Between Nature and Culture

The Aesthetics of Modified Environments

Emily Brady, Isis Brook, Jonathan Prior

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786610775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Within philosophy, a new interest in aesthetics beyond the arts has encouraged the rapid growth of environmental aesthetics. Within this literature, however, less attention has been given to the spaces and places that emerge from various nature-culture interactions. This has meant the relative neglect of types of environments to which the majority of people have access, and interact with, in a sustained manner. In this respect, these are the environments in which many of us understand and value nature. Through a greater understanding of how humans interact with these environments and the types of relationships that emerge through this interaction, we address seek to address this gap.
Between Nature and Culture provides a systematic, philosophical account of the main issues and problems that pertain to the aesthetics of modified environments, as well as new insights concerning the generation and appreciation of landscapes and environments that fall between (non-human) nature and (human) culture, including gardens, agricultural and ecologically restored landscapes, and land and ecological art works.

Chapter 1

Introduction
Environmental Aesthetics between Nature and Culture

Between Nature and Culture explores central issues and problems concerning the aesthetics of modified environments and offers new theoretical insights about the generation and appreciation of objects, landscapes, and environments that are the outcome of complex interactions between (nonhuman) nature and (human) culture, including gardens, agricultural landscapes, ecologically restored places, and land and ecological art works.

There has been growing interest in nonart aesthetics, such as everyday aesthetics, the aesthetics of design and functional objects, and natural and environmental aesthetics. However, within this literature, less attention has been paid to environmental spaces that complicate any simple bifurcation of an assumedly unmodified nature from human artifact. A study of the range of modified environments and our aesthetic responses to them enables a broader understanding of the subject matter of aesthetics, as well as the role of aesthetics in fostering particular human-nature relationships.

This study also reflects, we argue, the varieties of environments that many people most frequently encounter. With ongoing urbanization and rural to urban migration, the natural world is experienced within parks, gardens, urban woodlands, riverscapes, and so on by an ever-increasing number of the world’s population.¹ Beyond such spaces, we find suburban gardens and other modified greenspaces, including the agricultural land of rural environments, and the forests, rivers, and wetlands, which humans have been able to restore from degradation by their own hands. Here, we find the farmer working a field or tending to livestock; the weekend gardener weeding his or her flower patch; a family having a picnic in a city park; the walker enjoying a hike through mountains dotted with hill farms; biologists, ecologists, and others working together to restore a canalized river; fishers on the river or the open sea; engineers constructing public works that are situated in nonurban environments; or the environmental artist working in a rural setting. In this respect, the book engages with what are likely to be the more common environmental aesthetic experiences, empirically speaking—that is, experiences of humanly modified environments.

We think that this is important and not just from a position of what constitutes common experiences of the natural world. Environmental philosophers have historically tended to center upon the intrinsic value of natural environments that are perceived to be—rightly or wrongly—untrammeled by humans. It is claimed that a tendency to favor such environments, both in terms of delineating what is of value and the manifestations of such valuing (most notably national and wilderness parks), can lead to a separation between humans and the rest of nature. This tendency leads to preservation of a certain kind of naturalness that is remote and “unsullied” and sometimes hides the violent birthing or creation of such landscapes, most notably the ongoing removal and exclusion of indigenous peoples from land to create national parks (Cronon 1995; Spence 2000).

Recently, environmental philosophy has seen a turn toward pluralistic and practice-based thinking, which focuses on the development of ethical attitudes through regular, sustained, and deliberate human interactions with the nonhuman natural world (Light 2000, 2003; Arntzen and Brady 2008; Marris 2013; Vogel 2015; Thompson 2017). “Environmental pragmatism,” in particular, has emerged in response to frustrations among some philosophers that environmental ethics, while making progress theoretically, has been ineffective in influencing policy and creating positive environmental change. The approach is described as

the inquiry into the specific real-life problems of humanity’s relationship with the environment. The new position ranges from arguments for an environmental philosophy informed by the legacy of classical American pragmatist philosophy, to the formulation of a new basis for the reassessment of our practice through a more general pragmatist methodology. (Light and Katz 1996, 2)

In step with this, John O’Neill, Andrew Light, and Alan Holland (2007) consider the role of place and temporal narratives as relevant for shaping ethical attitudes and, in particular, Holland (2012) stresses the significance of meaningful relations between humans and environment for developing an environmental ethic. All three philosophers are interested in moving beyond intrinsic value accounts and toward moral pluralism, with various influences at play. Their inspiration comes from American pragmatism, Aldo Leopold’s (1989) Land Ethic and his notion of “land as a community,” as well as ideas of flourishing motivated by virtue ethics.

