Winter 2011 415

Re-Envisioning Nature: The Role of

Aesthetics in Environmental Ethics
Bryan E. Bannon*

The discussion of environmental aesthetics as it relates to ethics has primarily been concerned
with how to harmonize aesthetic judgments of nature’s beauty with ecological judgments of
nature’s health. This discussion brings to our attention the need for new perceptual norms
for the experience of nature. Hence, focusing exclusively on the question of whether a work
of “environmental art” is good or bad for the ecological health of a system occludes the
important role such works can play in formulating new perceptual norms and metaphors
for nature. To illustrate this point, the work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy presents us with
a different perception of time that is ethically useful.

I. INTRODUCTION

Until now, the focal point of the debate concerning the relation of aesthetics
and environmentalism has been the extent to which aesthetic concepts such as
beauty ought to guide or at least contribute to our ethical deliberations concerning
human duties to nature. While it is broadly acknowledged that natural beauty can
be an important part of motivating preservation and restoration projects, a puzzle
is introduced when one considers that aesthetic and ecological evaluations are not
always aligned. Appreciators of a landscape might undertake activities that they
misguidedly believe contribute to the preservation of that landscape, while in ac-
tuality their actions either do little to preserve or even harm those processes that
make the landscape beautiful. This danger has led some to speak derisively of the
appreciation of the picturesque in the landscape if one ignores its deeper integrity.
While there are lessons to be learned from that discussion, in this paper I ask a
different, yet related question. Rather than inquiring into the appropriate relation
of aesthetic and ecological evaluation, I explore the manner in which artworks of a
particular variety can provide alternative ways of envisioning the human relation-
ship to nature and thereby present alternative modes of dwelling within it. Most
accounts offered of the relation between beauty and ecological integrity take for
granted the current cultural attitudes of Western industrialized countries, which
are the very same ones that are creating the current problematic environmental
situation. Hence, changes in behavior are going to require deeper cultural changes
in our beliefs concerning what nature is and how we relate to it. The deeper ques-
tion indicated by the ongoing debate concerns what kinds of cultural assumptions
shape our relationship to nature such that ecological integrity is not of value to us

* Department of Philosophy, University of North Florida, 1 UNF Drive, Jacksonville, FL 32224;

email: bryanbannon@gmail.com. Research for this paper was completed while a postdoctoral fellow
in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University.

415
416 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

and, more importantly, what kinds of resources aesthetics might offer as a means
of transforming those values. My proposal in this paper is that the experience of
certain kinds of aesthetic works can present norms for different ways of inhabiting
a landscape and establishing different means of nature appreciation.
Specifically, I argue that certain kinds of land art present a non-dualistic vision
of human activity within nature and that this vision is a necessary precondition
for linking aesthetic and ecological values in a successful way. To establish this
claim, in section two, I examine the current intellectual landscape with respect to
the relation of beauty and ethics. The aim is both to show the limits of the question
and how what is really sought after is a shift in our cultural assumptions concerning
the human relationship to nature and how we ought to relate to the natural beauty
that surrounds us. In section three, I take up the new question in this context,
namely, how aesthetic works can inform our perception and therefore transform
our perceptions and evaluations of the natural world and our relationship to it. In
section four, I elucidate these claims with reference to the sculptural work of Andy
Goldsworthy, showing how a heightened awareness of our relational and temporal
nature rather than merely a more thoroughgoing cognitivism can aid us in forming
a healthier relation to the rest of nature. I conclude by returning to the concerns of
section two in order to show how the developed view modifies the current discourse
on the subject.

II. ETHICS AND APPRECIATING THE ENVIRONMENT

The aforementioned concern with the appropriate relation of ecological and

aesthetic values is frequently coextensive with another prevalent concern, namely,
how to determine objectively whether a given landscape is or is not beautiful.
Among those who have written on the subject, there is a consensus that aesthet-
ics has some role to play in motivating the changes necessary to environmental
preservation. Arnold Berleant, for example, states that “an aesthetic encounter is
a way to approach environmental education by helping to cultivate feelings of
care and responsibility for the earth.”1 Even theorists such as Emily Brady, who
believes that aesthetics and ethics ought to be considered distinct attitudes that we
might adopt toward the environment, agree that aesthetic regard “gives scope for
valuing nature without self-interest or an overly humanizing gaze” and therefore
contributes to a nonanthropocentric ethic.2 The challenge that has been leveled at
such views is how to make correct aesthetic judgments such that the qualities of
the landscape that we seek to preserve are ecologically beneficial properties and
not merely picturesque aspects of the landscape.
Holmes Rolston, III describes the stakes of this question rather nicely. While

1 Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), p. 57.

2 Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
2003), pp. 142 and 260.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 417

he agrees that aesthetic experiences can be a source of preservationist attitudes,

the beauty of a landscape providing a positive incentive to care for it, he is also
highly skeptical of their ability to ground an ethic.3 In order to make aesthetic
experiences suitable to prompt us to an appropriate set of duties toward nature,
Rolston suggests that we need to “deepen” our aesthetics by widening our sense
of aesthetic appreciation beyond sensuous beauty. He attempts to bridge the gap
between our individual taste and evaluations and the need for socially accepted
duties by distinguishing between “aesthetic capacities,” those subjective receptors
or sensory experience, and “aesthetic properties,” those properties of an object that
it possesses regardless of being actualized in a specific capacity and in virtue of
which an object ought to be appreciated. Appropriate appreciation, the kind that will
render correct judgments concerning the landscape’s aesthetic value, demands the
assumption of a specific vantage point from which the relevant aesthetic properties
of the landscape can be perceived. To assume a diverging position would result in
a failure of judgment on the part of the appreciator, revealing “my ignorance, my
insensitivity, not my variant and legitimate preferences.”4 Since this position must
be valid for all individuals, Rolston appeals to the natural sciences and natural his-
tory to supply the prospect from which nature is most appropriately appreciated.
Science indicates the relevant aesthetic properties of the object that our aesthetic
capacities must then train themselves to intuit. Beauty, though it can motivate us to
act in a caring way, cannot serve as a foundation for an environmental ethic unless
one’s aesthetic framework “comes to find and to be founded on natural history,
with humans emplacing themselves appropriately on such landscapes.”5 Only in
this manner can nature’s true properties be appreciated for what they really are.
There is a broad constituency behind attempts of this nature to supplement or
replace aesthetic experience with some form of cognitive judgment. The most
refined and well-developed account derives from the work of Allen Carlson.6 Carl-
son begins from Malcolm Budd’s claim that nature must be appreciated as nature
rather than as an aesthetic object such as an artwork. Thus, the starting point of
Carlson’s position is that nature is a particular kind of thing, an object that bears
aesthetic properties. Nature is a fundamentally different kind of object than an
artwork and so demands a fundamentally different kind of appreciation. Accord-
ingly, just as art history is best equipped to provide us a catalogue of the relevant

