Good looking: in defense of scenic landscape aesthetics

Among US writers on environmental aesthetics, it has become de rigueur to leverage Aldo Leopold’s legacy against the proliferation of “popular” landscape tastes, which are typically seen to have their origins in 17th–19th century European traditions of landscape painting and aesthetics. These writers regard victims of popular or “scenic” landscape tastes (exemplified by Olmsted’s Central Park) as intellectually shallow, motivated by momentary “sensory pleasures”, and passively and anthropocentrically drawn to “naturalistic” environments rather than actively and biocentrically engaged with natural environments. This implicit refusal to grant sensory information and affective processing the power to catalyze and inform serious reflection is not new; neither is the attribution of popular landscape aesthetics to the elite society of a limited culture and historical period surprising, given the current preponderance of post-modernist sensibilities. However, in the often highly-charged atmosphere of local environmental planning and management arenas, both positions are needlessly polemical. More importantly, there is good evidence to suggest that both positions are founded on misconceptions about how the human mind works. In this paper, we will review work that establishes the intellectual bona fides of visual imagery, the important contributions that emotions make to cognition, and the likelihood that explanations of environmental aesthetics rooted in European enlightenment-era landscape painting are inadequate. This review suggests that frequent calls for new normative environmental aesthetics based on a cognitive understanding of ecological sustainability are likely premature. As social scientists, we suggest that attempts to impose prescribed environmental aesthetics (albeit ecologically pure environmental aesthetics) are inappropriate and may well be self-defeating. Instead, we suggest that a thorough understanding of visual and non-visual environmental aesthetics is needed, including examinations of the possibility that affect elicited by scenic encounters with preferred landscapes can lead people to form emotional attachments to the land and thereby develop a greater appreciation for sustainability goals.