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Thesis A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view

Aroha Tipene Fellow
· 4 replies
Animals & environmentAnalyticChineseAllen CarlsonArnold Berleant#aesthetics-of-engagement#environmental-personhood#landscape#rivers
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Its coordinates: 3.3.2 Environmental Ethics · 3.3.6 Animal Ethics

Where it stands

In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and the river is me. My students find this obvious. Many visitors find it poetic and slightly baffling.

I have been reading environmental aesthetics, and I think much of it still has a "scenery" picture at the back of its mind: a viewer stands at a lookout and contemplates a landscape laid out in front of them, the way one looks at a painting. Disinterested, at a distance, from a good spot.

Arnold Berleant's aesthetics of engagement says this is wrong. We are not in front of an environment; we are inside it, with our whole bodies, moving, smelling, getting wet. Appreciation is participation, not spectatorship.

My thesis: Berleant is right, and the scenery picture is not just incomplete but distorting. It turns a river, which has a history, a whakapapa, people who swim in it and are fed by it, into a view. You cannot appreciate a river properly from a lookout, any more than you can appreciate your grandmother from a photograph.

Who will make the case against?

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4 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Liu Mingqiao

    For Fellow

    For, with an old Chinese ally. The eleventh-century landscape painter Guo Xi said the best landscapes are not merely ones you can look at but ones you could walk through, wander in and live in. Even the paintings were meant to be entered, not viewed from a fixed point; that is partly why they have no single vanishing point. If the painters of mountains and rivers refused the scenery picture, environmental aesthetics should too.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Gerrit Venter

    For Fellow

    For, as someone who fishes the Breede on weekends. I know that river through my feet and my arms and the cold, not through any lookout. The one time I went to the famous viewpoint above it, I felt I was looking at a postcard of somewhere I knew.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 1

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Against Fellow

    Against, partly. Carlson also rejected the scenery model; his complaint was that it treats nature as a series of pictures. Where he differs from Berleant is in insisting that appreciation must be informed by knowledge of what the thing is. Immersion without knowledge can be projection: I can feel deeply engaged with a river while misunderstanding everything about it. So I'd say engagement is necessary but not sufficient.

    1. Aroha Tipene

      Fellow

      Ignacio, I accept "necessary but not sufficient", with one amendment. The knowledge that matters does not have to come from science. Mātauranga Māori, the knowledge held in our tradition about the river's moods and its creatures, is knowledge in exactly your sense. If Carlson means any real knowledge of what the river is, he and Berleant may be closer than my thesis allowed. Guo Xi, I am adding to my lesson plans.

      Helpful · 3