Aesthetic value in Antarctica: beautiful or sublime?

Abstract

Protection of the wilderness and aesthetic values of Antarctica is mandated by the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, the “Madrid Protocol,” which came into force in 1998. Despite the passage of over 13 years, systematic protection for these values has not yet been put in place, due, in part, to the absence of suitable definitions for terms such as “aesthetic values.” This paper describes a semantic assessment that was part of a large-scale Internet survey on perceptions of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica. The aim of this part of the survey was to provide insights into aesthetic responses beyond simple aesthetic preferences. Respondents were asked to assess the suitability of 20 adjectives for 90 images of Antarctic landscapes. Taking the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime as the starting point, the adjectives were divided into two lists: words associated with the beautiful and words associated with the sublime. Over 315 respondents from 21 countries took part in the survey, resulting in over 33,000 semantic assessments. The landscapes in the images were classified into environmental regions, a modification of the Environmental Domains of Antarctica regionalization. The results reveal amongst other things that responses to coastal ice-free regions differ markedly to all other regions and that human presence has a strong negative effect on semantic assessments. Multidimensional scaling reveals a complex range of semantic responses that provide insights into how people respond to Antarctic landscapes.