3 Holmes Rolston, III, “From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics,” in
Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, ed. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 325 and 337.
4 Rolston, “From Beauty to Duty,” p. 330.
5 Ibid., p. 337.
6 Along with Rolston, J. Baird Callicott is one of the earliest interpreters to find this view in the writ-
ings of Aldo Leopold. See “Leopold’s Land Aesthetic,” in J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 239–48. Many others have endorsed Carlson’s
view in some form, and several such as Marcia Muelder Eaton and Patricia Matthews are discussed
concretely below.
418 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

categories within which we might evaluate an artwork, so the natural sciences, and
particularly ecology, are the disciplines best equipped to provide such categories
concerning nature. Noël Carroll summarizes the position succinctly: “Carlson’s
view of the appreciation of nature is that it is a matter of scientific understanding;
that is, the correct or appropriate form that the appreciation of nature—properly so
called—should take is a species of natural history; appreciating nature is a matter
of understanding nature under the suitable scientific categories.”7 While Carlson
has responded to this characterization of his philosophy by emphasizing the kinship
between scientific inquiry and the common sense knowledge of it gleaned through
experience, it remains the case that the categories through which he believes we
ought to appreciate nature as nature are provided by the empirical sciences.8 The
sciences are important to him as a mode of inquiry that reveals the categories
capable of producing “reasonable and universalizable belief.”9 Consequently, in
cases where everyday experience and science conflict, he would likely side with
the categories the sciences supply as the relevant ones since he believes those to
be the most objective and universalizable.
The reason Carlson reduces the appreciation of nature to a matter of scientific
understanding lies in his aesthetic functionalism. The sciences provide categories
that instruct us about how a particular landscape ought to look, which creates in
us certain aesthetic expectations for a given natural system. If these expectations
are based upon scientific categories, then the fulfillment of those expectations will
heighten one’s appreciation of the landscape. For example, if ecology informs us
that wetland systems should have a plethora of human-biting insects, then observ-
ing all the biting insects should make me appreciate the wetlands more, despite
their making me uncomfortable, because their presence indicates a healthy system
(or at least one free of DDT). Emphasizing that “the notion of things looking as
they should is a central feature of environmental aesthetics in general” retains the
aesthetic character of the appreciation.10 The stress is on the aesthetic object, here
the natural landscape, appearing as it should, that is, as the relevant empirical
knowledge tells us it should. Thus, in the same way an ecologist might assume a
functionalist stance with respect to ecological systems, we are called to evaluate
them aesthetically in terms of their “functional fit.”11 The issue is most clearly
stated in Carlson and Glenn Parsons’ book Functional Beauty. They hold that the
beauty of inorganic nature is a result of the functional fit of the various elements of
a system in terms of their causal roles. Inorganic beings such as rocks and falling

07 Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Carlson
and Lintott, Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism, p. 169.
08 Allen Carlson, “Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Knowledge,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 53 (1995): 398–99.
09 Ibid., p. 398 (emphasis in original).
10 Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 61.
11 Ibid., p. 58.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 419

water possess functions insofar as “they play the appropriate sort of causal role in
some capacity of a larger system to which they belong.”12 Thus, within a natural
system, as long as everything is in its place, performing its causal function, the
system will be beautiful. The landscape can be damaged and appear dysfunctional
for its kind, but in order to maintain an ateleological view of nature Parsons and
Carlson maintain that “for things with causal role functions, such as inorganic
natural things, such damage not only takes away its power to perform its function;
it also removes the function itself.”13 On this view, inorganic nature cannot be ugly
because functional roles are not permanent. If a being’s function in the system is
simply whatever casual role it plays at a particular moment, however, the norma-
tive role of the system is lost: as the climate and features of the land change and as
the living members of the system change their roles in response to these changes,
all the constituents retain some causal function. If one considers an aggressive
non-native species such as purple loosestrife, it creates a causal function within
the system and it is unclear from the functionalist position as they endorse it why
the previous state of the system is to be preferred to the new state of the system.
Though Parsons and Carlson might reply that I am using an example from organic
nature, another example for this problem is mountaintop removal: even though the
previously existing system has been obliterated and surrounding systems made
toxic for a large number of living beings, these are still causal, physical systems.
Are we to call them beautiful?14 There must be some further appeal to a normative
concept such as ecological health or integrity that grounds one’s evaluation of the
landscape, hence, the appeal to the ecological sciences.
Although I have been arguing with Carroll that Carlson’s view tends to conflate
the aesthetic and the ecological, Marcia Muelder Eaton defends the position as one
oriented toward the convergence of aesthetic and ecological values rather than re-
duction of aesthetics to the ecological.15 She implicitly invokes a categorical theory
of perception in order to explore the extent to which various social, political, and
cultural values inform how we identify what is aesthetically appealing and how
we then respond to those beings. In response to the current question, she states
“just as works of art must often be ‘read’—with extrinsic information determin-
ing the reading that results—so landscapes will be read in terms of the knowledge

12 Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 125.
13 Ibid., p. 135.
14 Even if they were to reply that different standards apply to evaluating such a landscape because its
natural causal roles have been destroyed by the human intervention, such an appeal requires us to accept
an explicitly dualistic assumption that there is a difference in kind between the physical causal systems
humans create and those nature creates. Additionally, to accept such a difference creates an additional
requirement of being able to delineate in some clear way how much intervention in a landscape is too
much for it to count as natural any longer. Since Carlson believes his model can encapsulate both wild
and agricultural landscapes, the amount of intervention tolerated is rather high.
15 Marcia Muelder Eaton, “The Beauty that Requires Health,” in Carlson and Lintott, Nature, Aes-
thetics, and Environmentalism, p. 357.
420 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

one brings to experiences of them.”16 She notes that while aesthetic properties are
themselves apparent in some way or another, ecological relationships tend to be
hidden (e.g., pesticides in a river). Carlson’s theory offers the ability to make those
hidden properties apparent by providing the categories to understand what aesthetic
properties indicate a healthy ecosystem of that kind.17 Again we see that what is at
stake is the perceptual disclosure of the landscape: how the landscape appears to
the viewer, what meanings are intuited in the landscape through the relationship
of one’s cultural position, individual knowledge and experience, and the quality
of landscape itself. What ecological knowledge accomplishes is the direction of
our attention to meaningful aesthetic signifiers such that already extant cultural
values surrounding the preservation of nature and beauty come to be aligned with
the ecological signifiers for a healthy system. Consequently, scientific knowledge
makes us more aware of ecologically significant aesthetic properties, but natural
beauty remains an aesthetic phenomenon.
For both Carlson and Eaton, perception operates in a categorical fashion, and
what we are trying to accomplish by gaining scientific knowledge of the landscape
is the education of our senses so that they are attuned to different aspects of the
landscape. Patricia Matthews suggests that there are two distinct ways in which
we might educate them.18 On the linguistic model “we ‘read’ nature” such that the
sensory properties of the landscape tell a story about it. The aesthetic properties
lead us into this deeper story that is what we actually appreciate. Rolston’s model
for aesthetic appreciation seems to employ this model: we are educated so as to
intuit what the aesthetic properties mean. For example, aesthetic properties of the
air such as its clarity and scent indicate and stand in for its quality; we read from its
properties the quality of the air. On the perceptual model, our aesthetic appreciation
is directly based on what we perceive. However, since our perception is categori-
cal, knowledge changes and informs the kinds of properties we perceive in the
object. Eaton’s model for aesthetic appreciation seems to employ this model: we
are educated such that what is aesthetically relevant changes. An example here is
the impact learning about trees can have on one’s appreciation of them: in learning
about specific kinds of trees, one is drawn to appreciate their individual qualities
more, qualities that would perhaps have been hidden without such knowledge.19
The distinction, therefore, is that while the linguistic model bases appreciation
on the content of the relevant knowledge embodied in the landscape (i.e., we ap-
preciate natural history), the perceptual model makes appreciation a matter of the

