Abstract
Written narratives enable humans to appreciate the natural world in aesthetic terms. Firstly, narratives can galvanize for the reader a sense for another person’s experience of nature through the aesthetic representation of that experience in language. Secondly, narratives can encode and document for the human appreciator as writer an experience of nature in aesthetic terms. Through different narrative lenses, the compelling qualities of environments can be crystallized for both the reader (who vicariously experiences nature through language) and the human appreciator (who directly experiences nature through the senses). However, according to philosopher Allen Carlson’s “natural environmental model” of landscape aesthetics, science provides the definitive narrative that represents nature on its own terms and catalyzes appropriate appreciation. In this article, I examine Carlson’s claim and argue for an environmental aesthetic philosophy of narrative multiplicity. Such a model would draw from scientific, indigenous, and journalistic narrative modes toward a critically pluralistic environmental aesthetic of the natural world. The ethical framework I propose—the function of which I characterize simply as narrative “cross-checking”—acknowledges the value of narrative heterogeneity in expressing and generating aesthetic experience of environments. This article’s thesis is forwarded through extensive treatment of these three narratives expressed within two examples, one of geographical place and one of environmental practice. As I will suggest, Denali, the prominent Alaskan mountain, can be aesthetically appreciated through the diverse narratives enumerated above. As a second case study, the traditional burning regimes of indigenous peoples reveal collectively how a critically pluralistic environmental aesthetic of narratives can be applied to—and identified to exist within—ecocultural practices, such as firing the landscape.
Highlights
Stories of Snow and FireDenali presides above the Alaskan interior, its ermine coat of snow contrasting with the verdant basin below (Figure 1)
Carlson discerns between “design” and “order” appreciation. He argues that the aesthetic experience of the natural world must break free of design theory in which an object is regarded for its immediate phenomenological presence, apart from the history it bears
Where multiple stories mutually illuminate one another, we find a narrative environmental aesthetic that represents nature to the most inclusive degree possible by integrating elements of diverse stories: scientific, indigenous, and journalistic as the three selected for this article
Summary
Denali presides above the Alaskan interior, its ermine coat of snow contrasting with the verdant basin below (Figure 1). Narratives (used here interchangeably with the word “stories”) can determine the qualities and tones of our aesthetic experiences They balance and moderate immediate sensory reactions to aesthetic features, such as the jaggedness of Denali or the burning of the Australian landscape, ensuring that our appreciative responses to the natural world are appropriate and continuing. The purpose of this article is to point to the need for narrative commingling Guiding this discussion, Denali and the firing practices of different indigenous cultures will provide tangible examples of how narrative heterogeneity can deepen appreciation of the natural world as part of a sensorially refined, ecologically appropriate, and broadly attuned human aesthetic. More frequent fires in the arid regions of the United States and Australia, along with the shrinking of Alpine glaciers in Europe, heighten the implications of these two case studies: of snow and fire
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