convenience, and themselves raising no theoretical puzzles.
In the case of mediated appreciation of nature, however, we find matters somewhat inverted. Here mediated experience plays a much more central role than it does in our appreciation of art: most of us have never seen, or will ever see, a polar bear in its Arctic habitat, the Great Barrier Reef, or a Sahara desert landscape. If we have any aesthetic access to these at all, it is an access mediated via representations such as photos, paintings, film, and literary narratives. Indeed, there are some parts of nature that can only be appreciated through representations, for practical or prudential reasons, such as the ocean floor and the far side of the moon.
Ecological considerations can also confer particular importance on mediated nature appreciation. Consider Sable Island: a remote sandy strip of land about 300 km off the eastern shore of Canada. It’s a striking landscape with a unique natural history and a fragile ecology: a 40-kilometer-long sandbar whose dunes, continually blasted by the winds of the North Atlantic, are held together by vegetation. Until recently, access to the island was restricted by the Canadian government, since trampling of the island’s native grasses poses a threat to dune stability and hence the very existence of the island. To the extent that anyone knew the beauty of the place at all, it was through photographs and films, such as those created in the 1990s by the photographer Roberto Dutesco, who obtained permission to visit the island and photograph its population of wild horses. In cases such as this, direct appreciation would come at a real environmental cost (for more on this case, see Parsons 2015).
But though mediated appreciation is arguably central to our appreciation of nature, in a way it is not central to our appreciation of art, it has often been viewed with suspicion, if not hostility, by philosophers interested in natural beauty. So let me now turn to those philosophers and their suspicions.
Philosophers on Meditated Nature Appreciation
Over the last 50 years, there has been much philosophical discussion about various aspects of our practices of aesthetically appreciating nature. In these debates, some big differences have emerged, one of which concerns the role of scientific understanding in aesthetic appreciation. Some thinkers have insisted that the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be informed by our best understanding of nature and its history, just as our aesthetic appreciation of art must be informed by our best understanding of art and its history. The thought is that, just as to properly appreciate, say, a Cubist painting, one needs to understand the history and nature of that genre, so to appreciate a part of nature properly one needs the relevant historical and contextual knowledge about that part of nature. And such relevant historical and contextual knowledge about nature is to be found in our scientific understanding of it (Carlson 1979a). Others have rejected this requirement, eschewing any such normative constraint on nature appreciation. All that is needed to properly appreciate nature, some maintain, is careful attention and sensitivity to the features it displays in our perception of it: its striking forms and colors, its moving events, intriguing processes and so on.
This division represents perhaps the main ideological split in the field (for a general discussion, see Parsons 2008; Carlson 2019). Despite this deep division, however, one thing that thinkers on both sides of the division share is a neglect of, if not contempt toward, mediated appreciation of nature.
Consider first the leading representative of the view that nature appreciation should be informed by scientific understanding, Allen Carlson. Broaching the general question of how we ought to aesthetically appreciate nature, Carlson takes as his key insight the idea that nature is an environment. This means, in his view, that nature is not any particular object or set of objects before or around us, but rather the whole background setting in which we, and the objects around us, are enveloped. Thus, Carlson writes: “the beginning of an answer as to how to aesthetically appreciate an environment is something like the following. We must experience our background setting in all those ways in which we normally experience it, by sight, smell, touch and whatever” (1979a, 272).
Having set up the idea of appreciating nature in this way, Carlson goes on to draw a strong contrast between this paradigm of direct sensory engagement of the environment and appreciation mediated by representations of nature, such as photographs. He writes:
When a photograph is used as a “stand-in” for the actual environment, [a different] mode of appreciation is in essence forced on the appreciator. He or she views the object of appreciation only with his or her sense of sight and from a specific external point, because the “stand-in”, the photograph, must be so viewed. There is no point in smelling or touching the photograph, or in walking around it; and one cannot, of course, walk around in it. But with the actual object of appreciation—the natural environment—all these things are not only possible, they are also appropriate and have a very real point. (1979b, 106–107)
Carlson goes on to extend the same considerations to the related medium of landscape painting. His general conclusion, in our terminology, is that such representations are not appreciatively apt for natural environments.
On the other side of the aforementioned ideological divide, we have writers such as Thomas Heyd, who rejects Carlson’s requirement that we bring scientific understanding to nature appreciation. We may, Heyd insists, instead draw on many different sorts of understanding in appreciation, including conceptions of nature to be found in fictional and literary works about the landscape, landscape painting, and mythological tales about nature from different cultures (2001).
Heyd describes these kinds of representations as “guiding and mediating” the appreciation of nature. But his discussion of examples makes clear that these representations do not really offer mediated appreciation, in our sense. Rather, they enable an appreciator directly experiencing nature to focus on, and find interest and meaning in, certain features. One of his examples is George Seferis’ poem Santorini, which describes the Greek island of that name. Of a visitor to the island, Heyd writes: “If she knows Seferis’s poem she will be much better equipped to appreciate aesthetically her natural surrounds.” (2001, 132) Reading the poem does not allow her to appreciate the island in lieu of directly encountering it; it simply provides a resource for her to employ when directly encountering it. Even landscape painting, in Heyd’s view, works in the same way: “paintings and sculptures featuring images of landscapes, animals, or plants… [may remind viewers] of the natural environment that surrounds them, and [they] may be enticed to fixate on that environment a little longer, thereby aiding in the aesthetic appreciation of those things” (2001, 134). The possibility that we might appreciate nature via experiencing representations is something Heyd does not consider.6
A similar passing over of mediated appreciation can be found in the writings of Arnold Berleant, who, like Carlson, is an influential figure in the field. Berleant’s views about aesthetic appreciation are starkly opposed to Carlson’s: he not only rejects the need to bring “objective” scientific understanding to bear in appreciating nature, but also argues that the aim of such appreciation is to overcome the very division between nature and self, object and subject. Yet despite their differences, when it comes to the inadequacies of appreciating representations of nature, he and Carlson are squarely in agreement, for Berleant draws almost the same stark contrast: “If we regard the painting of a landscape disinterestedly from a distance, we get a contemplative object, but what of the appreciation of an actual landscape?” (1993, 232) The latter is so different from our typical disinterested, distanced experience of appreciating a painting that, Berleant concludes, to attempt to appreciate nature through such art is to “abandon nature entirely in favour of its representation” (231).7
So to sum up, the idea of mediated appreciation, which seems so common in the case of everyday photographs and in the case of art, seems largely to go by the boards in discussions of nature appreciation. To be sure, none of the philosophers I have discussed makes the strong claim that mediated nature appreciation is impossible. On the contrary, none
