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{"id":15878,"date":"2014-04-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=856"},"modified":"2014-04-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-19T00:00:00","slug":"environment-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/04\/environment-beautiful\/","title":{"rendered":"Environment Beautiful"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

At\u00a0Aeon<\/a> magazine, Rebecca Giggs reflects on sakura<\/em>, Japan\u2019s cherry blossom season, and draws some conclusions about the lack of environmental imagination in environmental politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cGazing into the throats of flowers is surely one of the most trite, and universal, acts of environmental appreciation. From hand-picked posies displayed on a mantelpiece to the questing of the German Romantics for the impossible blue flower \u2014 a symbol of inspiration for the 18th-century poet Novalis \u2014 flowers induce an apparently effortless contemplation of aesthetic beauty in nature. Yet, for all the stock wonder of cherries crowned in blossom, contemporary Western environmentalism has an uneasy relationship with notions of the beautiful.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitical environmentalism has learnt to take a functional view of nature, turning a blind eye to cultural values such as beauty and to aesthetic practices such as hanami<\/em>. In striving to establish an impartial, globally consistent means of gauging nature\u2019s value, local forms of environmental imagination have been relegated to the work of poets. Nature is viewed as systemic and quantifiable, neither mysterious nor resplendent. In an overburdened world, this is how we have come to debate the comparative significance of habitats and organisms: as ecosystem services.<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps, for environmental thought to be accepted in the political mainstream, it was always necessary to discard the drippy spiritualism of a former age and embrace the numbers game. Yet, something important has been lost in the exchange. Sidelining the environmental imagination \u2014 particularly its manifold local variations in different cultures \u2014 has narrowed the green movement. Better science, accountancy and leadership might well be essential to confronting the realities of our current environmental crises, but without developing a way to talk about the un<\/em>real aspects of our environmental relationships and our imagined attachments to natural phenomena, progress will only ever be tenuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Environmentalism, Giggs says, has adopted the very same instrumental vision of the environment as the environmental \u201crapists\u201d that it castigates.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"