The term environmental aesthetics can apply to a variety of quite disparate sorts of cases—aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, of works of art situated in nature, of works of art—for example, landscape paintings—that are of or about nature, of works of art that take nature as their medium, and of gardens, a special category that seems to straddle the divide between culture and nature. In each case the philosophical challenge is the same: to determine the proper object and mode of appreciation. While these issues have not been definitively decided in the case of art appreciation, it remains helpful to use that example as a counterpoint against which an account of environmental appreciation can be constructed.

Nature Appreciation

Nature scenes and natural items figure in our culture's most clichéd examples of aesthetic appreciation. Images of sunsets, rainbows, flowers, and baby animals are...