Philosophical Aesthetics and the Global Environmental Emergency
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Philosophical Aesthetics and the Global Environmental
Emergency
JUKKA MIKKONEN
University of Helsinki
Email: jukka.mikkonen@protonmail.com
SANNA LEHTINEN
Aalto University
Email: sanna.lehtinen@aalto.fi
Why have environmental aestheticians, scholars specialised in the appreciation
of the environment, paid so little attention to global environmental problems,
such as global warming and biodiversity loss, the impact of these on aesthetics
and the impact of aesthetics on them? We can offer the reader only some edu-
cated guesses. First is the aestheticians’ focus on beauty. Aestheticians have
traditionally been more interested in beauty and aesthetic enjoyment than ugli-
ness and disgust. This interest in beauty has driven environmental aesthetics
towards a pronounced focus on either pristine natural environments or cultural
landscapes, at the expense of environments which have been negatively af-
fected by human activity. Some might even argue that degraded environments
are a blind spot in the field that approaches environments in terms of natural
processes or human design, or on a scale of intentional human intervention
(here, see also Arribas Herguedas (2018) on the aesthetic appreciation of con-
temporary agricultural landscapes and Prior and Brady (2017) on the aesthetics
of rewilding).
Second, Anglo-American environmental aesthetics reflects a North
American perspective on environmental issues, for instance, in highlighting
the concept of wilderness (see, for example, Drenthen and Keulartz (2014);
for a defence of the idea of wilderness, see Duclos (2020)). Even today some
central philosophers see pristine nature as an ideal nature (see e.g. Carlson
2018), at least as a useful heuristic concept in a theory of nature appreciation.
Third, the Anglo-American analytic, universalist approach emphasises objec-
tivity, operates on a relatively high level of abstraction and prefers to set aside
historical, social and political issues that are thought to confuse and complicate
conceptual examinations; in the analytic tradition, changes in the sublunary
sphere are not considered philosophically interesting.
The field of aesthetics has been criticised for being behind the times – that
is, for neglecting both contemporary cultural phenomena and topics stud-
ied in neighbouring disciplines (see, for example, Wolterstorff 2003: 18–19;
Environmental Values 31(1), February 2022: 15–26
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JUKKA MIKKONEN and SANNA LEHTINEN
Zamir 2007: 44–45; Saito 2012: 11; Naukkarinen 2017: 5; Prior 2017: 6–7).
Surprisingly, aestheticians and philosophers of art have also largely dismissed
the artistic representation and exploration of environmental crises, as J.E.
Thornes remarked in 2008 (Thornes 2008: 390) and as is still largely the case.
In defence of the field, however, it has to be said that at least aestheticians of
the younger generation are working hard to make the study of aesthetics rel-
evant in the world we are living in.
Of course, some aestheticians have initiated discussions on aesthetics and
anthropogenic environmental change. In everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito has
called for attention to the environmental impact of aesthetically-driven life-
styles (Saito 2010). She has proposed that the awareness of the environmental
and social impact of commodity production ought to inform aesthetic percep-
tion and appreciation of the everyday (Saito 2018). In the aesthetics of nature,
María José Alcaraz León has examined the aesthetic appreciation of damaged
environments. Alcaraz León has turned the attention to concrete environments,
such as mining sites, and the possibility of their positive appreciation (Alcaraz
León 2011). Aesthetic issues in ecological restoration have also been addressed
(see Prior and Brady 2017; Greaves 2019; Hartman and Wooley 2020).
As for the aesthetic study of global climate change (hereafter GCC), Emily
Brady has been a pioneer in the field. In ‘Aesthetic value, ethics and climate
change’, published in this journal in 2014, she explores issues that GCC raises
for aesthetics, focusing on the implications of GCC for the aesthetic appre-
ciation of landscapes, species and ecological processes. In her comprehensive
look at the aesthetic characteristics of GCC, she expects that climate aesthetics
is to a large extent an aesthetics of loss and our aesthetic responses to GCC
resemble in many ways the experience of tragedy in art.
