Abstract
What are the aesthetic transformations taking place through the effects of global warming and human responses to these effects? How should we conceptualize aesthetic environmental change, especially in the context of intergenerational concern for both nonhumans and humans? As the earth’s systems and its organisms experience climate change, these kinds of questions require an understanding of the aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values of lost species, places, and landscapes, as well as those which emerge through mediation and adaptation. The experience of aesthetic value or “aesthetic appreciation” is central to the study of aesthetics and, in practical terms, offers a more intimate scale for understanding the concrete interactions people have with changing environments and places. To explore these issues, the chapter discusses the tools of environmental aesthetics which can assist in grasping shifts in natural and seminatural aesthetic qualities, meanings, and values across both shorter and longer time scales, including intergenerational and future temporalities. The chapter moves on to address the kinds of aesthetic qualities of the earth’s systems which are demanding more attention in order to better understand and uncover what is being lost or affected by environmental change. Negative values are then discussed to address how aesthetics is placed with respect to the range of environmental phenomena caused by climate change, such as wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and so on. The chapter closes with a discussion of the interrelationship between aesthetics and ethics in the context of environmental change.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbey, E. (1988). Desert solitaire. University of Arizona Press.
Albrecht, G. (2020a). Negating Solastalgia, an emotional revolution from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene. American Imago, 77(1), 9–30.
Albrecht, G. (2020b). The effort of blame, bushfires and burnt Koalas. Blog. January 20, 2020. https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/the-effort-of-blame-bushfires-and-burnt-koalas/. Accessed 14 Apr 2022.
Alcaraz León, M. J. (2010). Morally wrong beauty as a source of value. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 40–41, 37–52.
Auer, M. (2019). Environmental aesthetics in the age of climate change. Sustainability, 11(18), 5001, 1–12.
Bennett, M. (2021). Ruins of the Anthropocene, the aesthetics of Arctic climate change. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(3), 921–931.
Berleant, A. (1992). Aesthetics of environment. Temple University Press.
Berleant, A. (2005). Aesthetics and environment, variations on a theme. Ashgate.
Brady, E. (2003). Aesthetics of the natural environment. Edinburgh University Press.
Brady, E. (2013). The sublime in modern philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and nature. Cambridge University Press.
Brady, E. (2014). Aesthetic value, ethics and climate change. Environmental Values, 23(5), 551–570.
Brady, E. (2022). Global climate change and aesthetics. Environmental Values. Special Issue: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Global Environmental Emergency. Environmental Values, Mikkonen, J., & Lehtinen, S. (Eds.). 31(1), 27–46.
Brady, E. (2023). Cryosphere aesthetics. In E. K. Wah Man & J. Petts (Eds.), Comparative everyday aesthetics, east-west studies in contemporary living. Amsterdam University Press.
Brady, E., & Prior, J. (2020). Environmental aesthetics, a synthetic review. People and Nature, 2(2), 254–266.
Brady, E., Prior, J., & Brook, I. (2018). Between nature and culture: The aesthetics of modified environments. Rowman & Littlefield.
Bristow, T., & Ford, T. H. (Eds.). (2018). A cultural history of climate change. Routledge.
Carlson, A. (2000). Aesthetics and the environment, the appreciation of nature, art and architecture. Routledge.
Carlson, A. (2020). Environmental aesthetics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2020 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/environmental-aesthetics/. Accessed 26 Apr 2022.
Carlson, A., & Lintott, S. (Eds.). (2008). Nature, aesthetics, and environmentalism, from beauty to duty. Columbia University Press.
Carroll, N. (1993). Being moved by nature: Between religion and natural history. In S. Kemal & I. Gaskell (Eds.), Landscape, natural beauty and the arts (pp. 244–266). Cambridge University Press.
Childish Gambino. (2021). Feels like summer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1B9Fk_SgI0. Accessed 7 Apr 2022
Cortada, X. (2022). https://cortada.com/art2022/underwater/. Accessed 7 Apr 2022
Crane, J. (Host). (2021). Tropical storm Irene, 10 years later. [Audio podcast episode]. In Brave Little State. Vermont Public Radio.
Demos, T. J., Scott, E. E., & Banerjee, S. (Eds.). (2021). The Routledge companion to contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change. Routledge.
Di Paola, M. (2018). Ethics and politics of the built environment: Gardens of the Anthropocene. Springer.
Diaconu, M. (2022). Rescaling the weather experience: From an object of aesthetics to a matter of concern. Environmental Values. Special Issue: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Global Environmental Emergency. Environmental Values, Mikkonen, J., & Lehtinen, S. (Eds.). 31(1), 67–84.
Dow, J. (2019). Climate change aesthetics. (Blog). https://jamesmdow.com/blog/2019/04/19/climate-change-aesthetics/. Accessed 22 Jan 2022
Foster, C. (2021). The screaming sky. Little Toller Books.
Fudge, R. (2021). Aesthetic consolation in the age of extinction. Philosophical Papers, 50(1–2), 141–162.
Ghosh, A. (2016). The great derangement, climate change and the unthinkable. University of Chicago Press.
