodied mind but a situated body-subject. When I perceive the world it is a process of relation, of communication. As Monika Langer puts it: 
"..Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological description of perception stresses the phenomenal body's primordial anchorage in and bond with, the pre-objective world. This means that the perceiver is simultaneously part of the perceived world and sufficiently apart from it for dialogue between them to arise." (Langer 1989, p.158) 
For this dialogue to be genuinely meaningful it is essential to be open to apprehending the perceived world as itself, not simply as "that which is not human". To establish a relationship with something which is defined only as "not-me" is a two-dimensional process with only one possible outcome; the only variable is the distance between us. The third dimension, the axis of radical otherness, allows an infinitely greater and richer variety of relative positions and interactions. Once I identify my consciousness with my body I am no longer looking out at the physical world from a sealed glass box, but able to feel truly part of it and thus to engage with other beings and objects in this fuller three-dimensional way. 
When I look into the eyes of a wild animal, my humanness shows me the difference between us; and simultaneously, my physicality shows me how close we are to being the same. Oneness and otherness are both powerfully present. Similarly, in a wild place I can feel its mysterious untamed otherness and yet also feel so intimately connected to it that I feel fully part of it. Any apparent paradox in such an account of encountering nature is a feature of the experience, not a fault of the description. This is, perhaps, part of the phenomenology of the sublime; apprehension of paradox may very well be an overwhelming experience. 
This is not, however, an all-or-nothing experience; it can be present in greater or lesser degrees of depth or intensity, and may also be resisted. Those who seek out the wild places are often those most willing to be so affected by them; and we can easily imagine, for instance, urbanite survivors of an air crash in a remote mountain region seeing their sublime surroundings only as wretched and desolate. 
The religious (literally "reconnecting") quality of the experience of "sublime nature" is perhaps epitomised in the wilderness experience- we are able to encounter the world into which we have been born in a different way, somehow more direct, as if our socially agreed decisions about how to live were yet to be made. Our conceptual framework of accepted ideas about our ways of being in the world is "overwhelmed", and the perceptual filter of culture is rendered less opaque by the absence of reinforcing cues and reminders. This makes it easier to perceive "things as themselves", to attend to our perceptual experience rather than to our preconceptions, and to encounter nature rather than "Nature". Such experiences can facilitate profound meditation about our relationship to the rest of nature, and hence about ourselves. 
But this does not, of course, automatically produce a sense of mystical oneness with all creation. Some people appear at times to be resolutely "unmoved" by even the most spectacular places; and while individual temperament must play some part here, I believe an important factor is a willingness to "co-operate" in this backgrounding of culture. 
Perhaps something akin to the "suspension of disbelief" needed to fully appreciate a work of fiction is required in order to approach nature in this way- although in this context it is more a case of "suspension of belief"- belief in existing social and cultural values, especially those defining the human relationship to nature. An openness to the idea that there might be something to be gained by a more direct experience of nature, that there might be something more than is captured in the standard stories of human-in-the-world, may incline a person to seek out these sublime experiences in the search for meaning, value or spiritual sustenance in nature. This questioning or seeking state of mind is not only found in those of an unusually artistic or mystical disposition, but can simply arise out of non-identification with prevailing social beliefs about nature and our relation to it. Whatever the motivation, if we approach nature in such a way, we are more likely to be "rewarded" with an experience of the sublime; I hope I have at least partially explained how this is true in a deeper sense than simply projection. 
Conversely a person who identifies more strongly with the institutional environmental values of their own culture may tend to view nature in terms of this framework, rather than as a potential source of an alternative perspective. The picturesque movement, for instance, favoured landscapes which evoked and confirmed the "classical" values expressed in certain schools of painting, to the point of literally remodelling parts of the real world in order to resemble the artists' vision. The Puritan pioneers in America were so confident of their religious and moral framework that the wild new world they found was seen not as a sublime source of mysterious truths but as a desolate wasteland, raw material awaiting transformation by honest Christian toil into a tamed and useful resource (Porteous 1996, pp75-7). Such certainty is hard to find today; perhaps for this reason, many widely-held aesthetic preferences reflect not conviction about present-day values but nostalgia for past cultures, real or imagined. The middle-England chocolate-box appetite for pastoral landscapes with misty fields, oak trees and village churchyards is inseparable from the desire to preserve or recapture the peaceful stable society which such scenery is, rightly or wrongly, associated with. The vast hedgeless monocultures of modern East Anglia may seem beautiful to the farmers whose livelihoods depend on ever-increasing productivity, but they are inevitably ugly to those concerned by the social upheaval and ecological damage they have wrought. 
Jay Appleton's "prospect-refuge" theory (Appleton 1975) suggested that our aesthetic landscape preferences are conditioned by a biologically determined survival instinct which favours inhabitable landscapes in which a hunter-gatherer might be able both to find cover and to survey a wide territory for food or potential danger. If true, this adds another deeper level to our aesthetic valuing of nature; but again, the central point is that we tend to prefer landscapes which embody our preferred version of the human / nature relationship. 
On the level of basic human biology we seek to eat and not to be eaten; according to Appleton, we are still subconsciously drawn to survivable places where this is possible. As modern social beings we seek to establish and maintain viable and convivial societies, rural as well as urban; we are attracted to places which speak of present or past successes in this enterprise. And as reflective individuals we seek to establish a meaningful personal relationship with the world outside those societies; our taste for the wild and the sublime draws us to those places where we can achieve this. 
Positive Aesthetics, Ecology and Relationship 
Allen Carlson's "positive aesthetic" of nature (Carlson 1984) claims that if we perceive the natural world competently we cannot but have a positive aesthetic response to it- we find it beautiful, awe-inspiring, and so forth. If we find it ugly or dull, he argues, we are not perceiving "correctly", or perhaps just missing something. What competent or correct aesthetic perception might consist in, and whether there can meaningfully be said to be such a thing, is the subject of considerable debate in its own right. For Carlson, the essential ingredient is knowledge of the constitution and context of the specific part of nature in question; such knowledge, he claims, is furnished by science, and more comprehensively so as our scientific understanding of the natural world advances: 
"The positive aesthetic appreciation of previously abhorred landscapes, such as mountains and jungles, seems to have followed developments in geology and geography. Likewise, the positive aesthetic appreciation of previously abhorred life-forms, such as insects and reptiles, seems to have followed developments in biology." (Carlson 1984, p.33) 
In the present day, he continues, 
"the positive aesthetics position is most evident in the writings of contemporary individuals especially concerned with ecology and ecological issues....The position has seemingly come into its own with the development of ecology and seemingly continues to grow in the light of it."(ibid., pp.33-4) 
This connection 
"..is understandable in light of the fact that ecology not only is in certain respects all-encompassing, but also puts considerable emphasis on qualities such as unity, harmony and balance- ones we find particularly aesthetically good."(ibid., p.33) 
This seems plausible- but if ecology can really persuade us to take a positive aesthetic attitude towards nature by revealing "qualities" within nature which "we find aesthetically good", then surely it is awareness of the presence of those qualities which has persuaded us, not possession of the minutiae of ecological knowledge. Science may be one means to the end of this awareness, but Carlson makes no convincing case for its being the only one. The unity, harmony and balance which ecology emphasise are aspects of its central theme- the interrelatedness of organic life-forms with one another and with their inorganic surroundings. Awareness of this interrelatedness can come in other ways, not least from direct personal experience. 
The indigenous inhabitants of those mountains and jungles did not need to wait for European geographers, geologists, or indeed aestheticians to explain to them that in the light of new scientific discoveries, positive aesthetic appreciation was an appropriate response to their homeland. We may fairly assume that they already found the familiar world around them, from which their whole lives were constructed, to be beautiful. 
The role of relationship in aesthetic appreciation is clearly seen in the inter-human realm. Can a human face be ugly? Well, we do undeniably speak of ugly people. However we also speak of "coming to see the beauty in people"- I may get to know a person whom I initially find highly unattractive and come to feel understanding, friendship, compassion or even love for them; and in the process, to revise my aesthetic judgement of their appearance. To be fair, we must also note the undeniable truth that an initially attractive person may come to seem less so; in either case, the process is not simply one of acquisition of factual knowledge about the person, but of the development of familiarity, and perhaps of emotional involvement- in short, the establishment of relationship. 
Perhaps then the same will be true if we return to consideration of aesthetic appreciation of non-human nature. If I develop a relationship with an apparently unattractive animal over time I may well come to appreciate qualities I had not initially been aware of, and quite possibly to find it beautiful. I would argue that the same is true of a piece of apparently uninteresting land, whether a yard square or a hundred miles across. If, for instance, I know what a place is like in all the different seasons of the year I have quite a different relationship with it than if I have only experienced it in the winter. If this knowledge has been gained in the context of growing my food on it this will add a further depth to the relationship. 
There is a world of difference between, at one extreme, the perception of a place by a passing tourist who goes there once for ten minutes and, at the other, the perception of the same place by a person who has lived there all her life. Recalling my earlier discussion, I would say that their stories of the place's character will be quite different. A poet for whom the place has triggered an experience of "sublime nature" may have a third version- not to deny, of course that the resident or even the tourist may also have had such an experience; but the point is that all three have differing degrees and types of involvement and engagement with the place and thus perceive its total character in different and essentially personal ways. This will be reflected in their aesthetic appraisals of the landscape, and of isolated features or creatures within it. 