Recently, Ariane Nomikos has argued that sensitivity to the aesthetic
character of familiar places and everyday activities could provide a source
of aesthetic consolation and ontological security and help us in adapting to a
changing world. According to her, one’s focusing on a controllable environ-
ment could build the sort of resilience needed to cope with changes that are
beyond one’s control. While Nomikos celebrates the value of the familiarity
of our routines, she also proposes that we can choose to embrace the strange-
ness which GCC introduces into our everyday lives. Aesthetic sensitivity to the
subtle changes in the everyday might add to our appreciation of familiar places
and routines. (Nomikos 2018: 459–460).
In his contribution to the discussion, Matthew Auer is more pessimistic
than Brady and Nomikos. First, Auer expects that pleasurable aesthetic experi-
ences will become ‘increasingly rare’ in the future, as moral pressures become
more immediate and personal. As GCC affects the very conditions for life,
‘the separation of moral considerations from aesthetic values becomes a sub-
ject primarily of theoretical interest’ (Auer 2019: 9). Further, Auer thinks that
there is not much need for ‘negative aesthetics’ or the ‘aesthetic of ugliness’
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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
in climate aesthetics, for terms such as ‘ugly’ simply are not proper terms to
designate events such as mass extinction. Second, Auer doubts the consola-
tion that daily routines might provide us and the comfort the new practices are
likely to afford. He argues that daily practices will substantially change and
become more unequal for women and men, especially in the Global South.
Auer claims that
[a]s the impacts of global warming become more widespread and severe, and
with the worst impacts affecting regions with the poorest and most vulnerable
populations, opportunities to enjoy the environment will be limited as increased
demands for life-sustaining ‘adjustments’ steal time away from other pursuits
(Auer 2019: 8).
Also, within the broader domains of environmental philosophy and philosophy
of the city there exist contributions that take global environmental emergency
as their starting point in a way that has repercussions for discussions on aes-
thetics. Bridging these domains, Steven Vogel (2015), for example, proposes
that the concept of nature be replaced by that of an environment, arguing that
human environments need just as much care and reflective attention as natu-
ral environments and that, ultimately, there is now no ontological difference
between the two. Intergenerational aesthetics, a topic also explored by Emily
Brady in this issue, takes sustainability deficiency as an important starting
point for emphasising the need for a more long-term understanding of how
aesthetic values change, in the light of the different types of environments and
human practices involved in their creation and maintenance change (Lehtinen
2020; Capdevila-Werning and Lehtinen 2021).
Benjamin Richardson’s The Art of Environmental Law: Governing with
Aesthetics (2019) contains perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of aes-
thetics and GCC. In his broad, interdisciplinary survey, Richardson identifies,
explains, and illustrates various aesthetic challenges related to environmental
changes and decay. Further, he proposes several ways to renovate environ-
mental aesthetics so that the discipline could respond to the challenges of the
Anthropocene. This ‘critical aesthetics’ needs to understand aesthetics in its
original, broad sense, relating to sensory perception and matters beyond ar-
tistic quality and beauty. Indeed, Richardson asserts that ‘we must open our
senses to the aesthetic deprivation of the Anthropocene, be it plastic pollution
or animal extinctions’, as uncritical appreciation is nothing but self-deception
(Richardson 2019: 276). Richardson also wants us to understand ourselves as
active participants rather than detached spectators; we have to acknowledge
our vulnerability and dependence on the natural world, on the one hand, and
our responsibility as aesthetic agents for the distant and future impacts of our
aesthetic actions, on the other hand. In addition, we ought to think of aesthetic
engagement not as an individual experience but as a social matter with a social
impact. (Richardson 2019: 276–280.)
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JUKKA MIKKONEN and SANNA LEHTINEN
The aim of this issue is to re-evaluate and redefine some of the central ten-
ets of philosophical environmental aesthetics and explore how the discipline
can contribute to understanding the contemporary global environmental crisis.