It is this emerging strain within Western approaches to environmental philosophy that we aim to contribute to, but we do so not to denigrate the importance of preserving or conserving less humanized places or indeed the multitude of aesthetic, ecological, and other values and cultural meanings that such places have.² Our approach is, rather, one of exploring a new direction in aesthetics through the spaces that are unambiguously the outcome of direct, sustained, and ongoing human-nonhuman interactions.

Finally, reflecting an upsurge of interest in the interactions between aesthetics and ethics, the book also puts forward the central argument that aesthetic experience in both the generation and appreciation of modified environments can contribute in part to developing particular kinds of ethical attitudes toward the natural world. Further, we argue that in the generation of particular kinds of modified environments, aesthetic and ethical values are often intimately bound up with one another, sometimes to the point where the intentional expressions of certain aesthetic values through landscape modification are concurrently expressions of an environmental ethic.

Our overall disciplinary focus is aesthetics and environmental philosophy, though we also draw on ideas from human geography and landscape studies. We should also mention that we take a largely Western approach; although non-Western approaches have a great deal to offer in understanding modified environments, to address this appropriately would require different authors and expertise.³ This book is jointly conceived and authored and reflects the individual expertise and particular interests that each author brings to the project, while also presenting a diversity of topics to the reader. We hope that our collaborative effort produces an original approach that will be of interest also to disciplines beyond aesthetics and environmental philosophy—indeed, we believe that the study of modified environments requires such an effort.

CONCEPTUALIZING BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE

There are a variety of ways in which spaces between nature and culture have been conceptualized and designated. In this book, we work with this variety relatively freely and interchangeably, using concepts such as nature-culture, human-nature, nature and humans, modified nature, cultivated nature, cultural landscapes, humanized environments, human-nature relationships, human-nature relations, and the human and nonhuman. At this early stage in the book, it is useful to briefly set out how we understand some of these concepts, how they have been contested in the literature, and, perhaps more importantly, our approach to the overarching ontological question of what constitutes “between” nature and culture.

Throughout the book, we recognize that there are continuities and differences between the cultural and natural realms. Homo sapiens are biological and cultural creatures that share a number of characteristics and basic requirements for life with other organisms. Like other animals, as well as plants, humans need food, water, and light to survive. But humans also create artworks and design buildings and other artifacts, which would seem to set them apart from other species and place them firmly within the realm of culture. Some scientists and social scientists have objected that humans are not the only creatures with culture and that there are cultures of nonhuman animals too, for example, macaques, chimpanzees, and some birds (Heyd 2007, 131). Various kinds of nests as well as other animal homes, such as beaver lodges, have been proposed as evidence of artifacts in more-than-human cultures (Ingold 2000).⁴

Our approach to this complex issue aligns with a widely held position in environmental philosophy that differentiates humans through the technology and particular forms of human agency—ethical and otherwise—that shape their practices. As Robert Elliot (1997, 123) puts it, “Human agency . . . is mediated by a heavy intrusion of culture, social organization and highly structured economic arrangements and is exaggerated by technological capacities.” Human agency can be explained through the will, actions, and intentionality, whereas the agency of plants, for example, is best explained through a striving to flourish. If a plant is moved, it will strive to flourish in another place and may live or die. In this way, plant agency may be said to involve a spontaneous kind of being. This agency also results in effects and influences on other things, as when “weeds” push through paving stones, encouraging tidy gardeners to pull them out.