16 Eaton, “The Beauty that Requires Health,” p. 347.

17 Ibid.
18 Patricia Matthews, “Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in Carlson
and Lintott, Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism, pp. 191–92.
19 Christian Diehm has a lovely essay in this vein, describing how such new perceptions can cultivate
non-anthropocentric attitudes as well. See “Staying True to Trees: A Specific Look at Anthropocentrism
and Non-Anthropocentrism,” Environmental Philosophy 5 (2008): 3–16.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 421

aesthetic properties that our empirical knowledge accentuates (i.e., we appreciate

the sensual properties to which natural history calls our attention).20
Because perception is never innocent but is always already informed by a
background of experience, knowledge, and various social frameworks, Matthews
sees Carlson’s appeal to the categories of the natural sciences as providing norms
that guide the way we perceive and sometimes the way we act as well.21 The very
nature of categorical perception is normative since, as we have seen, categories
create expectations for appearances. She puts the matter as follows:

By viewing science as a guide to perceptual norms, we can see that any unity discovered
with respect to the place of the object within a system will be only one aspect of the
perceptual object. In the end, whether the object is aesthetically valuable will depend on
the total perception of it—not merely how it fits into a system, but what other aesthetic
(and nonaesthetic) properties it has and how unity relates to those other properties when
the object is perceived. So experience, not just knowledge, is important.22

Matthews thus distances herself from Carlson’s aesthetic functionalism, but in so

doing she opens up an interesting possibility, namely, that there are appropriate
sources for perceptual norms beyond the scientific that might contribute to our ap-
preciation of nature. What is in question is Carlson’s belief that science (even the
broader conception of it he espouses when pressed) is the only appropriate source
of perceptual norms. Both Matthews and Eaton recognize there are other valid
sources,23 but the contexts of their discussions do not give them room to develop
such alternative bases. In the following section, then, I explore some of the pos-
sibilities for discovering perceptual norms other than in scientific discourse and
how these norms might inform our ethical evaluations.

III. PERCEPTUAL NORMS AND EXPRESSING THE AMBIENT

One inescapable contributor to our perceptions of nature is the complex set of

beliefs about what nature is and how we should relate to it in light of those beliefs.
While science is an important contributor to this set of beliefs, we frequently elide
the fact that science, as a series of observations of nature, is a particular kind of

20 Based on Matthews’ distinction, I am also inclined to suggest there is a phenomenological

equivocation in how theorists intend “appreciation” at various points in their writings. “Appreciation”
in the linguistic mode means something distinct from what it means in the perceptual: in the first,
appreciation is more intellectual than sensuous and might be likened to awe or wonder, while in the
second appreciation remains within what most would regard as aesthetic experience. At points, Carlson
indicates he intends the less aesthetic sense of appreciation (e.g., “Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and
Knowledge,” p. 396), but reading him as holding a strong split between the two forms of appreciation
creates challenges for his explicitly aesthetic views.
21 Patricia Matthews, “Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” p. 191.
22 Ibid., p. 197 (emphasis added).
23 Eaton, “The Beauty that Requires Health,” p. 343.
422 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

experience. These observations become meaningful in light of other beliefs that we

hold to be true. Particularly with respect to the ecological sciences, the interpretation
of these observations still requires some background set of beliefs that contextualize
and make meaningful the observational data. Daniel Botkin and Daniel Simberloff
both describe various tropes that ecology has used to guide the interpretation of
ecological data.24 Botkin cites the use of historical metaphors for nature such as
the machine and organism while proposing various metaphors of his own, rang-
ing from a supercomputer to an airplane cockpit or moose’s stomach. Simberloff
describes the movement away from Clements’ superorganism paradigm toward
that of a stochastic cybernetic system as described in individualistic population
dynamics.25 He argues, in fact, that many of the theoretical difficulties arising in
the science of ecology are the product of the tenacity of the superorganism idea.
The contemporary manifestation of this paradigm is that of a holistic ecosystem. If
he is correct, these ideas could pose a problem for those who retain a strong holism
in environmental ethics.26 My point here, however, is simply that regardless of
whether one characterizes it as a paradigm or as a metaphor, the sciences themselves
employ foundational beliefs concerning what nature is, which in turn contribute to
our understanding of how to interact with nature. Such an idea is what underlies
Rolston’s injunction that “science should demythologize these views [culturally
specific perspectives on nature] but must itself find a new myth that encourages
appropriate aesthetic responses to nature, responses that will sometimes be of the
sublime and the numinous.”27
This invocation of the sublime and numinous prompts us to revisit Rolston’s
earlier claims that the aesthetic appreciation of nature must occur through the deep
experience of the natural history of a landscape via its aesthetic properties. In an
earlier essay, he argues that while the appreciation of nature based in science is an
important element of our experience, we equally require “a science-transcending
aesthetic of participatory experience.”28 In this light, we might read the conditional-
ity of Rolston’s remarks in “From Beauty to Duty” more strongly: if aesthetics is
to ground an ethic, then it needs to be based in science, but we can still appreci-
ate nature through intimate experiences with the landscape. He distances himself
from the purely linguistic model of appreciation because he recognizes science’s
fundamental ambivalence with respect to human attitudes toward nature: while at

24 Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Daniel
Simberloff, “A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism,”
Synthese 43 (1980): 3–39.
25 Donald Worster has also been tracking these changes as a historical phenomenon in his Nature’s
Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and “The
Ecology of Order and Chaos,” Environmental History Review 14 (1989): 1–18.
26 Simberloff, “A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology,” esp. pp. 27–30. See Jason Simus, “Aesthetic
Implications of the New Paradigm in Ecology,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 42 (2008): 63–79.
27 Holmes Rolston, III, “Does Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Need to be Science Based?” British
Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 384.
28 Ibid.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 423

the same time it awakens us to hidden processes and deep time, it also poses the
danger of “[engaging] us with landscapes too objectively, academically, disinterest-
edly.”29 Such dispositions seem rather contrary to the form of engagement authors
sought from aesthetic appreciation in order to motivate caring attitudes toward
natural environments. While scientific knowledge can enrich our experience, there
is something more to our appreciation of nature than merely our cognitive evalu-
ations of the landscape.
Theorists have tried to characterize this something more under various guises.
Berleant advances his participatory aesthetic, Brady an “integrated aesthetic” that
balances cognitive elements with these more inexpressible facets, and Carroll a
traditional aesthetic of emotional arousal, though he acknowledges the important
cognitive aspects of these experiences. Cheryl Foster characterizes what these
philosophers are attempting to describe as the ambient aspects of our experience.
By “ambient,” Foster refers to those features of our experience that resist complete
and transparent expression in language; they are difficult to place into a narrative
because they form the background upon which narrative occurs.30 Though the
ambient resists rigorous definition, one can describe it in a basic way as “a feeling
of being surrounded by or infused with an enveloping, engaging tactility.”31 The
notion of the ambient is inherently experiential; as something that falls between
or otherwise exceeds our linguistic concepts, the only evidence for its existence
is phenomenological. But, as something we experience, it is something that might
be communicated through various expressive means. Accordingly, Foster uses the
image of an asymptote to characterize the ambient: it both reaches toward “that
which exceeds our grasp, yet struggles ever more closely toward articulation.”32
The notion of the ambient is important for our discussion because it indicates
an important characteristic of human experience that eludes the linguistic, narra-
tive formulations of the cognitivist aesthetic and yet forms the actual source of
the affective connection to nature that occurs when immersed in a natural place.
The trouble is that endorsing the ambient as something beyond the reach of lin-
guistic explication seems to conflict with the earlier view that perception is inher-
ently categorical. After all, if perception necessarily operates in terms of extant,
grasped categories, to perceive something would seemingly automatically place
the phenomenon within the grasp of those concepts and therefore intelligible and
linguistically expressible.
It is not the case, however, that the categorical operation of the senses requires
that every phenomenon be rendered intelligible. Rather, it requires that we make
an unconscious attempt to situate a phenomenon within our context of meanings
and values, but, failing to do so, we can be left with an indefinable feeling. We can

29 Ibid., p. 381.
30 Cheryl Foster, “The Narrative and Ambient in Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 56 (1998): 128.
31 Foster, “The Narrative and Ambient in Aesthetic Experience,” pp. 132–33.
32 Ibid., p. 135.
424 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

then respond to this ineffability in different ways: trying to understand its source, a
sense of wonder, feeling of fear, etc. Surely science can even bring us before such
an experience by performing these same feats, which is perhaps why Foster does
not want to prioritize the ambient over the narrative. Regardless, the experience
broadens our perceptions of the world such that we recognize the epistemic limits
of our categories as well as our background beliefs concerning what nature is.
The issue that confronts us now is how these perception-broadening experiences
can come to inform our perceptual norms. Foster further characterizes the ambient
as a “sensibility,” wherein “our encounters with the natural environment redirect us
from the need to theorize the world overtly and instead encourage us to experience
it in a more diffuse and unified manner.”33 Paying closer attention to the ambient
elements of our experience will cultivate sensitivity to the backgrounded elements
of our perception: the way light provides a certain tonality to everyday objects, the
cooling or thickening action of water on the air, or even how our own moods color
and inform our perceptions. Perhaps the deeper point to which Foster’s comments
draw our attention is that, as an environment, nature is not the kind of thing that
can be considered as an object at all. By drawing the ambient background to the
fore, our situatedness within a network of relations becomes increasingly apparent
such that we progressively become more aware of those factors that contribute to
and inform our perception. As certain elements come to the foreground, however,
others must necessarily recede from our awareness. Hence, there will always be
some aspects of an experience that exceed the attempted objectification. Thus, in
emphasizing the narrative aspect of our experience at the expense of the ambient,
theorists such as Carlson are oversimplifying our aesthetic experience of and re-
lationship to the natural world.
This structure of foregrounding and backgrounding is of particular importance
when considering a response to the question with which Foster concludes her essay,
namely, how do we allow such ineffable and difficult to communicate experiences
of aesthetic value to contribute to our social norms and discourses on value? What
I argue in the next section is that we can provide one response to this question by
examining the role that artistic works play in shaping our perceptions of the natural
world. They educate our perceptions not in terms of specific categories through
which we will come to understand the world around us, but in accentuating salient
relationships that alter and expand our means of categorization. As Eaton puts the
matter rather pithily, “Artists are in the business of providing communities with new
metaphors that challenge and hence broaden our comprehension of the world.”34
If certain artworks are inspired by a relationship to nature and are attempting to
express that whole experience, both background and foreground, in the work, then
such works can be the source of guiding metaphors that can inform our perception
in different ways.

33 Ibid., p. 134.
34 Eaton, “The Beauty that Requires Health,” p. 357.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 425

IV. NATURE, TIME, AND FINITUDE IN THE WORK OF ART

Edward Casey provides us with a helpful framework within which we can un-
derstand how and why artworks can serve such a role in educating our perceptions.
He calls the process “earth-mapping.” To map the Earth, understood here as the
material background to all our (and other beings’) worldly endeavors, is to seek
to represent relationships between material bodies in a work.35 In other words, we
can consider many forms of art as attempts to map the world, that is, to organize
a series of signs to establish a particular relation between human experience and
the material world. In this context, the artwork embodies the sensuous materiality
of experience through the communal and historical categories we inherit and cre-
ate. The appeal of this idea for the current discussion is that maps, in establishing
relations between the bodies represented, are normative. That is, in the work of
art considered as an Earth-map we find a particular series of relations established
that, if allowed to educate our perceptions, guide our behaviors toward the material
world.
Elaine Scarry provides a fine example of how an artwork can educate one’s
perception and influence one’s relationship to other beings. Scarry never thought
much of palm trees, even questioning their status as a tree and categorically dis-
qualifying them from ever being beautiful.36 Eventually she had a change of heart,
and in reflecting upon its origins she tells the following story:

One winter when I was bereft because my garden was underground, I put Matisse prints
all over the walls—thirteen in a single room. All winter long I applied the paintings to
my staring eyes, and now they are, in retrospect, one of the things that make my former
disregard of palm trees so startling. The precedent behind each Nice painting is the
frond of a palm; or, to be more precise, each Nice painting is a perfect cross between
an anemone flower and a palm frond. The presence of the anemone I had always seen.
. . . But I completely missed what resided behind these surfaces, what Odysseus would
have seen, the young slip of a palm springing into the light.37

What in the paintings changed her mind about palms was how Matisse accentu-
ated their relationship to light. As she notes throughout the description of her
conversion, Matisse seldom gives the palm tree itself a prominent position in
the painting, and yet they are what define the paintings. In our terms, Matisse’s
paintings bring to the fore an ambient quality of one’s experience of the palm tree
such that its “signature,” the casting of striped light and the manner in which this
striping transforms and enlivens perception, became legible in the larger world.38