(This special issue refers to the situation as ‘climate emergency’, yet the edi-
tors and contributors acknowledge that it is not a temporary but a slow crisis
and a societal change that will continue for generations to come.) The articles
in this issue approach key discussions in environmental aesthetics in order to
show that there is a worrying discrepancy between the aesthetic values as-
cribed to environments and the ways these environments are experienced and
understood in the light of our rapidly accruing knowledge of environmental
change. Further, the contributors share the conviction that philosophical aes-
thetics has so far been unable to acknowledge rapidly aggravating negative
environmental change: either the complexity and severity of the situation has
been altogether ignored or it has been undermined by turning the central ques-
tions into abstract discussion about environmental ethics.
Even though aesthetically motivated actions from shopping to travelling
play a role in causing environmental degradation we can still dream of a future
in which aesthetics could aid us in accepting (and perhaps even appreciating)
a radically changing and increasingly insecure environment. The articles in
the issue all contribute to the overall aim of showing how aesthetic values
are significant in perceiving environmental problems in the first place. This is
because aesthetics provides a direct means to bring together subjective inter-
est and attention with what is happening to the environment on a global level.
The aim of this special issue is to update environmental aesthetics so that it
can face the inevitability of large-scale environmental change that is already
taking place.
In the opening article, Emily Brady systematises and develops the views on
climate aesthetics which she has initiated in her earlier articles. Brady is inter-
ested in global environmental changes in terms of aesthetic qualities, meanings
and values, and her aim is to explore what sort of issues GCC presents to
aesthetics and how those issues will challenge the field. Brady maintains that
aesthetics needs a new research agenda because of GCC, and she explores four
issues that she considers foundational and especially pressing. First, environ-
mental aestheticians ought to pay attention to environments such as ice, snow,
marine and coastal environments, which have been neglected in the field;
which are now under threat or disappearing; and whose disappearance will
have global impact. Although Brady expects that changing climates might lead
to both losses and gains from an aesthetic point of view, she considers climate
aesthetics mainly as an aesthetics of loss. For her, the loss of these environ-
ments is ecological, social and cultural, and exploring their aesthetic meaning
and value would, Brady argues, signal their relevance within a global commu-
nity. Further, Brady highlights the value of descriptive aesthetics with regard to
neglected environments, namely, the cryosphere and the aerosphere, which are
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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
distant for many. While she thinks that first-hand perceptual experience is the
most reliable basis for identifying aesthetic qualities, she reminds us that this
might be ‘impossible or unadvisable’ with regard to certain places, ecologies
and animals. Leaning on Arnold Berleant’s notion of descriptive aesthetics,
Brady suggests that artistic and non-artistic literature, film, photography and
music, for instance, can provide ‘a mode of access to the aesthetic data of
neglected environments’ and ‘a relevant source for reflecting on aesthetic ex-
perience, meanings and value’. Moreover, she argues that such descriptive
resources aid us in capturing past, present and future values and are of utmost
importance in understanding environmental changes. For instance, cryospheric
words, concepts and meanings are likely to change as the material natures that
they change change.
Second, Brady argues for the value of negative aesthetics in climate aesthet-
ics. Negative aesthetics is required for capturing the aesthetic characteristics
of disastrous climatic phenomena, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts and
wildfires. For her, weather is an obvious starting point for accessible climatic
aesthetic experiences. Brady, who has studied the aesthetic category of sublime
in detail (Brady 2013), maintains that the sublime might be useful for account-
ing the experience of some extreme weather events. Further, she suggests that
the very concept of GCC could itself be sublime ‘because it describes an envi-
ronmental problem of extraordinary temporal and spatial vastness’. However,
Brady quickly remarks that the sublime involves both negative and positive
emotions, whereas GCC tends to engage only negative emotions. In addition,
she suggests, the knowledge of the consequences of extreme weather events
and the understanding that they originate in factors linked to GCC might shift
the response from excitement toward moral concern or at least change the char-
acter of the experience, adding to it an inextricable part of dread, shock and
sadness. Looking at the matter at a distance, Brady suggests that the sublimity
of GCC can be theorised temporally in imagining past and future in geologi-
cal time. Also, she admits that while GCC will have disastrous effects on life
on Earth, this ‘does not in itself preclude the possibility of positive aesthetic
values in places so affected now, and in the future’.
Third, Brady wants to bring intergenerational thinking into aesthetics.
As she puts it, GCC is a ‘severely time-lagged phenomenon’, and its scien-
tific understanding is based largely on probabilistic assessment that reaches
into the far future. For her, there exists an aesthetic that ought to explore in-
tergenerational thinking as in climate ethics and justice. As an example of
intergenerational theorising and future landscapes, Brady mentions ecological
restoration, rewilding in particular. She considers rewilding an aesthetically
interesting case because of its use of predictions. According to her, aesthetic
predictions, in shorter and longer time scales, can be considered aesthetic mod-
els that are facilitated by imagination. As for future landscapes, an important
form of imagination is ‘ampliative imagination’ which ‘enables expansion of
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JUKKA MIKKONEN and SANNA LEHTINEN
present sensory experience, creating a future image of some place and its aes-
thetic qualities and character’.
The fourth area in Brady’s research agenda is to bring together aesthetic and
ethical concerns. As GCC is an environmental harm for living beings, Brady
asks what the implications are of aesthetically appreciating environments af-
fected by such harm? In this section, Brady develops her earlier position. She
argues that while aesthetic and moral values are conceptually different, moral
considerations should be taken on board in aesthetic judgments of nature.
Although, she argues, it is morally permissible to find beauty in what has been
harmed, negative emotions might often psychologically displace positive aes-
thetic appreciation. Finally, Brady reminds one that aesthetics is not isolated
from ethical, social or political concerns, philosophically or practically, and
that it is crucial for us to come to understand ‘aesthetic-ethical harmonies and
conflicts’ in environmental changes.
In the second article, Jukka Mikkonen argues that GCC will impact on both
the practice of the aesthetics of nature and philosophical theorising about it. He
examines the two main philosophical theories of nature appreciation: the ‘sci-
entific’ approaches which ground aesthetic judgments in scientific knowledge
and the competing ‘non-scientific’ approaches which emphasise the value of
emotions, imagination and stories in nature appreciation.
Mikkonen argues that, while environments will change ‘on their own’, a
relevant issue today is the anticipation of anthropogenic and accelerated altera-
tion – namely the impact which global warming has on nature. Nevertheless,
he claims that future changes in an environment are challenging to predict, be-
cause there are so many variables involved and the couplings between different
components are not completely understood. Moreover, he remarks that the big-
gest uncertainties in climate models relate to emissions scenarios which, for
their part, relate to climate policy and our ability to actually reduce carbon
dioxide emission. Mikkonen claims that GCC is also far too complex a phe-
nomenon to be incorporated in the aesthetic experience of nature, for its scale
‘goes far beyond human experiential and cognitive frames’.
Like Brady, Mikkonen maintains that a key question in climate aesthet-
ics is the predication of future environments that are heavily altered by GCC.
Nonetheless, he argues that GCC is not a future but ongoing phenomenon, on
the one hand, and that the aesthetic appreciation of environment is not limited
to the present moment, on the other hand. Rather, he states, ‘our expectations
about the future pervade our present experiences, just as our history with a
place affects our engagement with it’. While science helps us in predicting,
say, ‘a future appearance and character of an environment in a given time
scale’, Mikkonen attempts to demonstrate that the possible futures of a place
are innumerable.
Mikkonen argues that, in the end, the greatest change is a conceptual
change: our notion of nature. We can no longer innocently look at nature
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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
without thinking of GCC and our role in it. Further, Mikkonen asserts that it is
exactly the difficulty in estimating the reasons for, and human role in, a given
environmental change that opens a door for imagination. Nevertheless, he ar-
gues that GCC also challenges the traditional forms of aesthetic imagination,
as it renders positive emotions psychologically demanding and as the omni-
presence of human activity on Earth leaves little room for wandering thoughts.
Finally, Mikkonen argues that, as a familiar environment appears strange
or uncanny, aesthetic imagining cannot rely on traditional guidelines: we need
new models for approaching the environment. He proposes that art could
stimulate environmental imagining and help us in adapting to the future: to
rethink our place in the world; to foster our sensibility and imagination; to pro-
duce new collective identities and communities and alternative ways of living.
Environmentally-aware art could also enrich aesthetic imagination in provid-
ing us with novel ways to experience and interpret environments.
Weather is not only a matter of great practical interest but also a central
part of everyday aesthetics and outdoor leisure activities. In her work on
the aesthetics of weather, Mădălina Diaconu has demonstrated the climatic
and cultural dependence of ‘fine weather’ (and related ‘beautiful weather’)
and illustrated the complexity of weather for traditional aesthetics of natural
beauty. Furthermore, Diaconu has brought meteorological aesthetics into the
Anthropocene, when ‘humans have turned from passive recipients of weather
into weathermakers’. As Diaconu sees it, we have lost innocence concerning
the weather: ‘Fine weather has come under suspicion, and climate change
opened a second age of bad conscience after Christianity.’ Instead of naive
blue-sky thinking and the alleged sublimity of catastrophes (in weather pho-
tography), Diaconu has called for less intensive experience and a sensitivity to
everyday weather (Diaconu 2015).
In her article in this issue, Diaconu analyses aesthetic features in a common
experience of weather and reflects on how those features have changed in the
Anthropocene. In her phenomenological approach, she examines perceptual
features of weather from framelessness to synaesthesia, together with atmos-
pheric moods that are part of human physiological wellbeing. Diaconu remarks
that weather has certain distinctive perceptual characteristics, for instance, as
it has a dynamic quality and its contents are fuzzy and fluctuating. The sky, in
turn, is in continual change and ‘its reality consists of a metamorphotic flow’.
The physical atmosphere is beyond human control, perception, knowledge and
representation, she contends. Moreover, as Diaconu points out, weather is a
difficult ‘object’ for Western aesthetics which, she notes, has an obsession for
‘solid things and stable images’. If Western aesthetics calls us for ‘thinking like
a mountain’ (Aldo Leopold), the aesthetics of weather suggests that we should
rather learn from transient clouds that ‘evolve, morph and soon disintegrate’.
Diaconu maintains that we modern Western people are rather inattentive to
weather, apart from assessing its suitability for our activities, ‘in which case
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JUKKA MIKKONEN and SANNA LEHTINEN
we simply consume the information provided by the media, instead of actively
interpreting sensory clues’. Moreover, she claims that modern culture and
technology have isolated people from weather into ‘climate capsules’ that are
regulated by, for example, artificial light and humidifier devices. Nonetheless,
Diaconu stresses that weather is a social phenomenon and that homeless peo-
ple, victims of natural catastrophes and the poor are exposed to weather rather
than able to enjoy it. Finally, Diaconu proposes a ‘rescaling’ of weather ex-
perience from a naive, formalistic enjoyment of the sky to appreciating the
complexity of the atmospheric system, which she sees as a requirement for
a collective responsibility. For Diaconu, a weather experience has a poten-
tially transformative effect and it may impact on our values. If we cultivate
our sensitivity to weather, we may strengthen our environmental commitment.
‘However paradoxical this may sound’, she writes, ‘sensitivity to the sky helps
us find our way back to the earth, and attention to the air is the condition for a
solid emplacement’.
Although the Anthropocene is a contested concept for various reasons,
whether because of its glorification of the human agency (Haraway 2015), of
how it fails to address the gross inequalities behind destruction (Demos 2017)
and how it effaces the colonial logic of exploitation (DeLoughrey 2019), it
is also apt to direct attention to some of the most peculiar environments pro-
duced by human intervention and subsequent neglect. The authors of the last
article, Marcello di Paola and Serena Ciccarelli, have both in their earlier work
dealt with the topic of aesthetics in the Anthropocene era, ranging from urban
gardening (Di Paola 2017) to the beauty of GCC (Ciccarelli 2014). In their
joint contribution to this special issue, Di Paola and Ciccarelli shed light on
the disoriented aesthetics of some of these types of environments which can
be recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene. The authors use the term
‘mashed-up environment’ (MAE) to describe environments in which natural
and anthropogenic processes have irredeemably intertwined. The main ques-
tion is what modes of aesthetic appreciation best describe the relation to the
emerging unintentional hybrid environments.
In order to describe aesthetic responses to the new types of environments,
Di Paola and Ciccarelli present the aesthetic disorientation triggered by them
through three dimensions. First, the phenomenological dimension is described,
to explain how our human perception and appreciation of places is affected by
what we interpret them to be in the first place. MAEs typically blur the lines
between clear binary descriptions, such as human and nature, planned and un-
planned, or wild and domestic. Making sense of the place is thus disrupted in
the case of the MAEs in ways which veer easily towards a sense of unhomeli-
ness: the expectations based on traditional assumptions are not met and the
environment is characterised by a distinct air of strangeness.
Second, the epistemological dimension of aesthetic disorientation is com-
plicated in the case of MAEs as well. The traditional genealogical approach,
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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
present in a strand of environmental philosophy of specifically Northern
American origin, is not applicable since it is based on relatively easy discern-
ment between natural and humanised environments. The authors show how
mashed-up environments are intrinsically beyond these types of assumptions
and that their mashed-upness concerns their future as well as their past: their
conditions have simply evolved beyond any traditional restoration and man-
agement logics and predictions.
Third, the narrative dimension concerns the fragmentary identity and the
difficulty in identifying the main narratives of the new types of anthropogenic
environments. Di Paola and Ciccarelli emphasise that the usual ways of creat-
ing structure and coherence in the experience and meaning of places do not
apply in the case of the MAEs either. This lack of coherence is so strong that
it is reflected in the fragmentary and dissociated identity of the places in ques-
tion. Recognition and thorough analysis of the three dimensions makes the
specific concerns of the MAEs palpable and paves the way to a new type of
aesthetic appreciation that the broken world is generating.
The task to show the true strangeness of the Anthropocene landscape is
not only theoretical but has very practical dimensions as well. Di Paola and
Ciccarelli concretise their discussion by presenting Priolo saltmarshes, a
unique and permanently altered ‘petrochemical flamingo oasis’ in Southern
Italy, as their main case study. The place is a strange combination of a natural
saltmarsh, an ancient site of salt production, a petrochemical landfill, and a
sanctuary for uncommon animal species, the settling of which in the landscape
has been enabled by GCC.
The improvements to the aesthetic approach that Di Paola and Ciccarelli
are suggesting will help us to take into consideration the complex yet deeply
meaningful aesthetic experiences of MAEs. This by no means involves deny-
ing human agency in bringing about environmental emergency, but testifies
to the complexity of the phenomenon from the very human perspective of
aesthetics. Di Paola and Ciccarelli recognise familiarisation as a strategy
against disorientation. The aesthetic appreciation required is grounded on par-
ticipatory, experimental and creative practices that take into consideration the
particular features and conditions of the MAEs. Familiarisation, described in
this way, can reveal and highlight the ‘strangeness of Earth as a planet’, rather
than undermining the challenging responses to anthropogenic landscapes. This
is important also since contemporary human identity is formed in conjunction
with the very same instability that has been produced by human activity in the
first place.
The articles in this issue reshape key research concerns in aesthetics and
prepare the discipline for facing the accelerating environmental change.
Overall, they demonstrate how aesthetic values play an important part in a
comprehensive human experience and understanding of environment. The
writers also share the belief that cultivating our sensitivity to aesthetic matters
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JUKKA MIKKONEN and SANNA LEHTINEN
improves our understanding and evaluation of environment in general. The
papers initiate new research areas and call for future research on, for exam-
ple, aesthetic responsibilities, the epistemic, aesthetic and moral complexity of
Anthropocene environments, new aesthetic emotions and environmental im-
agination in contemporary times. Of course, the list of topics related to global
environmental change and aesthetics is nearly endless. It would include a wide
variety of matters, from changes in agricultural practices to post-fossil futures,
and as yet rather speculative areas such as geoengineering and de-extinction
technology (for aesthetic issues in the latter, see Lindquist 2020). The aim of
this special issue is to turn aesthetic attention to the changes that are taking
place.
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