The new geological age of the Anthropocene is the formal recognition by stratigraphers that the nonhuman natural world—or the more-than-human world as some scholars put it—has been pervasively shaped by human cultural forces. The human species has had such a widespread effect on earth systems (including chemical cycles, erosion and sediment transport, etc.) that it is now a geological force detectable in the earth’s strata. In light of this new designation, as well as debates within environmental philosophy, it is doubtful that “pristine nature” exists, untouched by direct or indirect human actions. This has led some theorists to question the relevance of the term “nature,” to the point where there have been calls to drop the term or replace it (Vogel 1996, 2015; Morton 2007; Lorimer 2015), following on from earlier arguments about human forces ushering in the “end” of nature (McKibben 1989).

Nonetheless, while it may be difficult—and not particularly productive— to support the idea of “pristine nature,” we think it is important to resist the collapse of nature into culture and instead hold them in tension with one another. Oftentimes, the types of environments that we discuss in the book are categorized as “cultural landscapes.” While we see this category as a useful means to properly foreground the work of human labor, propagation, and territorialization, in shaping the land (including its aesthetic qualities), as well as cultural readings of landscape, it does so in a manner that risks downplaying the role of nonhuman nature.⁵ We are thus interested in reflecting upon those environments—farmlands, gardens, land art, mining landscapes—that are quite evidently the outcome of cultural forces, without losing sight of the agency of nonhuman forces.

Indeed, it is important to distinguish our approach from the view that nature is strongly socially constructed—that nature is a matter of human discourse and practice only⁶—while advocating a position sensitive to the many ways that humans interpret and conceptualize nature through a variety of cultural lenses, for example, science, art, literature, oral and written histories, and so on. Our approach, then, is consistent with relatively recent formulations in the social sciences that try to break down—or perhaps, more accurately, bridge —nature-culture binaries, such as Sarah Whatmore’s writing on human/nonhuman hybridities (Whatmore 2002) and Lesley Instone’s “situated entanglements” (Instone 2001, 2004). Our approach, then, is one that seeks to explore the aesthetics of humanly modified environments that inhabit a space between nature and culture—a space that is best understood as a continuum between the two rather than a sharp dichotomy or hierarchical dualism.

What do we mean when we speak of “modified environments”? As we understand them, modified environments are diverse in their character and ontology, ranging from land-based environments with built or cultivated elements to water environments shaped through human management of rivers, the sea, the sky, and atmosphere, as well. Their character will depend upon the role of human causes and the nature of human modification (whether intended or unintended). John Andrew Fisher (2003, 273) makes a useful distinction between “mixed” and “influenced” environments, which helps to unpack the role of humans in shaping environments. “Influenced environments” describe most “natural environments” because they are largely—if not entirely—subject to some kind of human influence or causal effect, whether through pollution, the introduction of exotic species, hunting, historical practices that have shaped the character of a present landscape, and so forth. “Mixed environments” refers to environments that have “artifactual elements—highways, power lines, smoke from distant power plants, jets roaring overhead” (2003, 274). In the book, we use “modified environments” to cover all of these cases—mixed or influenced—though our attention will be focused mainly on cases of intentional human modification of nature, as we see in the design of gardens or creation of artworks in the land. “Modified” is used to identify anthropogenic causes or intentions, keeping in mind that environments are also shaped by ecological and geological processes such as climate, decay, erosion, and animal activity (as mentioned above, beaver lodges, but also bee hives, bird nests, and badger setts).

Modified environments are ontologically complex, having both natural and cultural elements that may or may not be easy to tease apart. There will be obvious cases where the two are distinct, for example, where we find artifacts placed within strongly natural settings such as satellite masts, bridges, roads, pylons, wind turbines, or sculptural artworks in remote places. Here, the artifactual element stands out, sometimes dominating, even marring, the landscape. On the other hand, we also find artifacts overwhelmed by their natural settings, such as an overgrown ruin or an old barn, in which the built feature will have less of a presence. In marine environments, visual evidence can be obvious—a wind turbine or oil platform—or then hidden from surface view, such as a sunken platform. The prominence or lack of prominence of artifactual elements potentially shapes aesthetic appreciation. For instance, wind turbines in a remote, uninhabited landscape can be jarring and seem out of place for some people. For others, the turbines may appear as awesome design objects against a dramatic backdrop (Gray 2012; Saito 2017).

There is also a range of cases that ...