35 Edward S. Casey, “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art,” in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environ-
mental Philosophy, ed. Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), p. 262.
36 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 16–18.
37 Ibid., pp. 33–34.
38 Ibid., pp. 34–46.
426 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

This transformation leads her to observe “but beautiful things, as Matisse shows,
always carry greetings from other worlds within them. . . . The perceiver is led to
a more capacious regard for the world.”39 The artwork expands our perception and
alters our evaluations by greeting us with another world.
Because the invocation of other worlds is fairly common in aesthetics, I here refine
in what sense I understand the work of art to embody and present another world.
Nelson Goodman defines world in terms of a “system of description,” a specific
mode of schematizing one’s experience into coherent and consistent categories
that make sense of that experience.40 Casey defines world in terms of a linguistic
and historical domain of human speech and action. María Lugones gives the term
a distinctively social cast in describing world in terms of a given culture’s system
of relationships.41 Worlds therefore take on an ethical cast: in presenting a way
of inhabiting the surrounding social and natural environment, they structure how
one experiences certain phenomena and how one responds to those experiences.
Although there are individual differences between their accounts, there is a con-
sensus among these thinkers that a world is an essentially relational phenomenon.
To be in a world is both to reside within a particular system of relationships and
to participate in the creation of that system. What the work of art accomplishes in
presenting a world is both to call attention to the current world we inhabit and to
do so by indicating ways in which that world could be different.42 Goodman offers
an account of the various ways in which we might come to create such a world, but
they all have in common the structure of “always start[ing] from worlds already
on hand; the making is a remaking.”43 Using sensuous forms, various material
media, techniques that themselves possess a history, the artist who would present
a world is always in dialogue with an existing world and must take up a position
relative to it: does the work affirm the current system of relations? Challenge it?
Draw attention away from some factor within it in order to accentuate others, etc.?
In this respect, artworks will always possess the potential to inform and transform
our perception, especially when they express the ambient.
Returning to Casey’s idea of Earth-mapping, we can approach a work of art in
terms of how it embodies norms for our relationship to the Earth. While he presents
an extensive taxonomy for the various forms mappings can take, I focus on one
artist, the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, in order to give a more specific and con-
crete example of how artworks can serve as a non-scientific source of perceptual
norms friendly to the Earth. Goldsworthy’s works seek to embody in some way
the complex relationships between natural and human forces. Frequently they are

39 Ibid., pp. 47–48.

40 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1979), chap. 1.
41 María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2 (1987):
10–11.
42 On this point, see also Janette Winterson, “Imagination and Reality,” in Art Objects: Essays on
Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 133–51.
43 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 6.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 427

quite ephemeral, such as an arrangement of colored leaves or a rainbow spray of

water and light when an aqueous surface is slapped with a stick at a particular
angle. Casey describes Goldsworthy as someone who creates “landworks,” which
he defines in terms of their ability to “map the earth in works of art by virtue of
modifying the surrounding landscape in ways that challenge our accustomed modes
of visual experience.”44 John Fowles expresses his appreciation for Goldsworthy’s
work “because it made me look at familiar things with fresh eyes,” showing him
what was already there, a complement Goldsworthy accepts saying it is “the most
rewarding thing ever said to me.”45 Brady describes how Goldsworthy’s sculpture
informs perception by constituting “a form of aesthetic regard or even aesthetic
respect for nature, where that regard or respect comes through a co-generation of
artistic qualities—cultural and natural—in environments.”46 On all these views, a
particular virtue of Goldsworthy’s work is that it presents a world in which human
forces are not occluded in the work such that we begin to perceive nature and the
human influence within it differently. Brady’s point specifically is promising for the
current inquiry as it shows the connection between our regard for his work and the
transformation in our dispositions and attitudes toward nature itself. At the core of
Goldsworthy’s work is an inquiry into precisely this relationship between people
and the landscapes they inhabit. To this point, he says the following:

My intention is not to improve nature but to know it—not as a spectator but as a

participant, I do not wish to mimic nature, but to draw on the energy that drives it so
that it drives my work also. My art is unmistakably the work of a person—I would
not want it otherwise—it celebrates my human nature and a need to be physically and
spiritually bound to the earth.47

Thus, Goldsworthy’s projects in some ways complement the role of the sciences
discussed above and in others deviates from it. Like a scientist, Goldsworthy
situates his art as an attempt to understand the land and know nature. Unlike a
scientist, he does so as an active participant in nature rather than as an objective
observer. He denies that his work helps to categorize nature, but rather embodies
the understanding of those who have an intimate relation to it.48 For this reason, the
knowledge that he gains is akin to the experiential knowledge Rolston describes
and is oriented not toward learning facts about nature that are then read into the
landscape but toward cultivating a different kind of relationship with the landscape
itself. In this sense, Goldsworthy’s sculpture is inherently ethical.

44 Casey, “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art,” p. 266.

45 John Fowles, “Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy: John Fowles,” in Hand to Earth:
Andy Goldsworthy, ed. Andy Goldsworthy and Terry Friedman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004),
pp. 160, 163. This effect of the work, of course, is identical to the one Eaton describes science as having
on our perception.
46 Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” Ethics, Place, and
Environment 10 (2007): 289.
47 Andy Goldsworthy, Stone (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 50.
48 Fowles, “Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy,” p. 161.
428 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

As ethical, Goldsworthy’s work is about understanding and transforming rela-

tionships. The question we must pose is how the particular understanding of the
relations mapped in his work presents a world distinct from our current Western
industrialized one. There are two themes in his work that speak to these concerns,
namely, temporal finitude and non-dominating collaboration. Goldsworthy empha-
sizes both of these as central themes in his work at various points.49 Focusing on
these two themes can help us to see how art can provide similar resources to the
natural sciences with a very different ethical sensibility.
Nature, and more specifically its inorganic configurations such as stone, is not
typically thought of as something that possesses finitude. As Carolyn Merchant and
Pierre Hadot describe it so well, the modern period comes to understand nature as
dead, inert material to be exploited even as nature is personified.50 Combined with
the classical vision of nature as space and time, which are understood as containers
for bodies and events respectively, dead nature is something outside of time and
change precisely because it just is the laws that constitute time so conceived.
Challenging this sense of nature as dead material is part of what thinkers such as
Callicott and Rolston think is valuable about the current scientific understanding
of nature. Since science brings us before the evolutionary history of the landscape,
nature is re-enlivened; it becomes animated and is given a history. One might won-
der, however, the extent to which the scientific world achieves sufficient separation
from the view of nature found to be problematic. To the extent that many forms
of science continue to maintain a very classical, linear conception of space and
time, the systems it describes will still appear to be functional in an engineering
sense. This reliance on classical understandings of nature as the Great Object is
what I referred to above as the cultural assumptions that science has such difficulty
relinquishing. Roles are presented as fixed and unchanging, and, as Brady observes
in relation to Carlson’s position, such scientific systems tend to reify a particular
human-nature relationship as the only one possible when, in reality, there are myriad
possible relationships.51
What we find in Goldsworthy is an alternative way to acquaint us with the im-
mensity of the Earth’s time, regarding it as a process rather than a substance. His
sculpture grapples with the idea of nature’s time being composed of a multitude
processes all moving at distinct tempos with respect to one another. What we per-
ceive as a single, linear time is actually the perception of these various temporali-
ties from the perspective of a human duration. His sculptures attempt to reconcile
these diverse temporalities within a work composed in and for human time; they

49 For example, he writes, “If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time”
(Goldsworthy, Stone, p. 120), and “In sum, my work is a growing body of feeling toward and under-
standing of the earth” (Fowles,“Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy” p. 161).
50 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New
York: Harper Collins, 1980); Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of
Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
51 Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” p. 294.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 429

seek to make apparent the ambient, temporal background of our experience. For
example, in one series of works depicted most vividly in the documentary Rivers
and Tides, Goldsworthy collects small, red, iron-infused stones from a river and
grinds them into a fine powder.52 Using water to compress them into a ball, he then
tosses the ball into the river creating both a splash of vibrant red and suffusing the
surrounding water with a deep, swirling, red hue as the powdered stone dissolves.
The river eventually carries the red away, returning to its clear state with the red
becoming increasingly diffuse as it flows away from the site of impact. Speaking
of this process, Goldsworthy describes the stone itself as fluid insofar as it is en-
gaged in a cyclical process of solidification, being worn away and reduced to dust,
and then recompressed back into stone. The works, which he characterizes as “a
little memory in the life of a stone,” prompt him to reflect on how they affect his
perception of the world: “we set so much by our idea of the stability of stone and
when you find that stone itself is actually fluid and liquid, that really undermines
my sense of what is here to stay and what isn’t.”
Sculpture is not a medium usually praised for its transience. Sue Clifford and
Angela King remark that observing Goldsworthy’s work “extended our perception
of sculpture from the solid and monumental to the delicate and ephemeral.”53 Pre-
cisely because sculpture tends toward permanence, Goldsworthy’s temporally finite
works are able to highlight the fragility of those things we believe to be fixed and
unchanging. A relationship in the current world is thereby perceptually subverted
through the aesthetic work that presents an alternative to that world. Reflecting
more closely upon the temporal finitude of nature establishes different perceptual
norms. Rather than regarding a mountain solely as a monolithic presence in the
landscape, we can learn to see it as a vulnerable and changing presence. Here we
have another way to think like a mountain: learning to appreciate and participate in
not only the ecological processes that surround us, but also to be open to changes
within ourselves that result from the interaction with these forces.
Presenting that which we take to be permanent as fragile and mutable leads into
the second theme of non-dominating collaboration. As many have noted, nature is
not always beautiful and inviting. Stan Godlovitch, for example, believes that human
“temporal puniness” is what determines our standard of natural beauty such that we
fail to appreciate how deeply threatening nature can be.54 We therefore tend both
to forget that our evaluations are “sensorily parochial” and to ignore the mystery
of nature, that is, its “unknowability” and “aloofness.” As a mystery, Godlovitch
believes nature continually recedes before our attempts to know it and thwarts our
attempts to feel at home within it. To appreciate nature therefore requires us to accept

52 “Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy, Working with Time,” DVD, directed by Thomas Rie-
delsheimer (New York: Docurama Films, 2001).
53 Sue Clifford and Angela King, “Hampstead Heath,” in Goldsworthy and Friedman, Hand to Earth,
p. 58.
54 Stan Godlovitch, “Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics,” in Carlson and Lintott.
Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism, p. 136.
430 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

this condition of “epistemic and affective alienation” by adopting an attitude toward

nature based upon “a sense of being outside, of not belonging.”55 Recognizing the
finitude and complexity of nature, for Godlovitch, requires a dualistic response in
which humanity withdraws from nature and leaves the mystery alone. Ironically,
since Godlovitch’s comments are oriented toward criticizing Carlson’s aesthetics,
Brady’s criticism of Carlson is appropriately applied to Godlovitch: he is reifying
one response to the mystery of nature as the only response and foreclosing other
possible responses to it. But, as we have already seen, Goldsworthy calls our atten-
tion to this mystery in such a way that we are inextricably intertwined with natural
places rather than alienated and removed from them.
Godlovitch is right, though, that our entanglement with nature is not always a
pleasant thing, as Goldsworthy himself recognizes. Reflecting on nature’s finitude
also brings to the fore our own, which can be a difficult topic for reflection, but one
that can heighten one’s ethical sensitivities. Goldsworthy does not shy away from
this aspect of our experience of nature, striving to embody a feeling of “a deep
insecurity in nature—a fragile, unpredictable, and violent energy” in sculptures
such as a pitch-black hole or jagged, cracked stones.56 His Drawn Stone (2005)
located in the courtyard of San Francisco’s de Young Museum is a perfect example.57
The de Young was demolished in 2000 after being severely damaged in the Loma
Prieta Earthquake in 1989 and subsequently rebuilt as a dramatically different
structure and reopened in 2005. So when Goldsworthy was commissioned for a
site specific installation, he drew upon the history of the building, placing several
slabs of Appleton Greenmoore stone in the museum courtyard and creating a run-
ning crack that wends from this inner area along the floor, through the slabs, and
out into the sidewalk in Golden Gate Park. There is no comfort in this reminder
of the city’s precarious geography, but that is precisely the point: all things are
subject to time. But this sculpture is a work; it is a “permanent” installation in the
museum that was destroyed. Such a work cannot help but also be a comment on
how to respond to the indifference of nature, and the message is surely not one of
alienation and withdrawal. Though there is something “deeply unnerving” about
the fragility of stone, it is also a “beautiful expression of change.”58 This sculpture
acts as a reminder of a specific relationship of the human constructed place to its
larger geological context. It makes tangible the ambient danger of the city and at-
tempts to express it in a way that addresses perception directly.
When attuned to see the finitude of nature and ourselves, we can reflect more directly
on how we respond to this finitude. In viewing Goldsworthy’s sculpture (and perhaps
attempting to create our own!), we become more aware of how various forms are

55 Ibid., pp. 145, 147.

56 Goldsworthy, Stone, p. 64.
57 Anonymous, “Andy Goldsworthy: Drawn Stone, 2005,” http://deyoung.famsf.org/about/andy-
goldsworthy-drawn-stone-2005.
58 Goldsworthy, Stone, p. 65.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 431

created in response to forces. The process of working in unstable or unfamiliar

conditions challenges currently held understandings of materials and nature and
compels a different relationship to them. Describing a day of work in which he
successfully adapted to changing conditions by discovering unforeseen relations
within a place, Goldsworthy says, “That was a good day, in which mistakes were
as important as successes. Most of the time I didn’t know where I was going, it was
always potentially a really bad day.”59 Danger, failure, error: opening ourselves to
these possibilities rather than safeguarding ourselves from them at all times and
at all costs is part of the understanding he demonstrates in each of his works. In
order to produce his works, he necessarily must assume this open relationship to
what happens. When Goldsworthy travelled to Japan to work in a very different
landscape from the one to which he was accustomed, he initially struggled to create
anything successful. Eventually, however, he did create a number of works,

. . . because I just kept at it: when I’m faced with a problem like that it doesn’t mean
that the place is wrong or I must move, it just means that I must change, which is
important and something I enjoy. I realized that here is a situation where I have got to
change as an artist, as a person, to cope with the landscape.60

Rather than changing the place to accommodate his usual style of work, he created
new works by adapting to the landscape. What was at first an aloof and foreign
landscape becomes familiar not by transforming it, but by entering into it in an
engaged and sensitive manner, by learning from its internal aesthetic norms. When
pressed concerning the fact that his work does, in fact, rework nature, Goldsworthy
replies as follows:

It is the way of nature to be used, worked and touched. All of nature here has been
touched; the Japanese landscape by centuries of rice cultivation, these mountains by
plantation forestry, all are in some way affected, and my art doesn’t hide that fact. We
all touch nature and we are a part of this process of interaction and change, we rely on
each other. This is a good thing if it’s done well, with respect, and I celebrate this in
my art: the act of touching and the way the landscape changes.61

The relationship is collaborative insofar as natural processes are just as much the
creators of the work as is Goldsworthy and non-dominating insofar as the temporal
finitude of the diverse processes at play are allowed to be the processes they are, not
corralled into adhering to a human temporal framework.62 Changing the landscape

59 Fowles, “Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy,” p. 162.

60 Fumio Nanjo, “Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy: Fumio Nanjo,” in Goldsworthy and
Friedman, Hand to Earth, p. 163.
61 Nanjo, “Three Conversations with Andy Goldsworthy,” p. 164 (emphasis added).
62 I sketch how the appropriate theories of caring for a place necessitate attentiveness to their temporal
diversity in my “Developing Val Plumwood’s Dialogical Ethical Ontology and Its Consequences for a
Place-Based Ethic,” Ethics and the Environment 14 (2009): 39–55.
432 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

well, respecting its integrity and the norms of a place, is a matter of relating to it
in a non-dominating, collaborative manner.
The world mapped out in Goldsworthy’s landworks is one in which human be-
ings possesses the potential to develop this kind of relationship with the rest of
nature. His sculpture calls our attention to the ambient processes through which
other beings, animate and inanimate, have adapted themselves to a place, but this
adaptation still occurs through interacting with and altering the starting conditions.
In other words, niches are created, not found, and humanity, as a process that con-
tributes to the broader processes of nature, cannot help but have an impact on the
world around it. The challenge, then, is not to withdraw from the world but to adapt
means to collaborate with existing structures and determine the kind of impact one
has. Thus, Miranda Strickland-Constable is exactly right to describe Goldsworthy’s
works as a “suspension of probability.”63 They are, rather, a construction of what
is possible.

V. AFFRONTING NATURE

Of course, Carlson and Parsons have offered reasons for why land art, and
Goldsworthy’s in particular, ought to be considered “affronts to nature.” Before
proceeding, then, their concerns need to be addressed. After all, if there is something
inherent to land art itself that would contribute to forming perceptual norms that
would promote the further domination of nature, then the argument of the previous
section would be at odds with itself.
While both Parsons and Carlson offer slightly different definitions of what an
aesthetic affront to nature might be, both agree that environmental art insults nature
(not humans concerned with nature) by inducing a metaphysical change within
it from something natural to something artifactual. For Parsons, an aesthetic af-
front “is an insult, indignity, or slight to X that is based on interference with the
aesthetic qualities of X.”64 Hence, when artists such as Goldsworthy intervene in
a place, Parsons believes he makes two different kinds of mistake: first, they alter
the aesthetic qualities of the place that existed prior to their arrival and, second,
they alter the kind of thing nature is, transforming it from “nature” to “artwork.”
Carlson’s definition of an aesthetic affront, borrowed from Donald Crawford,
helps shed light on this latter metaphysical transformation. If, as he would have it,
“the affront in question is by works which ‘assert their artifactuality over against
nature’ and which are ‘impositions upon nature,’”65 then we begin to see how the
very traditional nature-culture dualism lies at the heart of Parsons’ and Carlson’s

63 Miranda Strickland-Constable, “Beginnings,” in Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy, ed. Andy

Goldsworthy and Terry Friedman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), p. 20.
64 Glenn Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 130.
65 Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 16 (1986): 637.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 433

concerns. As I showed above, they both agree that a natural setting will always be
beautiful in virtue of the causal functional roles at play within it. Once an artist
arrives and alters the aesthetic properties of the place, such functions are removed
and the place is transformed into a work. As Parsons puts it, such works “[manifest]
the attitude that the original natural object is not worthy of continued unmolested
existence, since it is deemed necessary to replace it with something else (the environ-
mental artwork).”66 Thus, while what is evaluated are still the aesthetic qualities of
the work, these qualities are perceived to be harmed or damaged only in light of the
dualistic assumption that human interaction enacts the change in metaphysical kind.
At the foundation of their argument is a specific perceptual norm, one that identifies
human presence as somehow molesting or altering the very nature of nature.67
The problem with Parsons’ and Carlson’s analysis of the situation is that their focus
on the alleged change in metaphysical status and the shift in aesthetic properties
that it supposedly engenders. This emphasis results in simultaneously dismissing
what is important about many environmental artworks and weakening the force of
their criticism of others. For example, Parsons calls Goldsworthy’s work “gussying
up nature,” and describes it as a process of adding a touch of aesthetic flair to the
environment in order to pique the aesthetic interests of those denizens of “a barbaric
age” incapable of appreciating the beauty of nature on its own.68 The thought seems
to be that the interest generated by such a work is for the environment as a work
and not for it as nature. As I have shown, however, far from merely “gussying
up” nature, Goldsworthy’s work confronts us with both the aesthetically pleasing
and the discomfiting within nature. It is not the case that he is trying to replace
nature or improve upon it in the way Parsons and Carlson claim. In fact, the effort
to accentuate new possibilities for collaborating with nature takes for granted the
falsity of their dualistic assumption without which there simply is no affront.
In arguing this point, I am in no way defending all environmental artworks. Surely,
as Brady notes, many of these works display a dispiriting disregard for the natural
world that is their medium.69 My claim here is that in emphasizing the dualistic
assumption and focusing on a possible aesthetic affront, we gloss over what is actu-
ally objectionable about some environmental art, namely, the perceptual norms they
embody. What is disheartening about the specific works Carlson describes is not
their ecological effect on nature necessarily, but the kind of human relationship to
nature that they embody. Christo’s wrappings and Michael Heizer’s slashings embody
the very world view environmentalism confronts and is attempting to dismantle.70

66 Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature, p. 132.

67 See especially Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” pp. 646–47.
68 Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature, pp. 136–37.
69 Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” pp. 290–92. See Jason
Simus, ”Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship,” Environmental Ethics 3- (2008): 21–36.
70 I would argue that Smithson’s work is exempt from most of Carlson’s arguments against it for
reasons similar to Goldsworthy’s. To defend this point would take us too far afield and so I leave it as
a question for the reader to decide.
434 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

Of course, it is hard to say whether such was the intent of the artists,71 but regard-
less, in the same way we learn perceptual norms from the works of Goldsworthy,
objectionable works serve to reinforce problematic perceptual norms. The situation
with environmental art is at the same time both simpler and much more complex
than Parsons’ and Carlson’s view reveals. It is simpler because without the dualistic
assumption we need not worry which works or which activities enact metaphysical
changes in the landscape, more complex insofar as we can no longer lump all such
works together in a single category. Evaluating which works are problematic on the
basis of whether the perceptual norms they embody are problematic is therefore a
more fruitful approach since doing so allows us to encourage those works, such as
Goldsworthy’s, that have much to offer in terms of improving the human relation-
ship to nature while also providing resources to resist and criticize works, such as
many of Heizer’s, that embody perceptual norms of mastery.

VI. RETURNING TO ETHICS

This last notion calls our attention back to the ethical value of the appreciation
of nature. As I showed in the second section, the reason for giving science such a
prominent role in our aesthetic appreciation of nature is the need to align aesthetic
values with ecologically sustainable values in order to motivate preservationist be-
havior. Shifting our emphasis from a concern for the correctness of our evaluations
to the cultural assumptions underlying those evaluations revealed both that there
are sources other than science that can contribute to the formulation of a different
relationship to the natural world and that preservation does not have to be about
maintaining the fixed properties of a natural system regarded as an object. On the
contrary, Goldsworthy’s work presents a world in which preservation is a disposition
through which one interacts rather than an attempt to retain any particular state:
the integrity of nature is preserved through a collaborative engagement with the
temporal processes of nature. This shift in the sense of preservation is a result, as
Brady has also noted, of the shift from viewing humanity as an observer of nature
to an engaged participant in it.72
One conclusion we can draw on the basis of the above arguments is that re-
envisioning our basic beliefs about nature involves a just as thorough re-envisioning
of humanity. We can look to historical figures such as Leopold with his call for
humanity to resume its place as a productive citizen of the land community, but
artists also continually produce works that present us with different senses of self,

71 Brady cites Michael Heizer as self-identifying with the American pioneer spirit of breaking the
land for human purposes (“Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” p. 290), while
Carlson cites Smithson saying, much like Goldsworthy, “an ‘artist’s treatment of the land depends on
how aware he is of himself as nature.’ He also urged artists to ‘become conscious of themselves as
natural agents’” (“Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” p. 645).
72 Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” p. 297.
Winter 2011 RE-ENVISIONING NATURE 435

society, nature, etc.73 Why not look to them for inspiration in this time when we are
once again opening up these very old questions about the essence of humanity and
nature? Perhaps we shall find, either in Goldsworthy’s works or another’s, ideals
for human agency that will help us understand how best to live in a fundamentally
unstable, changing, and indifferent world.
As I stated above, I do not mean to imply that all art is equally capable of performing
the role I describe here. One can easily imagine works that focus on nature’s fearful
aspects and try to express a world in which control and rigid order are valorized over
wildness and adaptation. In other words, there are just as many potential worlds to
be expressed in works of art as we can imagine possible relationships to nature. This
situation is a product of the simple fact that there is no one answer to the question
of what the appropriate relationship of humanity to nature is, which puts us in a
difficult position regarding what to do about conflicting ideals. Surely there is no
simple answer to this essentially political question, but rather than foreclosing the
discussion by appealing to science as the single voice capable of speaking about
nature as it really is, we must open up the discussion to include different voices
and values by considering alternative conceptions of what nature might be (e.g.,
a protean set of relations rather than a mechanistic thing composed of functional
relations).
So, rather than presenting a solution to the problem of how to align ecological and
aesthetic judgments, what I have argued is that this project conceals an intrinsically
ethical question: how should we dwell within the larger ecological community?
What kind of character do we endeavor to have in the larger scheme of nature?
Asking these questions leads us to a different set of questions: what kinds of uses
reinforce the ideals of agency we endorse? When should we seek to maintain a
specific state of a system and in what cases adapt to changes? Is it possible to create
human settlements that are welcoming to other forms of life and preserve nature’s
wild quality, etc.? These questions seek less to determine once and for all what is
the correct or appropriate relationship of humanity to nature and more to grapple
with the complexities of our mutable relationship to nature and unearth some of
the challenges we face in doing so.
If there are many ways in which we might relate to nature in a friendly or pro-
ductive way rather than an adversarial or dominating one, it is more likely that
we shall discover metaphors and paradigms to give shape to those visions in art
than in science. I say this not to disparage science, its accomplishments, or even
its potential contributions to creating a healthier, more beautiful world. Rather,
because science requires such metaphors and paradigms for nature when translating
its findings into action and policy, any environmental philosophy that would place
such trust in science must embrace as a complementary process the examination

73 See Simus, ”Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship.”

436 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 33

of the often subterranean sources of the metaphors science employs in order to

make its findings meaningful. These metaphors are themselves laden with values
and are frequently endorsed only tacitly, if not completely unconsciously. For
this reason, they are frequently difficult to identify and critique. On the contrary,
artistic expression as a process of earth-mapping places world in the foreground
of our perceptions, actively presenting a way of looking at what is already before
our eyes differently. By rendering our intellectual ambience into a material form
such that we are capable of opening up a narrative with respect to it, we are more
likely to be able to have a discussion of what we in fact value and why than we
are in a scientific discourse that frequently eschews discussions of value. These
metaphors for nature are what motivate us to care for our places, interest and en-
gage us at a creative level in the process of living, and guide us in choosing which
new experiences and opportunities to seek out. While I have made the case that
Goldsworthy’s art, as a celebration of human creativity, our embodied nature, and
the possibility of living in nature as collaborator with other beings, can be a source
for valuable norms in forging new ways of inhabiting the Earth, others may find the
other norms that they value more in the work of different artists. Regardless, what
matters is that we seek out such norms and begin the process of enacting them so
as to cultivate beauty both in ourselves and the world around us.

Eco-Republic
What the Ancients Can Teach Us about
Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living
Melissa Lane

“Eco-Republic seeks to refashion the political

imagination toward a more environmentally
sustainable way of life. Lane draws on
ancient thought, and on Plato in particular,
to make imaginable the sort of political
subjectivity that she sees as necessary to
developing sustainable lifestyles and a
concomitant politics. This focus on our
collective imagination is a significant
reorientation of political theory itself.”
—Danielle S. Allen, Institute for
Advanced Study
Cloth $27.95 978-0-691-15124-3

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