I agree with Carlson that ecological knowledge can lead to positive aesthetic appreciation of nature; although, with Noel Carroll (Carroll 1992, in Kemal & Gaskell 1992) I would see this as only one route to it (perhaps one particularly relevant to ecologists), to which must be added other varieties of knowledge and experience, emotional, relational and contextual. I would in fact suggest that for most people, most of the time, it is these other intensely personal knowledges of character that are most influential. 
Following on from this, I find it hard to agree absolutely that positive aesthetic appreciation is always the "appropriate" reaction; I would not like to be the one to tell an Eritrean, or even an Irishman, that if he knew more about the barren landscape before him in which his entire family had starved to death, he would find it beautiful. Even if he is well aware that responsibility for the famine lay not with the land but with politicians or generals, his version of the character of the place in which the tragedy happened will be overwhelmingly influenced by those events, and it would be nothing but blind dogmatism to consider him somehow mistaken or uninformed when he said it was an ugly place. 
Ugliness, appropriateness and necessity. 
Given the highly personal and relational quality of aesthetic appreciation of nature, then, we cannot realistically say that it can never be ugly. This may seem like the loss of a potentially valuable argument for environmentalists- but we have importantly not said that it can ever be valueless, just that aesthetics cannot always be invoked to express its value. In any case, if everywhere was always to be considered as "potentially beautiful" (whatever that may be), then the beauty of a place could never be considered a special reason for its protection. When we say a place is beautiful, we want it to mean something, without having to make a dubious claim to objectivity. This requires, as I have argued, a more contextualised understanding of aesthetic appreciation: in what ways do we find things ugly or beautiful? And if we ask this question, we find at least one sense in which a reduced version of Carlson's claim can be substantiated, at least one way of being ugly which nature cannot exhibit. 
One thing nature can never be is "inappropriate to its surroundings" in the way that human buildings or activities are often perceived to be- almost by definition, what naturally (in the sense of not by human agency) arises in a place is what is appropriate to it- it is part of what that place is. This claim may at first sight seem tautologous or even meaningless; does nature have "surroundings" in the same way that a building does? Care is certainly needed here, as usual, in distinguishing between the different possible uses of the word nature. When we speak of aesthetic appreciation of nature we usually mean appreciation of a perceptible natural phenomenon or place, a part of "nature as a whole", rather than appreciation of that whole, just as "aesthetic appreciation of art" does not mean appreciation of art in general, which could only be an abstract sort of appreciation, not an aesthetic experience arising out of immediate perception. Yet unlike art, in appreciating nature the idea or awareness of "nature as a whole" is an important element in understanding what is in front of us. We do not tend to perceive nature as a random collection of discrete and independent objects; whether we think in terms of ecosystems or of divine design, some notion of coherence is usually present, not only within what we are perceiving but extending out into the rest of the world, giving context and continuity to the perceived foreground. This organic coherence is part of the character of a mountain or a river, or of any wild plant or creature in its natural habitat; this is what I mean by the claim that nature cannot be inappropriate to its surroundings. (Obviously this would not apply to "pieces of nature" that have been moved into artificial surroundings, such as a caged leopard in a zoo-these obviously can be dramatically out of place, although perhaps in the case of the leopard it would be the surroundings that were inappropriate.) 
Talk of animals in their natural habitats reminds us that we are perhaps the only species whose natural habitat we cannot define; and here is the link between the idea of appropriateness and the earlier observation that in the real world, consideration of aesthetic value in nature is usually linked to consideration of the aesthetic "disvalue" of our own effects on the landscape. When cherished rural landscapes are altered by roads, quarries, industrial agriculture and so forth, emotive terms such as vandalism and disfigurement are often used to describe the actual or potential results. The perceived ugliness comes not only from the appearance of the "developments" in themselves but from jagged discontinuity, from damage to the coherence of the place's character. Certainly this happens in urban settings as well, when old buildings are demolished to make way for new ones; but in the city the loss is a loss of history, whereas in the countryside it is often also experienced as a "loss of nature". Not only the actual square feet covered by the tarmac are lost to a new airport, for instance; many surrounding square miles may lose their aesthetically (as well as ecologically) coherent character. Of course it is easy to point to the fact that most existing countryside is not really "virgin nature" at all- (although we should not forget that there are still cases like the new trans-Amazon highway in Brazil where it genuinely is)- but this is irrelevant to the widespread perception that areas lose aesthetic value along with their "naturalness" with the arrival of visible modern "development". What we are doing to the world, our aesthetic sensibilities seem to suggest, is ugly because it is inappropriate; and it is inappropriate because it is "not natural". 
This, of course, begs the vexed question of what it would be for us to "act naturally". Indeed if, as I have argued, we are culturally bound to a conception of nature as dualistically separate from us, is such action even conceptually possible? The aim here is not, thankfully, to answer these questions but simply to demonstrate that they are inevitably raised when we attend to our aesthetic responses to our environment. However at least one possible approach to such questions does also seem to arise from this attention. 
Faced with a "greenfield site", sensitive architects, builders and civil engineers may strive to emulate or complement the effortless coherence of the surrounding landscape, or alternatively to cunningly disguise or screen their workings and structures; but even their best efforts will not win over an objector who does not accept that there is a need for what they are doing. 
Human presence in the landscape does not always appear ugly or destructive. Not only "raw nature" is beautiful- human habitation and activity in scale and harmony with its surroundings can evoke a positive aesthetic response not only by virtue of its form (judged as art) but by its appropriateness to its environment. The artifacts, structures and settlements of traditional indigenous peoples, and of our own pre-industrial past, seem aesthetically appealing not only because of nostalgia, anthropological curiosity or post-colonial guilt; they are qualitatively different from most of what we build today because they express a quality of connectedness with their physical setting. This connectedness is certainly enhanced by the almost exclusive use of very local materials, but there is a subtler sort of appropriateness which they exemplify, and which contrasts even more strongly with our modern developments. This is, quite simply, that their purpose is to satisfy the genuine physical and spiritual needs (for shelter, warmth, security, food and religious practice) of the local people. A farming village, built of local stone and nestled in a south-facing combe, can seem part of the landscape whereas a similar-sized cluster of modern commuter housing on a nearby greenfield site seems incongruous: this is not merely the shock of the new but also a reflection of the fact that one speaks of humanity as embedded in a place and the other only of a distant economic imperative. The small local quarry from which the stone came may not be attractive, but is rendered at least comprehensible by the sight of the sturdy nearby farmhouses, cottages, churches and barns its excavation made possible. No such mitigation is present when peering over the vast rim of a modern industrial superquarry like Whatley, whose endless truckloads of crushed limestone hillside travel hundreds of miles to build distant motorways because of the economic arithmetic that makes virgin aggregates cheaper than recycled rubble. Macroeconomic justifications for such activities may be satisfactory on an intellectual level, if we accept their premises, but they have no impact on intuitive aesthetic judgements of appropriateness. 
Part of this appropriateness is to do with respect of the existing landscape- although grandiose projects can indeed sometimes be very beautiful (witness the Taj Mahal) these are the exceptions rather than the rule, and in general any such principle of respect will suggest that we alter the face of the earth only to whatever degree is necessary. This is obviously going to be a very hard thing to define, but seems to be a reality in our experience. Persons responsible for the "public image" of construction, mining and other projects which radically alter existing environments will usually be at pains to convince objectors of the existence of a need for their activities, beyond the benefits to their own shareholders; there is an implicit acceptance that something more than profit is generally thought to be required to offset the loss of a meadow or a mountain. Superfluous greed-driven "development" offends against this principle and thus, whatever its architectural merit, can never be said to be appropriate to its environment. The appropriate thing to build or excavate, where nothing is needed, can only be nothing. 
Conclusion 
Aesthetic responses to nature, and to our impact upon it, thus constitute a powerful challenge to the modern imperative to subordinate all other considerations to economics, and to accept what we are told is economically necessary rather than what seems intuitively to constitute the good life. They demonstrate the manifest reality and value of the subjective, intangible and resolutely unquantifiable dimensions of our experience of the world. This is a valuable role and should not be downplayed; nor should aesthetic values be subjected to futile exercises of quantification which will always make them appear to vanish like a conjuror's rabbit. An exclusive focus on "objective facts" leaves value frameworks unchallenged; and the daunting task facing environmentalists today is precisely to see through the blizzard of conflicting facts and information to discern and question the underlying values which drive our ecologically disastrous behaviour. Intuitions such as whether what we do to our surroundings is beautiful or ugly, appropriate or incongruous, have an essential part to play in envisioning and creating a gentler, more sustainable way of life. 
There is no need to disguise aesthetic motives as other "more rational" ones. We should not be ashamed to be guided by our desire to live in a beautiful world; we will never achieve this if we do not act to create or protect what we find aesthetically valuable. As Theodore Roszak has pointed out, environmentalists need something more appealing than doom and guilt to counter the thrill of our Promethean industrial adventure (Roszak 1993, p.40); what better than the promise not only of worthy ecological prudence, but of wild, life-affirming beauty? 

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END
Michael Hannis 
Copyright 1998

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