Abstract

Aesthetic reasons should be significant factors in justifying decisions about both natural and humanized environments. Far from being trivial or mere tools to find serious considerations, aesthetic rationales are necessary for appropriate environmental protection. Aesthetic responses to environments should be construed broadly to include cognitive, expressive, and sense-of-place dimensions. Aesthetic justifications for environmental protection go beyond shallow and deep anthropocentric rationales and involve direct appeal to environmental aesthetic merit. Although nature is not aesthetically positive in all dimensions, natural beauty is sufficiently widespread for aesthetic protectionism to be consequential. Environmental aesthetic responses can be better or worse and such objectivity is required if aesthetic protectionism is to be fully functional. By paying attention to the interaction between aesthetics and ethics, the prima facie beauty of some degraded environments is called into question. Aesthetic merit has an important place among the other compelling reasons for environmental protection.