Nature and Landscape

The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas ofeighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aestheticexperience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics,environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just naturalenvironments but also human-made and human-modified landscapes.Nature and Landscape is an importantintroduction to this rapidly growing area of aesthetic understanding andappreciation. Allen Carlson begins by tracing the development of the field'shistorical background, and then surveys contemporary positions on the aesthetics ofnature, such as scientific cognitivism, which holds that certain kinds of scientificknowledge are necessary for a full appreciation of natural environments. Carlsonnext turns to environments that have been created or changed by humans and thedilemmas that are posed by the appreciation of such landscapes. He examines how toaesthetically appreciate a variety of urban and rural landscapes and concludes witha discussion of whether there is, in general, a correct way to aestheticallyexperience the environment.