Haught, P. (2017). An impossible peace, the aesthetic disruptiveness of climate change. In K. Giesen, C. Kersten, & L. Škof (Eds.), The poesis of peace, narratives, cultures, and philosophies (pp. 202–220). Routledge.
Hepburn, R.W. (1984). Contemporary aesthetics and the neglect of natural beauty. In Wonder and other essays. Edinburgh University Press.
Hepburn, R. W. (2001). The reach of the aesthetic. Ashgate.
Ice Memory Foundation. (2022). https://www.ice-memory.org/. Accessed 10 Apr 2022.
IPBES. (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the intergovernmental science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (E.S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, & H.T. Ngo, Eds.). IPBES secretariat. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651095-14.
IPCC. (2022). Summary for policymakers. In P. R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, & J. Malley (Eds.), Climate change 2022: Mitigation of climate change. Contribution of working group III to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157926.001. Accessed 1 May 2022.
Jarosz, N. (forthcoming). Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) and Aesthetics, Towards an intergenerational aesthetics of nature. Environmental Values. https://philpapers.org/rec/JARIAL
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Kolbert, E. (2021). The lost canyon under Lake Powell. New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/16/the-lost-canyon-under-lake-powell. Accessed 22 Jan 2022.
Korsmeyer, C. (2005). Terrible beauties. In M. Kieran (Ed.), Contemporary debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of art (pp. 51–63). Blackwell.
Levinson, J. (Ed.). (2014). Suffering art gladly, the paradox of negative emotion in art. Palgrave Macmillan.
Li, Q., & Ryan, J. (2017). Nature, engagement, empathy: Yijing as a Chinese ecological aesthetics. Environmental Values, 26(3), 343–364.
Mikkonen, J. (2018). Knowledge, imagination, and stories in the aesthetic experience of forests. Estetika, The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, 55(1), 3–24.
Mikkonen, J. (2022). Aesthetic appreciation of nature and the global environmental crisis. Environmental Values. Special Issue: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Global Environmental Emergency. Mikkonen, J., & Lehtinen, S. (Eds.). 31(1), 47–66.
Morton, T. (2018). This is not my beautiful biosphere. In T. Bristow & T. H. Ford (Eds.), The cultural history of climate change. Routledge.
Neumark, D. (2021). Letters to the ice. https://interwebsart.org/portfolio/letters-to-the-ice/. Accessed 3 Sept 2021.
Nomikos, A. (2018). Place matters. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 76(4), 453–462.
Parker, W. (2018). Climate science. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/climate-science/. Accessed 22 April 2022.
Parsons, G., & Zhang, X. (2018). Appreciating nature and art, recent western and Chinese perspectives. Contemporary Aesthetics, 16. https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol16/iss1/10/. No page numbers. Accessed 7 Apr 2022.
Randerson, J. (2018). Weather as medium, toward a meteorological art. MIT Press.
Richardson, B. (2019). The art of environmental law: Governing with aesthetics. Bloomsbury.
Roeser, S., Taebi, B., & Doorn, N. (2019). Geoengineering the climate and ethical challenges, what we can learn from moral emotions and art. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 23(5), 641–658.
Saito, Y. (2005). The aesthetics of weather. In A. Light & J. M. Smith (Eds.), The aesthetics of everyday life (pp. 156–176). New York.
Saito, Y. (2007). Everyday aesthetics. Oxford University Press.
Saito, Y. (2019). Aesthetics of the familiar, everyday life and world-making. Oxford University Press.
Shue, H. (2014). Climate justice, vulnerability and protection. Oxford University Press.
Stecker, R. (2019). Intersections of value, art, nature, and the everyday. Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, L. F. (2003). Twelve conceptions of imagination. British Journal of Aesthetics, 43(3), 238–259.
Stewart, D. C., & Johnson, T. N. (2018). Complicating aesthetic environmentalism, four criticisms of aesthetic motivations for environmental action. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 76(4), 441–451.
Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2010). Landscape, race and Memory: Material ecologies of citizenship. Routledge.
Tuan, Y. (1995). Desert and ice, ambivalent aesthetics. In S. Kamal & I. Gaskell (Eds.), Landscape, natural beauty and the arts (pp. 139–157). Routledge.
Tynan, A. (2020). The desert in modern literature and philosophy: Wasteland aesthetics. Edinburgh University Press.
van der Horst, D. (2018). Justice in the eye of the beholder? Looking beyond the visual aesthetics of wind machines in a post-productivist landscape. Environment, Space, Place, 10, 1.
Wadham, J. (2021). Ice Rivers. Princeton University Press.
Watt-Cloutier, S. (2015). The right to be cold. University of Minnesota Press.
Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene, ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E, Nature and Space, 1(1–2), 224–242.
Ziser, M., & Sze, J. (2007). Climate change, environmental aesthetics, and global environmental justice cultural studies. Discourse, 29(2/3), 384–410.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Brady, E. (2023). Environmental Aesthetics and Global Climate Change. In: Pellegrino, G., Di Paola, M. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_103
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_103
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-07001-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-07002-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities