nature appreciation essay

Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

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Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

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How nature can make you kinder, happier, and more creative, we are spending more time indoors and online. but recent studies suggest that nature can help our brains and bodies to stay healthy..

I’ve been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful.

But, even though I’ve always believed that hiking in nature had many psychological benefits, I’ve never had much science to back me up…until now, that is. Scientists are beginning to find evidence that being in nature has a profound impact on our brains and our behavior, helping us to reduce anxiety, brooding, and stress, and increase our attention capacity, creativity, and our ability to connect with other people.

“People have been discussing their profound experiences in nature for the last several 100 years—from Thoreau to John Muir to many other writers,” says researcher David Strayer, of the University of Utah. “Now we are seeing changes in the brain and changes in the body that suggest we are physically and mentally more healthy when we are interacting with nature.”

While he and other scientists may believe nature benefits our well-being, we live in a society where people spend more and more time indoors and online—especially children. Findings on how nature improves our brains brings added legitimacy to the call for preserving natural spaces—both urban and wild—and for spending more time in nature in order to lead healthier, happier, and more creative lives.

Here are some of the ways that science is showing how being in nature affects our brains and bodies.

1. Being in nature decreases stress

It’s clear that hiking—and any physical activity—can reduce stress and anxiety. But, there’s something about being in nature that may augment those impacts.

In one recent experiment conducted in Japan, participants were assigned to walk either in a forest or in an urban center (taking walks of equal length and difficulty) while having their heart rate variability, heart rate, and blood pressure measured. The participants also filled out questionnaires about their moods, stress levels, and other psychological measures.

Results showed that those who walked in forests had significantly lower heart rates and higher heart rate variability (indicating more relaxation and less stress), and reported better moods and less anxiety, than those who walked in urban settings. The researchers concluded that there’s something about being in nature that had a beneficial effect on stress reduction, above and beyond what exercise alone might have produced.

In another study , researchers in Finland found that urban dwellers who strolled for as little as 20 minutes through an urban park or woodland reported significantly more stress relief than those who strolled in a city center.

The reasons for this effect are unclear; but scientists believe that we evolved to be more relaxed in natural spaces. In a now-classic laboratory experiment by Roger Ulrich of Texas A&M University and colleagues, participants who first viewed a stress-inducing movie, and were then exposed to color/sound videotapes depicting natural scenes, showed much quicker, more complete recovery from stress than those who’d been exposed to videos of urban settings.

These studies and others provide evidence that being in natural spaces— or even just looking out of a window onto a natural scene—somehow soothes us and relieves stress.

2. Nature makes you happier and less brooding

I’ve always found that hiking in nature makes me feel happier, and of course decreased stress may be a big part of the reason why. But, Gregory Bratman, of Stanford University, has found evidence that nature may impact our mood in other ways, too.

In one 2015 study , he and his colleagues randomly assigned 60 participants to a 50-minute walk in either a natural setting (oak woodlands) or an urban setting (along a four-lane road). Before and after the walk, the participants were assessed on their emotional state and on cognitive measures, such as how well they could perform tasks requiring short-term memory. Results showed that those who walked in nature experienced less anxiety, rumination (focused attention on negative aspects of oneself), and negative affect, as well as more positive emotions, in comparison to the urban walkers. They also improved their performance on the memory tasks.

In another study, he and his colleagues extended these findings by zeroing in on how walking in nature affects rumination—which has been associated with the onset of depression and anxiety—while also using fMRI technology to look at brain activity. Participants who took a 90-minute walk in either a natural setting or an urban setting had their brains scanned before and after their walks and were surveyed on self-reported rumination levels (as well as other psychological markers). The researchers controlled for many potential factors that might influence rumination or brain activity—for example, physical exertion levels as measured by heart rates and pulmonary functions.

Even so, participants who walked in a natural setting versus an urban setting reported decreased rumination after the walk, and they showed increased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain whose deactivation is affiliated with depression and anxiety—a finding that suggests nature may have important impacts on mood.

Bratman believes results like these need to reach city planners and others whose policies impact our natural spaces. “Ecosystem services are being incorporated into decision making at all levels of public policy, land use planning, and urban design, and it’s very important to be sure to incorporate empirical findings from psychology into these decisions,” he says.

3. Nature relieves attention fatigue and increases creativity.

Today, we live with ubiquitous technology designed to constantly pull for our attention. But many scientists believe our brains were not made for this kind of information bombardment, and that it can lead to mental fatigue, overwhelm, and burnout, requiring “attention restoration” to get back to a normal, healthy state.

Strayer is one of those researchers. He believes that being in nature restores depleted attention circuits, which can then help us be more open to creativity and problem-solving.

“When you use your cell phone to talk, text, shoot photos, or whatever else you can do with your cell phone, you’re tapping the prefrontal cortex and causing reductions in cognitive resources,” he says.

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In a 2012 study , he and his colleagues showed that hikers on a four-day backpacking trip could solve significantly more puzzles requiring creativity when compared to a control group of people waiting to take the same hike—in fact, 47 percent more. Although other factors may account for his results—for example, the exercise or the camaraderie of being out together—prior studies have suggested that nature itself may play an important role. One in Psychological Science found that the impact of nature on attention restoration is what accounted for improved scores on cognitive tests for the study participants.

This phenomenon may be due to differences in brain activation when viewing natural scenes versus more built-up scenes—even for those who normally live in an urban environment. In a recent study conducted by Peter Aspinall at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and colleagues, participants who had their brains monitored continuously using mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) while they walked through an urban green space had brain EEG readings indicating lower frustration, engagement, and arousal, and higher meditation levels while in the green area, and higher engagement levels when moving out of the green area. This lower engagement and arousal may be what allows for attention restoration, encouraging a more open, meditative mindset.

It’s this kind of brain activity—sometimes referred to as “the brain default network”—that is tied to creative thinking , says Strayer. He is currently repeating his earlier 2012 study with a new group of hikers and recording their EEG activity and salivary cortisol levels before, during, and after a three-day hike. Early analyses of EEG readings support the theory that hiking in nature seems to rest people’s attention networks and to engage their default networks.

Strayer and colleagues are also specifically looking at the effects of technology by monitoring people’s EEG readings while they walk in an arboretum, either while talking on their cell phone or not. So far, they’ve found that participants with cell phones appear to have EEG readings consistent with attention overload, and can recall only half as many details of the arboretum they just passed through, compared to those who were not on a cell phone.

Though Strayer’s findings are preliminary, they are consistent with other people’s findings on the importance of nature to attention restoration and creativity.

“If you’ve been using your brain to multitask—as most of us do most of the day—and then you set that aside and go on a walk, without all of the gadgets, you’ve let the prefrontal cortex recover,” says Strayer. “And that’s when we see these bursts in creativity, problem-solving, and feelings of well-being.”

4. Nature may help you to be kind and generous

Whenever I go to places like Yosemite or the Big Sur Coast of California, I seem to return to my home life ready to be more kind and generous to those around me—just ask my husband and kids! Now some new studies may shed light on why that is.

In a series of experiments published in 2014, Juyoung Lee, GGSC director Dacher Keltner, and other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the potential impact of nature on the willingness to be generous, trusting, and helpful toward others, while considering what factors might influence that relationship.

As part of their study, the researchers exposed participants to more or less subjectively beautiful nature scenes (whose beauty levels were rated independently) and then observed how participants behaved playing two economics games—the Dictator Game and the Trust Game—that measure generosity and trust, respectively. After being exposed to the more beautiful nature scenes, participants acted more generously and more trusting in the games than those who saw less beautiful scenes, and the effects appeared to be due to corresponding increases in positive emotion.

In another part of the study, the researchers asked people to fill out a survey about their emotions while sitting at a table where more or less beautiful plants were placed. Afterwards, the participants were told that the experiment was over and they could leave, but that if they wanted to they could volunteer to make paper cranes for a relief effort program in Japan. The number of cranes they made (or didn’t make) was used as a measure of their “prosociality” or willingness to help.

Results showed that the presence of more beautiful plants significantly increased the number of cranes made by participants, and that this increase was, again, mediated by positive emotion elicited by natural beauty. The researchers concluded that experiencing the beauty of nature increases positive emotion—perhaps by inspiring awe, a feeling akin to wonder, with the sense of being part of something bigger than oneself—which then leads to prosocial behaviors.

Support for this theory comes from an experiment conducted by Paul Piff of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues, in which participants staring up a grove of very tall trees for as little as one minute experienced measurable increases in awe, and demonstrated more helpful behavior and approached moral dilemmas more ethically, than participants who spent the same amount of time looking up at a high building.

5. Nature makes you “feel more alive”

With all of these benefits to being out in nature, it’s probably no surprise that something about nature makes us feel more alive and vital . Being outdoors gives us energy, makes us happier, helps us to relieve the everyday stresses of our overscheduled lives, opens the door to creativity, and helps us to be kind to others.

No one knows if there is an ideal amount of nature exposure, though Strayer says that longtime backpackers suggest a minimum of three days to really unplug from our everyday lives. Nor can anyone say for sure how nature compares to other forms of stress relief or attention restoration, such as sleep or meditation. Both Strayer and Bratman say we need a lot more careful research to tease out these effects before we come to any definitive conclusions.

Still, the research does suggest there’s something about nature that keeps us psychologically healthy, and that’s good to know…especially since nature is a resource that’s free and that many of us can access by just walking outside our door. Results like these should encourage us as a society to consider more carefully how we preserve our wilderness spaces and our urban parks.

And while the research may not be conclusive, Strayer is optimistic that science will eventually catch up to what people like me have intuited all along—that there’s something about nature that renews us, allowing us to feel better, to think better, and to deepen our understanding of ourselves and others.

“You can’t have centuries of people writing about this and not have something going on,” says Strayer. “If you are constantly on a device or in front of a screen, you’re missing out on something that’s pretty spectacular: the real world.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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13 Essays About Nature: Use These For Your Next Assignment

Essays about nature can look at the impact of human behavior on the environment, or on the impact of nature on human beings. Check out these suggestions.

Nature is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It provides food, shelter, and even medication to help us live healthier, happier lives. It also inspires artists, poets, writers, and photographers because of its beauty.

Essays about nature can take many different paths. Descriptive essays about the beauty of nature can inspire readers. They give the writer the chance to explore some creativity in their essay writing. You can also write a persuasive essay arguing about an environmental topic and how humans harm the natural environment. You can also write an informative essay to discuss a particular impact or aspect of the natural world and how it impacts the human beings who live within it.

If you need to write a nature essay, read on to discover 13 topics that can work well. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

1. How Happiness Is Related to Nature Connectedness

2. why protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility, 3. how technological advancements can help the environment, 4. why global warming is a danger for future generations, 5. how deforestation impacts the beauty of nature, 6. the relationship between plants and human beings, 7. the health benefits of spending time in nature, 8. what are the gifts of nature, 9. the importance of nature to sustain human life, 10. the beauty of non-living things in nature, 11. does eco-tourism help or hurt the natural world, 12. how sustainability benefits the natural environment, 13. does agriculture hurt or help nature.

Exposure to nature has a significant positive impact on mood and overall mental health. In other words, happiness and nature connectedness have a close link. Your nature essay can explore the research behind this and then build on that research to show why nature conservation is so important.

This essay on nature is important because it shows why people need the natural environment. Nature provides more than just the natural resources we need for life. Spending time in the fresh air and sunshine actually makes us happier, so behaviors that harm nature harm your potential happiness.

Planet earth is a precious gift that is often damaged by the selfish activities of human beings. All human beings have the potential to hurt the natural environment and the living creatures in that environment, and thus protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility. You can build this into an essay and explore what that responsibility may look like to different groups.

For the child, for example, protecting nature may be as simple as picking up trash in the park, but for the CEO of a manufacturing company, it may look like eco-friendly company policies. For an adult, it may look like shopping for a car with lower emissions. Take a look at the different ways people can protect nature and why it is essential.

Technology is often viewed as the enemy of nature, but you can find technological advancements helping rather than harming nature. For example, light bulbs that use less energy or residential solar panel development have reduced the average home’s amount of energy. Your essay could explore some inventions that have helped nature.

After looking at these technologies, dive into the idea that technology, when used well, has a significant positive impact on the environment, rather than a negative one. The key is developing technology that works with conservation efforts, rather than against them.

Global warming is a hot topic in today’s society, but the term gets used so often, that many people have tuned it out. You can explore the dangers of global warming and how it potentially impacts future generations. You can also touch on whether or not this problem has been over-blown in education and media.

This essay should be full of facts and data to back up your opinions. It could also touch on initiatives that could reduce the risks of global warming to make the future brighter for the next generation.

Much has been written about the dangers of deforestation on the overall ecosystem, but what about its effect on nature’s beauty? This essay topic adds an additional reason why countries should fight deforestation to protect green spaces and the beauty of nature.

In your essay, strike a balance between limiting deforestation and the need to harvest trees as natural resources. Look at ways companies can use these natural resources without destroying entire forests and ecosystems. You might also be interested in these essays about nature .

People need plants, and this need can give you your essay topic. Plants provide food for people and for animals that people also eat. Many pharmaceutical products come from plants originally, meaning they are vital to the medical field as well.

Plants also contribute to the fresh air that people breathe. They filter the air, removing toxins and purifying the air to make it cleaner. They also add beauty to nature with their foliage and flowers. These facts make plants a vital part of nature, and you can delve into that connection in your nature essay.

Spending time in nature not only improves your mental health, but it also improves your physical health . When people spend time in nature, they have lower blood pressure and heart rates. They also produce fewer damaging stress hormones and reduced muscle tension. Shockingly, spending time in nature may actually reduce mortality rates.

Take some time to research these health benefits, and then weave them into your essay. By showing the health benefits of nature exposure, you can build an appreciation for nature in your audience. You may inspire people to do more to protect the natural environment.

Nature has given people many gifts. Our food all comes from nature in its most basic form, from fruits and vegetables to milk and meats. It provides the foundation for many medicines and remedies. These gifts alone make it worth protecting.

Yet nature does much more. It also gives the gift of better mental health. It can inspire feelings of wonder in people of all ages. Finally, it provides beauty and tranquility that you cannot reproduce anywhere else. This essay is more descriptive and reflective than factual, but it can be an exciting topic to explore.

Can humans live without nature? Based on the topics already discussed, the answer is no. You can use this fact to create an essay that connects nature to the sustenance of human life. Without nature, we cannot survive.

One way to look at this importance is to consider the honey bee . The honey bee seems like a simple part of the natural world, yet it is one of the most essential. Without bees, fruits and vegetables will not get pollinated as easily, if at all. If bees disappear, the entire food system will struggle. Thus, bees, and many other parts of nature, are vital to human life.

Have you ever felt fully inspired by a glorious sunset or sunrise? Have you spent time gazing at a mountain peak or the ocean water crashing on the shoreline and found your soul refreshed? Write about one of these experiences in your essay.

Use descriptive words to show how the non-living parts of nature are beautiful, just like the living creatures and plants that are part of nature. Draw from personal experiences of things you have seen in nature to make this essay rich and engaging. If you love nature, you might also be interested in these essays about camping .

Ecotourism is tourism designed to expose people to nature. Nature tours, safaris, and even jungle or rainforest experiences are all examples of ecotourism. It seems like ecotourism would help the environment by making people more aware, but does it really?

For your essay, research if ecotourism helps or hurts the environment. If you find it does both, consider arguing which is more impactful, the positive side or the negative side. On the positive side, ecotourism emphasizes sustainability in travel and highlights the plight of endangered species, leading to initiatives that protect local ecosystems. On the negative side, ecotourism can hurt the ecosystems at the same time by bringing humans into the environment, which automatically changes it. Weigh these pros and cons to see which side you fall on.

For more help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

Sustainability is the practice of taking care of human needs and economic needs while also protecting the natural environment for future generations. But do sustainable practices work? This essay topic lets you look at popular eco-friendly practices and determine if they are helpful to the environment, or not.

Sustainability is a hot topic, but unfortunately, some practices labeled as sustainable , aren’t helpful to the environment. For example, many people think they are doing something good when tossing a plastic bottle in the recycling bin, but most recycling centers simply throw away the bottle if that little plastic ring is present, so your effort is wasted. A better practice is using a reusable water bottle. Consider different examples like this to show how sustainability can help the environment, but only when done well.

Agriculture is one way that humans interact with and change the natural environment. Planting crops or raising non-native animals impacts the nature around the farm. Does this impact hurt or help the local natural ecosystem?

Explore this topic in your essay. Consider the impact of things like irrigation, fertilization, pesticides, and the introduction of non-native plants and animals to the local environment. Consider ways that agriculture can benefit the environment and come to a conclusion in your essay about the overall impact.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Nicole Harms has been writing professionally since 2006. She specializes in education content and real estate writing but enjoys a wide gamut of topics. Her goal is to connect with the reader in an engaging, but informative way. Her work has been featured on USA Today, and she ghostwrites for many high-profile companies. As a former teacher, she is passionate about both research and grammar, giving her clients the quality they demand in today's online marketing world.

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1.6: What Makes Nature Beautiful?

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• Elizabeth Scarbrough

Introduction

As you have read in this volume, much of contemporary aesthetics focuses on the nature of art and artworks. The aesthetics of nature as a subdiscipline of analytic philosophical aesthetics gained prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. [1] Discussions about the aesthetics of nature are complicated by questions about the scope of the topic: Are we talking about natural objects? Natural environments? Whole ecosystems? What about human-created natural environments such as gardens, parks, and cityscapes? Exactly what counts as natural beauty?

In what follows I will present a brief overview of different theories of the beauty of nature. I will start by discussing two historical accounts that I believe have most impacted our current conception of the beauty in nature: the picturesque and the sublime. I will then turn to a discussion of contemporary accounts of the beauty of nature, dividing these accounts into conceptual accounts, non-conceptual accounts, and hybrid accounts of nature appreciation.

Historical Accounts of the beauty of nature

Anthropocentric accounts: the picturesque and landscape aesthetics.

The picturesque is an aesthetic category often applied to the aesthetic appreciation of nature. It was popularised toward the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. [2] At the core of the notion of the picturesque is the prospect of converting natural scenes into pictures. This “landscape aesthetic” assumes that one ought to employ a mode of aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment that is informed by the practice, and aesthetic criteria of, landscape painting. Eighteenth-century landscape painters used devices such as the “Claude-glass” to help “frame” the scene they wished to paint. These Claude-glasses became so popular in the eighteenth century that travelers and other flâneurs would use them without any intention to paint the vistas they saw. [3] While there were many disparate understandings of the picturesque during this time period, I will mention two seminal figures: Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829) and Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824). [4] Price argues that the picturesque was an objective aesthetic quality that resided in the object (Ross 1998, 133). Price believes that the picturesque could be defined through its “roughness, sudden variation, irregularity, intricacy and variety,” and his list of picturesque objects included: water, trees, buildings, ruins, dogs, sheep, horses, birds of prey, women, music, and painting. In contrast, Knight thinks that the picturesque was a mode of association found within the viewer and thus any object could be picturesque. These associations, he believes, would only be available to those who had knowledge of landscape paintings:

This very relation to painting expressed by the word picturesque, is that which affords the whole pleasure derived from association; which can, therefore, only be felt by persons who have correspondent ideas to associate; that is, by persons in a certain degree conversant in that art. Such persons being in the habit of viewing, and receiving pleasure from fine pictures, will naturally feel pleasure in viewing those objects in nature, which have called forth those powers of imitation and embellishment. (Ross 1998, 155–156)

Thus, within the history of the picturesque we see differing ideas about the source of beauty: Is beauty subjective (residing in the perceiver’s mind) or is beauty an objective quality in objects? [5] Whether you believe beauty is subjective or objective, the picturesque is probably still the most popular (mis)conception of the beauty of nature. When we think of a beautiful scene of nature, our ideas are substantially informed by our past experiences with landscape paintings, and now landscape photography.

The sublime

The sublime is another theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. While the first reference to the sublime is in the first century CE (we see hints of its predecessor in Aristotle’s Poetics ), [6] the term really blossomed in eighteenth-century British philosophy. Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1671–1713), third Earl of Shaftesbury (now known simply as Shaftesbury) wrote about the sublime in The Moralist: A Philosophical Rhapsody . While viewing the Alps during his “Grand Tour” he wrote,

Here thoughtless Men, seized with the Newness of such Objects, become thoughtful, and willingly contemplate the incessant Changes of their Earth’s Surface. They see, as in one instant, the Revolutions of past Ages, the fleeting forms of Things, and the Decay even of their own Globe. … The wasted Mountains show them the World itself only as a humble Ruin, and make them think of its approaching Period. (Hussey [1927] 1983, 55–56). [7]

He praises the mountains as sublime, claiming that mountains are the highest order of scenery (Hussey [1927] 1983, 55). The sublime, for Shaftesbury, is not contrary to beauty, but superior to it.

The sublime is bigger, harder, and darker than the picturesque. Unlike the picturesque, whose beauty is aimed to charm, the sublime teaches us something. The two most influential theories of the sublime are those of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

In his Introduction to Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Adam Phillips writes, “Beauty and Sublimity turn out to be the outlaws of rational enquiry. Both are coercive, irresistible, and a species of seduction. The sublime is a rape, Beauty is a lure” (Burke [1757] 2008, xxii). The sublime is dangerous, full of terror. Burke’s sublime can be found in both art and nature. [8] For Burke the sublime exists in degrees, the strongest of which invokes astonishment from the viewer, mingled with a degree of horror (53). Burke claims that the strongest forms of the sublime are usually found in the ideas of eternity and infinity (57). In weaker forms, the sublime’s effects include admiration, reverence and respect (53). Burke states,

Whatever leads to raise in man his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind. And this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates. (46)

When we experience the sublime, we feel as if the human mind has triumphed in the face of terror. This accomplishment is pleasurable, and thus we receive pleasure from what at first started as an unpleasurable experience.

Burke’s influence on Kant’s theory of the sublime cannot be overstated. Like Burke, Kant recognised that in experiencing the sublime, something pleasurable resulted from an experience that could not be called beautiful. Like Burke’s, Kant’s conception of the sublime is tied to notions of awe and respect, and, like Burke’s, Kant’s sublime is found in the infinite. Kant took Burke’s nascent ideas and from them developed a full-fledged theory of the sublime. Unlike Burke, Kant believed that the experience of the sublime resides solely in the minds of people.

Kant distinguishes two different types of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical. The paradigmatic example of the mathematical sublime is that of infinity (again, similar to Burke). With the mathematical sublime,

the feeling of the sublime is thus a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude for the estimation by means of reason, and a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence of this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason, insofar as striving from them is never less a law for us. (Kant [1790] 2001, § 27, 5:247).

For Kant, the imagination is the faculty we use to bring perceptions into our mind before we subsume these “intuitions” under concepts. With the mathematical sublime, my mind is incapable of perceiving the magnitude of what I’m witnessing. When I look up at the starry night, my mind cannot comprehend the magnitude of space. While I can’t comprehend the magnitude, I am none the less pleased at my ability to grapple with it. In sum, what Kant is saying here is that we feel displeasure in the fact that we cannot fully comprehend infinity but feel pleasure in the fact that we at least have the ability to try.

Kant’s dynamical sublime involves the recognition of the possible destructive forces in nature, which could result in our death. This recognition, while initially unpleasurable, leads to pleasure since these forces in nature (e.g., storms, winds, earthquakes) “allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature” (Kant [1790] 2001, § 28, 5:261). The experience of the dynamical sublime, then, is an experience of the enormity of nature and our role within it. We feel puny against the forces of nature, but also realise our reason gives us standing.

Now that we have discussed two historical accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, I turn to more contemporary accounts.

Contemporary Accounts: (a) cognitive, (b) non-cognitive, (c) hybrid

Contemporary accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature start to gain traction around the 1970s. [9] This is no accident as the environmental movement was in full swing. In what follows I will discuss the contemporary accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature in two major camps: the cognitive (or conceptual) camp and the non-cognitive (or non-conceptual) camp. Loosely speaking, cognitive theories are those that emphasise the centrality of knowledge in the appreciation of natural beauty. These theories come in many flavours, but many of them (e.g., the theories of Carlson, Rolston, and Eaton [10] ) focus on the use of scientific categories in nature appreciation. Allen Carlson’s Natural Environmental Model (NEM) is a paradigmatic example of a cognitivist theory of the aesthetics of natural environments. For Carlson, the key to appreciating nature aesthetically is to appreciate it through our scientific knowledge. Carlson’s NEM borrows Paul Ziff’s notion of aspection (Ziff 1966, 71). Aspection (seeing the object first this way, then that) provides guidelines or boundaries for our aesthetic experiences and judgments of certain art objects. Different artworks have different boundaries, which will yield different acts of aspection. For example, while many paintings can be viewed from one location, other works of art (e.g., sculpture, architecture) require you to walk through space. Thus, painting and sculpture require different acts of aspection.

Drawing upon the insights of Ziff (and others such as Kendall Walton, [11] ) Carlson argues that the proper aesthetic appreciation of nature involves acts of aspection through the lens (or category) of scientific knowledge. [12] Just as knowledge of the art’s kind (e.g., opera, painting, sculpture) informs our appreciation, scientific information about nature informs our aesthetic appreciation of it. Thus, to truly appreciate an ecosystem or an object in that system, one must have (some) scientific knowledge in order to employ the appropriate act of aspection. Importantly, one must not treat nature as one would treat art, turning a natural object into an art object, [13] or transforming an experience of an open field into an imagined landscape painting (as theories of the picturesque might). [14] Carlson acknowledges that nature is importantly unframed and as a consequence when we try to frame nature by turning a natural object (e.g., driftwood) into a free standing object, or when one tries to frame nature by experiencing it as if looking through a Claude-glass, one imposes a frame that should not be there. Carlson’s approach is labeled “cognitivist” because it emphasises the importance of cognition in aesthetically appreciating nature well .

Non-Cognitive

Non-cognitive theories are those that emphasise the subjective aesthetic experience of natural beauty and often focus on the role of the imagination. These include theories put forth by various philosophers, including Hepburn (2010), Berleant (1992), Carroll (2004), Godlovitch (1997), and Brady (1998). [15]

Emily Brady presents one such non-cognitivist model in her article “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Using Carlson’s NEM as a foil against her own account, she argues that basing the aesthetic appreciation of nature on scientific categories is flawed because it is “too constraining as a guide for appreciation of nature qua aesthetic object” (Brady 1998, 158). She provides four core criticisms of Carlson’s scientific approach. First, she asserts that Carlson’s account rests on a faulty analogy: just as aesthetic appreciation of art requires knowledge of art history and criticism to help place art in its correct category, we should use natural history (e.g., geology, biology, physics) to place nature in a correct category. In a (now) famous counterexample to the NEM, recounted by Brady, Noël Carroll raises the worrisome case of the waterfall (Carroll 2004, 95). Carroll asks: What scientific category must we fit a particular waterfall in order to appreciate it aesthetically? If the only category that we need is that of a waterfall, then the NEM need not rely on scientific knowledge at all, but just rely on “common sense.”

Further, Brady argues that even if we grant that scientific knowledge could enrich an aesthetic appreciation of nature, it does not seem essential to aesthetic appreciation. Ecological value, she argues, is—and ought to be—a distinct (while still overlapping) category of value. Perhaps most convincing of Brady’s objections is that the scientific approach is too constraining, since proper aesthetic appreciation of nature requires “freedom, flexibility, and creativity” (Brady 1998, 159). We should have the freedom to explore trains of thought not related to scientific categories. When looking at the weathered bark on a tree, I need not know how it was formed; rather I may make associations between the weathered tree bark and the beauty of a beloved older relative’s face—the ravines in both adding a beautiful texture to the surface. She believes that the aesthetic appreciation of nature ought to use perceptual and imaginative capacities, such as those exemplified in my tree bark/relative example. [16] Brady claims that the most desirable model of aesthetic appreciation of nature will: (a) be able to distinguish aesthetic value from other types of value, (b) provide a structure to make aesthetic judgments which are not merely subjective, and (c) solve the problem of how to guide the aesthetic appreciation of nature without reference to art models.

Criticisms of this “imaginative approach” focus on the possibility of an unfettered imagination producing absurd trains of aesthetic inquiry. For example, one might look at the ripple pattern reflecting on the water of a lake and imagine that the ripples look like the ridges of the potato chips you recently cut out of your diet. From here you begin a train of thought which leads you to worry about processed food, factory farming, and fad diets. This seems like an unproductive, and unaesthetic, train of thought. To combat this “unfettered imagination” worry, Brady gives us some guidelines to prevent self-indulgence and irrelevant trains of thought. She believes the Kantian notion of disinterestedness can help prevent the sort of train of thought I just rehearsed. [17] Further Brady gives us guidelines for what she calls “imagining well.” She believes “imagining well” should be thought of like an Aristotelian virtue: it is acquired only through practice and only becomes a virtue once it is a matter of habit. This is a non-conceptual model of aesthetic appreciation in that it does not rely on previous concepts of art or nature for deep aesthetic appreciation.

If imagining well is like an Aristotelian virtue, then there should be a developing capacity on the part of the aesthetic participant to know when to employ scientific categories and when not to. Surely, sometimes focusing on scientific categories can cut aesthetic pleasure off at the knees.

An example of this phenomenon can be seen in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi :

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book–a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. . . . In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter. . . . I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . .The sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights. . . . No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. (Twain [1883] 1984, 94–96)

This much-discussed example shows that knowledge sometimes precludes aesthetic appreciation. Turning to another example, as a flute player I am aware of passages that are particularly hard to play. One reason for their difficulty is the lack of a natural stopping place to take a quick breath. Whenever I hear another flute player perform one of such pieces, I am on the edge of my seat, anticipating when he or she will take a breath. The in-depth knowledge about the piece precludes my appreciating the overall sound of the music. Instead, I find myself focusing on the technical ability of the artists. According to Brady, I am not appropriately disinterested in this instance. If that’s the case, then almost any amount of expert knowledge (including scientific knowledge) could preclude aesthetic appreciation. Is there a happy middle ground?

Hybrid Accounts: Can We Marry Cognitive and Non-Cognitive accounts to get the best of both worlds?

Perhaps instead of aiming for a uniform experience, we should be aiming for experiences that are aesthetically meaningful and reward our attention and efforts. In other words, we should allow for the co-recognition of a variety of experiences rather than defending one account of meaning over another when it is possible to countenance them all. In his book Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts , Ronald Moore (2007) details a pluralist model of aesthetic appreciation. Moore argues that the appropriate way to aesthetically appreciate nature is syncretic: rather than using any one particular model, we should draw from multiple models. This syncretic way of appreciating nature re-integrates our appreciation of natural objects and artworks. Moore insists that we “approach the qualities of things we think worthy of admiration in nature through lenses we have developed for thinking of aesthetic qualities at large—not art, not literature, not music, not politics, not urban planning, not landscape design, but all of these and more” (2007, 216). If the goal of our aesthetic appreciation is to use those parts of our intelligent awareness that suit the object, then this model can include all modes of aesthetic appreciation.

But while such a model enables us to explore many modes of appreciation, it does not tell us what modes of appreciation are relevant to which objects. Some might see this as a weakness of the syncretic account, but one might also argue that the charm of the syncretic model is that it challenges us to come up with specific accounts of appreciation for different types of objects.

One might worry that different modes of appreciation might preclude one another. When Moore declares that syncretism is “the Unitarianism of aesthetics” (2007, 39), a precocious deist might ask if one can be both Jewish and Buddhist, both Jesuit and Bahá’í? In my view, some models are not only compatible, but also ampliative. For example, non-cognitive models of the appreciation of natural beauty that focus on “trains of ideas” or “associations,” may be informed by more cognitive models such as Carlson’s NEM. [18] Scientific information about an object of delectation can spur more interesting, and perhaps, more productive trains of thought. If we know that a particular flower blooms but once a year, that scientific information can be utilised to ground a fruitful aesthetic experience.

But some models might be incommensurable; it might be impossible to employ two models at the same time, to have two experiences of appreciation at the same time. In this scenario we might decide to alternate between two different modes of appreciation. Take, for example, the film critic. Film critics often watch movies twice: once to allow themselves to enjoy the film—to immerse themselves, and the second time to focus on technical aspects of the production with an eye toward their criticism. The “technical” mode and the “immersion” mode might very well be incompatible, but one might be able to switch off and on between the two. If this is the case, there is nothing stopping me from having one experience after the other as the appreciation unfolds throughout time. These multiple avenues for aesthetic pleasure favor a syncretic model, or pluralist model, of aesthetic appreciation. We must draw upon whatever models we have at our disposal, including conceptual as well as non-conceptual models, artistic as well as natural models, historical and contemporary models alike.

In this chapter we examined some of the historical underpinnings of our appreciation of nature, namely the British Picturesque and the sublime. We then discussed cognitive, non-cognitive, and hybrid accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. What I hope to have shown is that there is no one-principle-fits-all solution for all aesthetic experiences of nature. An immersive experience river rafting will be different from birdwatching. Knowledge in some cases will add depth to our aesthetic experiences, while in other cases will impede our ability to appreciate. We should thus embrace a pluralistic model of aesthetic engagement, one that allows us to employ different models to different objects—or different models at different times in our life. The appropriate response to nature, for the sublime, is awe and humility. This might be instructive for me at a particular time in my life. At another time, the NEM might allow me to gain access to experiences of unscenic nature otherwise inaccessible through other models (such as the picturesque).

I would like to leave you with one final thought: we need not go to a National Park to engage with nature. We live in nature and are part of it. It is accessible to us in the trees that line our streets, the urban animals who forage for scraps in our trash bins, and in the sunsets we watch through our car windshield on our commute home. The beauty of nature surrounds us and is available to all—free of charge.

Alison, Archibald. 1790. Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste . London: J.J.G and G. Robinson.

Berleant, Arnold. 1992. The Aesthetics of Environments . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Brady, Emily. 1998. “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring): 139–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/432252. Reprinted in Carlson and Berleant 2004.

Burke, Edmund. (1757) 2008. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carlson, Allen. 1979. “Appreciation and the Natural Environment.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 3 (Spring): 267–275.

Carlson, Allen, and Arnold Berleant, eds. 2004. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments . Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Carroll, Noël. 2004. “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History.” In The Aesthetics of Natural Environments , edited by Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

Dewey, John. (1934) 2005. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee Books.

Eaton, Marcia Mulder. 2004. “Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” In Carlson and Berleant, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, 170–181.

Gilpin, William. (1768) 2010. “An Essay upon Prints, Containing Remarks upon the Principles of picturesque Beauty.” In Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale ECCO, Print Editions.

Godlovitch, Stan. 1997. “Carlson on Appreciation.” S. Godlovitch and A. Carlson Debate 55 (Winter): 53–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/431604 .

Hepburn, Ronald. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Sky and Space.” Environmental Values 19, no. 3: 273–288. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327110X519835 .

Hussey, Christopher. (1927) 1983. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View . London: F. Cass.

Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment . Translated by Paul Guyer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Marsh, George Perkins. (1865) 2018. Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Moore, Ronald. 2007. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts . Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Muir, John. 1894. The Mountains of California . New York: Century Co.

Rolston III, Holmes. 2004. “The Aesthetic Experience of Forest.” In Carlson and Berleant, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments , 182–195.

Ross, Stephanie. 1998. What Gardens Mean . Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper). (1709) 2010. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody. Being a Recital of Certain Conversations upon Natural and Moral Subjects. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale ECCO, Print Editions.

Thoreau, Henry D. (1862) 2012. October, or Autumnal Tints . Illustrated by Lincoln Perry. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Twain, Mark. (1883) 1984. Life on the Mississippi . New York: Penguin.

Walton, Kendall L. 1970. “Categories of Art.” The Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (July 1): 334–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183933 .

Ziff, Paul. 1966. Philosophical Turnings: Essays in Conceptual Appreciation . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• Ronald Hepburn’s 1966 article, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” is a good place to start and a must-read for anyone interested in the topic. This essay, and many others I discuss in this chapter, can be found in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant’s edited volume, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Carlson and Berleant 2004). ↵
• The term seems to have first appeared in 1768, in an essay by Rev. William Gilpin (1724–1804) entitled, “An Essay Upon Prints,” where Gilpin defined the picturesque simply as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture” ([1768] 2010, xii). ↵
• Allen Carlson, whose Natural Environmental Model we will discuss in the next section, has noted that if we are to adhere to the landscape cult’s practice of viewing the environment as a landscape painting, we are essentially forced to see the natural environment as static and as a mere two-dimensional representation. This leads us to have an incomplete and shallow aesthetic engagement with the natural environment. ↵
• While I will discuss only Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, two other men would be relevant to a longer discussion about the picturesque: William Gilpin and Humphry Repton (1752–1818). ↵
• As we will see in the next section on the sublime, Kant’s theory of judgment places beauty in the minds of the spectator. ↵
• The first reference to the sublime is thought to be Longinus: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous. The sublime was said to inspire awe. Aristotle believed that horrific events (in tragic plays) call upon fear and pity, resulting in a catharsis in the spectator. Elements of this view can be found in many theories of the sublime. ↵
• See also Shaftesbury ([1709] 2010) ↵
• Burke believed that anything that contained one or more of the following attributes could be perceived as sublime: (1) Obscurity, (2) Power, (3), Privation (4), Vastness, (5) Infinity, (6) Succession, (7) Uniformity ([1757] 2008, 61–76). ↵
• Please note that I have skipped over the nineteenth century aesthetics of nature here. In G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) aesthetics, philosophy of art expressed “Absolute Spirit” and nature was relegated to a footnote. Only a handful of Romantic thinkers thought and wrote on the aesthetics of nature, and many of these were in the United States. For a good introduction read Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) “Autumnal Tints” (Thoreau [1862] 2012), George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) ([1865] 2018), and the environmentalist John Muir's (1838–1914) “A View of the High Sierra” (Muir 1894). ↵
• An introduction to Carlson’s cognitive model for the aesthetic appreciation of nature can be found in his “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” (Carlson 1979). For an introduction to Holmes Rolston III’s cognitive model, please see his “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests” (Rolston III 2004). A good introduction to Marcia Muelder Eaton can be found in her “Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (Eaton 2004). ↵
• Carlson also draws upon Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” (1970) in which Walton argues that we need art historical information to make well-informed aesthetic judgments. For example, if I were to judge Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Swan” as a failure of minimalist sculpture, I wouldn’t be attending to the properties of “Balloon Swan” which makes it a successful piece of (non-minimalist) contemporary pop sculpture. In order to appreciate “Balloon Swan” appropriately, I must categorise it appropriately. ↵
• While Carlson gives priority to appreciation informed by scientific knowledge, he does acknowledge the role of common sense in our aesthetic appreciation of nature. ↵
• The “object model”—as Carlson calls it—asks the appreciator to take the object out of its natural environment and observe its formal properties such as symmetry, unity, etc. When we do this, we appreciate the natural object as an art object, thus only appreciating a limited set of aesthetic properties, namely those formal properties that we find in art. In rejecting this model, Carlson demands that our appreciation of a natural object requires us to place it in its natural context. For example, we should see the honeycomb as part of the bee life cycle and appreciate the purpose and role it plays in nature. ↵
• The “landscape model” asks us to aesthetically appreciate a natural landscape as we would appreciate the painting or picture of that natural landscape. We are asked to attend to the scenic qualities of the landscape, to appreciate its lines and form. Unlike a painting, which is already presented to us as a framed object, we should likewise frame the landscape. This model reinforces the subject/object distinction, by asking us to place ourselves outside or in opposition to the landscape that we are trying to appreciate. ↵
• Non-cognitive accounts may further be divided into imagination accounts (Brady) and immersion accounts (Berleant). While I focus here on imagination accounts, Berleant’s immersion account is instructive. Berleant argues that the appropriate way to appreciate nature is through engagement; this non-conceptual model (of engagement) correctly emphasises humanity’s continuity with the natural world and nature’s boundlessness where other models do not. ↵
• Brady details four different types of imagination: (i) exploratory, which is the imaginative search for unity in perception, (ii) projective, where we intentionally see something as something else, (iii) ampliative, which moves beyond mere imagination to draw upon other cognitive resources, and (iv) revelatory , where the ampliative imagination has led to the discovery of an aesthetic truth (Brady 1998, 163). ↵
• The First Moment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment tells us that judgments of taste (which are judgments about beauty) are “disinterested.” Kant details a few different ways in which these judgments are disinterested: we must not ask if the object is good (or good for something), we shouldn’t invoke sensations of the agreeable, and we shouldn’t care about the real existence of the object. Let’s take these three forms of interest in turn. First, when looking at something beautiful (let’s say a flower) I shouldn’t care if the flower is good for something (such as being good for medicinal purposes). I shouldn’t also care if the object is morally good. Second, when I make a judgment of beauty, I am not saying that the object is “agreeable” or pleasing to me. Going back to our flower example—Kant doesn’t want us to say something like, “this flower is agreeable to me since it is the kind my mother used to give me when I was sick.” Finally, we shouldn’t care whether or not the object is real. A mirage of a flower and an actual flower should hold the same judgment of beauty. In this sense we are disinterested in whether the object is real or imaginary. ↵
• Those who argue for “associative” models of aesthetic experience might include Archibald Alison (1790), who argues that objects spur “trains of ideas of emotions”; John Dewey’s discussion of “trains of ideas” ([1934] 2005); and Emily Brady on “Imagining Well” (1998). ↵

APPRECIATING NATURE

INTRODUCTION

Why appreciation of the beauty of the universe is so important to ourselves, our communities and to the one who made it..

An introduction to appreciating nature

By Sr Shirley Aeria

• September 14, 2021
• appreciating nature , Lifestyle , Outdoor Spaces , Spirituality , Wildlife Gardening

We asked Sr Shirley to share some wisdom on why an appreciation of nature is deeply rooted in our faith.

NATURE IS A CONDUIT OF GOD’S LOVE

Nature, in all its limitless forms reflect a humble and extravagant God who cares deeply for all that has been created. Through our contemplative gaze, we can experience nature as an immense channel of God’s magnanimous love for each of us and for all of creation. In Matt 6:26, Jesus says, “Look at the birds, they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest… yet your Father in heaven takes care of them.” In the great mystery of the Incarnation of God in Jesus (when God became man), the core message is that the Divine Presence is in us and in all of creation. The Incarnation has made every being and creation holy. There is an infinite self-emptying of God in creation and therefore, every aspect of creation has inherent dignity and deserves respect and appreciation.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE STOP APPRECIATING NATURE?

Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ reminds us that all creation is interconnected. So, if one aspect of creation, whether it be humanity, animals, or landscapes, is damaged due to a lack of appreciation or care, we are all, directly or indirectly, affected. For example, losing habitats and homes due to climate change, pollution or mining can cause considerable suffering to both people and nature. In his Canticle of the Sun, St Francis of Assisi goes to great lengths to amplify the sisterly and brotherly relationships we have with ALL aspects of creation. Every person, flora, and fauna has a mission. Just because we haven’t found their respective purpose, does not mean that they are redundant! Our ecosystem relies heavily on relationships functioning well at all levels, as scientists have informed us. The importance of biodiversity goes beyond our dependence on ecosystems to live. All God’s creatures, from sister tree to brother fly, all have their own value and goodness. Every created thing, living or non-living, is here to give glory to God by their very existence on planet Earth, and the entire universe.

WHAT LEGACY SHOULD WE, AS CHRISTIANS, LEAVE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS?

God has entrusted humanity with the responsibility of looking after the planet as we read in Genesis 1:26ff. The reality right now is rather different. We humans have contributed to the destruction of our planet. Failure to act on our part as Christians, would be both irresponsible and totally lacking in charity if we are to care for our brothers and sisters on planet earth.

“The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time “she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction”. St Pope John Paul II

WHAT ROLE DOES MY PARISH HAVE IN HELPING PEOPLE APPRECIATE AND CARE FOR CREATION?

Within the parish setting, if the leadership recognises the importance of creation, this attitude will more likely filter through the majority of parishioners. The physical space in the parish can encourage practical activities which involve the sharing of the gifts and skills of parishioners to work together to support our common home would, no doubt, inspire and encourage more people to engage with nature. The parish, by making their grounds beautiful and full of nature, can help parishioners and passers by experience of beauty in their everyday lives. The beauty of nature is real therapy for our soul. As many of us will agree, there are numerous health benefits to being in beautiful places such as reducing stress, increased positivity, increased focus, and even measurable physical health benefits.

Future generations would either thank us or rebuke us depending on the type of legacy we leave for them in terms of the care and sustainability of our planet. Appreciating nature will not only save our planet but ultimately, we will be saving human existence! What’s more we will be happier for being appreciative and grateful. We, therefore, have a moral obligation and personal incentive to appreciate, live simply, and ensure that we do all we can to preserve planet earth for future generations.

Shirley Aeria is a sister of the The Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood, who proclaim with their lives the joy and freedom of the Gospel in the spirit of St Francis and St Clare of Assisi. Sr Shirley spends much of her time volunteering to help make her community a beautiful place full of nature. She does so with boundless enthusiasm.

Photos copyright John Paul de Quay and Eleanor Margetts

About the Author

Further reading.

Appreciating nature is a really key topic in addressing our ecological emergency, as our actions towards our common home are steered by our spirituality. When we put God first, what should result is a care for creation . When we speak of an ‘ecological spirituality’ we are talking about how our love of God allows us to recognise the gift of creation (the universe) and better look after it for the good of all. Cosmic! Here is some further reading to help you get your teeth into a meaty subject.

WHAT IS ECOLOGY?

The word ‘ecology’ get thrown about a lot. Now Pope Francis is talking about an ‘integral ecology’! What exactly are we talking about?

What is biodiversity? Why does it matter?

The WWF Living Planet Report is an excellent one-stop-shop for understanding the state of nature on our planet. An essential read.

THE CANTICLE OF THE CREATURES

The song, written by St Francis of Assisi, which inspired the name and message of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’.

WHAT DOES 'LAUDATO SI'' MEAN?

Why did Pope Francis call an encyclical addressing environmental and social suffering, ‘Praise be!’ (Laudato Si’)?

How should we view nature?

Global Caring explores how we are called to see nature through the eyes of Jesus.

WORDS OF WISDOM

INSPIRING STORIES

By sharing these inspirational stories with you, we hope to inspire your creativity in your parish and to show that great things can be very simple, and very possible. Please do remember to write to us with any stories of projects that you would like to share.

An introduction to organic gardening

An introduction to wildlife gardening

Changing our Church Spaces for Good – how a humble allotment in Leeds is serving the local community

Here is a selection of ideas to get you started! If you have completed any of these projects, or run these services in your parish please do share your story or resources so that we can improve our guide. When deciding what to do, think about what the needs of your community are; some actions will be possible for some and not for others.

As this site progresses we will add links where you will find toolkits and resources to help you plan these activities. Please do send in any suggestions in the meantime.

INVITE A GUEST SPEAKER

NATURE WALK

APPRECIATING THE WORLD THROUGH ART

GREENING URBAN AREAS

CREATE A COMMUNITY QUIET GARDEN

OUTDOOR MASS, PRAYER OR BLESSING SERVICE

Parish Film Night

MORE ACTIONS

There are lots more activities that can help you appreciate nature on our parish allotment and wildlife garden pages. Getting dirt under your nails, growing food, and getting stuck into projects that create a welcome for all creatures great and small, really help us cultivate a deep appreciation that we are creatures living as part of God’s marvellous creation.

PARISH ALLOTMENT PAGE

WILDLIFE GARDEN PAGE

Useful websites.

These resources have been tried and recommended by our resident experts, editors and parishioners from across the UK. These are more general and practical resources for a multitude of uses. Simple and accessible, they are a great place to start!

NATURE AND MENTAL HEALTH

For plenty of ideas on activities in nature for positive mental health

UK WILDLIFE

A great place to learn more about the amazing wildlife sitting right under your nose (figuratively!).

BIRD WATCHING

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has excellent resources on watching birds and lots of citizen science projects to get involved in as you sit and listen to the birdsong.

PARISH SCHOOL TRIPS

Countryside Classroom helps teachers to find resources, places to visit and school support relating to the themes of food, farming and the natural environment.

PARISH quiet gardens

The Quiet Garden Movement nurtures access to outdoor space for prayer and reflection in a variety of settings.

How does appreciating nature HELP US MEET THE LAUDATO SI' GOALS?

The Laudato Si’ Goals are our global Church’s vision for action. Launched by the Vatican in 2021, the 7 goals aim to guide us in our mission to care for our common home by recognising the integral link between all ecological and human systems. 

Have a read below about how the topic of this page helps us to meet each of the goals.

RESPONSE TO THE CRY OF THE EARTH

Only when we learn to appreciate something will we take care of it. “If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple.” (Pope Francis Laudato Si’ 215). Appreciating nature allows us to listen to what the earth is telling us; it helps us to notice where it is suffering, and gives us the drive to do some something about it.

RESPONSE TO THE CRY OF THE POOR

Seeing the beauty of nature helps us to understand the reality of our utter dependence on it, that we are creatures ourselves and part of nature. Love of neighbour and appreciation of nature should not be separated. This view helps us to live in solidarity with the world’s poorest communities, who, because they are often directly working the land, are more aware of our dependence on nature, and more disproportionately effected by climate change and biodiversity loss.

ECOLOGICAL SPIRITUALITY

In encountering nature, we encounter our Creator. By appreciating what we have been given through nature, we can appreciate the world with a renewed sense of wonder. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker.” (Wis 13:5)

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

Without appreciating nature humans will “see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption” (Pope St John Paul II). An appreciation of nature helps us create a better economic model that puts the wellbeing of people and the planet above amassing personal fortunes. “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone” (Pope St John Paul II).

ADOPTION OF SIMPLE LIFESTYLES

Appreciating nature is a basic and necessary human experience; one of life’s simple pleasures that require no resources, money, or work. In making time and space in our lives to sit and ponder the beautiful world around us, we are reminded of what’s important and are invited to waste and want less. For a more in depth reflection, listen to “The Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book.

ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION

Nature is the world’s greatest classroom! People of all ages should continue to learn about the world, and what better way to do so than through direct contact with the environment. The more we learn, the better we understand and appreciate God’s love for us through creation.

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATORY ACTION

Appreciating nature helps us as communities engage with creation on our doorstep and to recognise the need for us to act locally to protect it. This keeps our local environment clean and productive for all to enjoy.

How does appreciating nature HELP US MEET THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS?

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted as a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations in 2015 as a blueprint for more just future for people and the planet. Recognising that all injustice is interlinked, the UN invites the world to make these goals a reality by the year 2030.

See below to find out which SDGs relate to the topic of this page.

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University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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• Reviews ›

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature , Oxford, 2003, 180pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199259658.

Reviewed by Fiona Hughes, University of Essex

This book comprises four essays, each based on previously published articles and capable of being read independently, yet as a whole they constitute a substantial study of the aesthetics of nature. The book has the virtue of serving as an introduction to the uninitiated while deepening the interest of the converted and will be of interest to anyone working in the field of aesthetics. Budd is committed to a catholic perspective allowing for the aesthetic appreciation of nature, art, sport, juggling and much else. [p. 15] But his focus in this book is exclusively on the first of these. He dates a renaissance in the topic to the publication in 1966 of Ronald Hepburn’s highly influential ``Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, which Budd suggests reversed the priority of artistic over natural beauty prevailing since Hegel. Not surprisingly, given this genealogy, Hegel’s predecessor, Kant, for whom natural beauty was paradigmatic, figures as an important point of reference for Budd’s studies.

The approach is analytical and critical in style. Budd’s aims are descriptive in that he believes that any successful theory will ‘chime in with’ our experience. His preference is for a theory that would be ‘neutral as to the relative importance or priority of art and nature within the field of the aesthetic’. [p. 13] These preferences set the scene for investigations that are rigorous and unpolemical. However, an emphasis on the shortcomings in theories under investigation can be limiting, especially when it comes to seeing the broader picture. In particular, Budd displays a lack of sympathy for Kant’s systematic commitments.

Essay 1 is concerned with what it is to aesthetically appreciate ‘nature as nature’, the Leitmotiv of the book as a whole. In Essay 2 Budd gives an extended, although necessarily selective, reading of Kant’s aesthetics of nature in the Critique of Judgment , focusing on Kant’s account of natural beauty, the relationship of the latter to morality and the sublime in nature. Essay 3 takes issue with those aesthetic theories for which art is the dominant paradigm, even for an aesthetics of nature. Budd then turns to ‘positive aesthetics’, for which everything in unmanipulated nature has a positive aesthetic value. In particular he considers arguments put forward by Allen Carlson, whose environmentally oriented aesthetics stands in contrast to his own account. In Essay 4 Budd gives a helpful, though selective overview of trends in the literature since Hepburn’s article. Carlson figures once again as a major interlocutor, particularly with reference to the way in which knowledge plays a role in aesthetic appreciation. While Carlson believes that Kendall Walton’s distinction between apparent and real properties of artworks can be applied to nature in so far as the latter is capable of being ‘determined by the right categories’, Budd convincingly questions whether such categories could ever be established. His conclusion is that, because of the freedom left to the observer in the face of the variability or ‘relativity’ of phenomena, ‘there is no such thing as the appropriate foci of aesthetic significance in the natural environment or the appropriate boundaries of the setting’[p. 147].

In Essay 1 Budd distinguishes between a weak and a strong form of the aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’. [pp. 9-10] The weak or ‘external’ form covers those cases where a natural thing or event is liked either not in virtue of being an artwork or in virtue of not being an artwork. Budd calls the first the ‘non-artistic’ and the second the ‘anti-artistic’ version. The strong or ‘internal’ form is only the case when the liking arises in virtue of something being natural. In other words, the natural status of the object or event – Budd uses the neutral term ‘item’ – constitutes a necessary element of one’s appreciation. This is Budd’s own position, which he seeks to elaborate and then apply throughout the rest of the book. He sums it up as:

the idea of a response to a natural item, grounded on its naturalness—on its being a part of nature or on its being a specific kind of natural item—focused on its elements or aspects as structured or interrelated in the item, the item being experienced as intrinsically rewarding, unrewarding, or displeasing, the hedonic character of the reaction being ‘disinterested’.[p.16]

Aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’ entails an awareness of the object or event falling under the concept of nature and this knowledge is constitutive of our liking for it.

The idea of liking ‘nature as nature’ marks an important difference between Budd and Kant, which can be drawn out by contrasting the ways in which they characterize aesthetic appreciation as ‘free’. Whereas, as we have seen, for Budd the freedom of the spectator arises from the diversity of categories under which nature could be taken up, for Kant the freedom of aesthetic judgment implies that it is not determined by a concept. Budd is, however, right to insist that Kant’s account does not entail that ‘the object must be experienced without its being experienced as falling under a concept (of that natural kind)’. [p. 29] Kant does not insist that we are unaware of the object’s natural kind in finding it aesthetically pleasing, but only that a concept does not determine the pleasure. Budd holds that, nevertheless, Kant has no account of aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’, in that he insists that when I like something aesthetically, I ‘abstract’ from any empirical concept of it. [p. 29] This would seem to rule out the possibility that my liking could be ‘grounded on its naturalness’ as Budd’s model requires, for although in another frame of mind I know the object to be natural, this does not contribute to my aesthetic appreciation of it.

It is arguable that Kant concedes a greater role to our awareness of the natural status of an aesthetically appreciated object than Budd’s talk of ‘abstraction’ suggests. Paradoxically, we can draw this out from Kant’s claim that the beautiful in nature looks as if it were art, whereas the beautiful in art looks as if it were nature. [ Critique of Judgement AA 306] Budd rejects positions such as Savile’s and Wollheim’s that regard artworks as paradigmatic for our aesthetic appreciation of natural objects. Without entering into an assessment of his response to either (his account of the latter is very brief), I would like to suggest that there is more to Kant’s chiasmic statement than meets the eye. Kant’s suggestion is surely that the natural thing, recognized as natural, is beautiful in so far as it mimics art. But in what sense does it do so? The aesthetically pleasing natural object bears a certain structural similarity to an artwork in so far as it displays purposiveness of form. The artwork, conversely, is only beautiful in so far as, while we are aware that it is an artwork, it nevertheless mimics the purposeless or intention-free appearance of nature. The beautiful hovers between purpose and purposelessness and this indeterminate status is only possible in so far as a natural object mimics art or vice versa . If this is right then there is a sense in which the awareness of the object’s natural status is a necessary condition of, while not determining or engendering, our aesthetic appreciation of it.

Repeatedly Budd argues against the idea that aesthetic appreciation of nature involves seeing the latter as art. An early statement of this central commitment comes when he says that his theme is ‘nature as nature and not as art (or artefact)’ [p. 5]. However there is a distinction between viewing nature as art in a reductive sense and the subjunctive mood of the ‘as if’. Nature can be viewed as if it were art, without in any sense reducing nature to art. Admittedly, conceding this distinction to Kant does not result in an aesthetics of ‘nature as nature’ in Budd’s terms. But this is not because Kant ‘abstracts’ from the natural status of the aesthetic object, but rather because its being natural is not sufficient for it to count as aesthetic. If it is to qualify as such, it must be recognized as nature and yet at the same time mimic art. To say that nature is seen as if it were art is strictly to say that it is not possible to determine the scene or thing under a concept because of the playful or expansive frame of mind it invites in our response to it.

There is undoubtedly a disagreement between Kant and Budd in so far as the latter holds that ‘relevant knowledge’ makes possible aesthetic responses that would otherwise be impossible. [p. 20] The knowledge now in question is not simply the awareness that the object or event is natural, but rather that further determinations play a role in our aesthetic appreciation of it. In principle, Kant need not have excluded the possibility that knowledge can enhance our aesthetic appreciation, just as he concedes an ancillary role to charm. But he did not entertain such a possibility, blinded perhaps by the need to exclude knowledge as the determining ground of aesthetic pleasure. While Budd denies that knowledge necessarily leads to heightened aesthetic pleasure, he insists that it can do so. The question that arises is whether knowledge is capable not only of ‘transform[ing] one’s aesthetic experience of nature’ [p. 20], but also of engendering it. Budd seems to be on firmer ground in the former case, but he also says the sublime can be ‘produced’ by the addition of knowledge to perception. [p. 22] As he makes no distinction between the sublime and aesthetic response in general here, we must conclude that this would hold for any aesthetic experience. While knowledge is not a necessary condition of aesthetic pleasure, it can, according to Budd, be a sufficient condition. Yet this claim would require a deeper analysis of the role played by knowledge in the internal dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.

Importantly not all knowledge is aesthetically relevant for Budd. Only that which ‘integrate[s] with the perception in such a manner as to generate a new perceptual-cum-imaginative content of experience ’ counts. [my emphasis. p. 22] This distinction is important for the distance at which Budd stands to Carlson’s ‘natural environmental model’ of aesthetics of nature, discussed in Essays 3 and 4. Whereas Carlson insists that common sense or natural-scientific knowledge of nature is essential to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, Budd asks how we can delimit the knowledge that is aesthetically relevant. [p. 136] Whereas Carlson’s account threatens to deaden aesthetic affect under a burden of knowledge, Budd’s focus on the emergence of new perceptions through the intermediary of imagination discovers a criterion of aesthetic relevance for knowledge. Budd does not much develop this idea beyond supplying an extended range of examples in Essay 1, nor does he do so in the critical reconstructive discussion of Essay 4. Nevertheless it is one of the most valuable ideas he offers and reveals a place for knowledge in aesthetics, which it would be possible to combine with the Kantian insight that the latter is not reducible to cognitive, moral or other, including environmental, interests. This insight could have been developed into an account of how different orientations overlap in the aesthetic case, without their determining it. This could allow us to see how aesthetic freedom fosters our capacity not only for cognitive open-mindedness, but also for moral impartiality.

However such a development of his account of the generative role of knowledge would almost certainly go against Budd’s instincts. In Essay II he reveals himself to be skeptical about Kant’s systematic aspirations. While there is much in his reading of Kant that is of great value, two points are particularly telling. Firstly, Budd is unconvinced by Kant’s attempt to link aesthetic judgment to morality through their shared formal status. With characteristic incisiveness, he points out the distinction between the formal status of the categorical imperative that concerns any maxim or principle of action’s ‘ accordance or conflict with the requirement of willed universality ’ and ‘the form of a beautiful object’ that is nothing other than ‘ the structure of its elements ’. [p. 57] The transition from aesthetics to morality is unsuccessful because ‘the existence of natural beauty … reveals only that nature is hospitable to the aesthetic exercise of our cognitive powers’. It does not concern ‘our ability to realize our moral ends’. [pp. 56-7] The second issue is that of Kant’s much criticized use of a psychological idiom, in that he tries to explain the possibility of knowledge and aesthetic appreciation through a ‘murky’ [p. 31] investigation of mental faculties. Budd says that this amounts either to a ‘picturesque redescription of the experience’ or ‘a priori speculation about psychological processes’. In the first case it is ‘unenlightening’, while in the second ‘it needs to be replaced by an empirically well-founded account’. [p. 34] These two criticisms are related, for it is by means of faculty theory that Kant attempts to show the systematic connection between aesthetics, morality and cognition.

Kant’s reason for writing a third critique was not simply the discovery of a distinct species of aesthetic judgment, but the coincidence of this event with the possibility of revealing a bridge between cognition and morality, thus completing the critical system. While Budd is right that the formal status of aesthetic judgment and of morality are distinct from one another, it would be possible to show how they are linked within a systematic account of Kant’s formalism. I can only sketch what would be an intricate argument. The form of an object or the ‘structure of its elements’ invites a formal judgment in which the imagination is in harmony with the understanding without determination by an empirical or categorial rule. We are able to give the rule to ourselves (this counts as ‘heautonomy’), even though in response to something given to us in experience. This is a first step to revealing our capacity for the autonomous use of reason. It is strictly a preparation or propadeutic for the moral ability to judge according to the form of the moral law. Whereas it would be impossible to move directly from the form of the aesthetic object to the form of the moral law, as Budd rightly says, the move is rather from the form of aesthetic judgment to that of action based on a formal principle. The freedom of mind both imply is the ground of the possibility for the transition from aesthetics to morality. As aesthetics is based on the subjective conditions of cognition, the giant step from cognition to morality becomes, at least in principle, possible.

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The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

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Consists of four self‐contained essays on the aesthetics of nature, which complement one another by exploring the subject from different points of view. The first is concerned with how the idea of aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood and proposes that it is best understood as aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature —as what nature actually is. This idea is elaborated by means of accounts of what is meant by nature, what is meant by a response to nature as nature, and what an aesthetic response consists in, and through an examination of the aesthetic relevance of knowledge of nature. The second essay, which is divided into three separate chapters, expounds and critically examines Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetic judgements about nature. The first of these chapters deals with Kant's account of aesthetic judgements about natural beauty; the second with his claims about the connections between love of natural beauty and morality (which are contrasted with Schiller's claim about love of naive nature); and the third examines his theory of aesthetic judgements about the sublime in nature, rejecting much of Kant's view and proposing an alternative account of the emotion of the sublime. The third essay argues against the assimilation of the aesthetics of nature to that of art, explores the question of what determines the aesthetic properties of a natural item, and attempts to show that the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature, which maintains that nature unaffected by humanity is such as to make negative aesthetic judgements about the products of the natural world misplaced, is in certain versions false, in others inherently problematic. The fourth essay is a critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature on the aesthetics of nature. Various models of the aesthetic appreciation of nature have been advanced, but none of these is acceptable and, it is argued, no model is needed.

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Orion Magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

. . . WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down , tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands , and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how come we never hardly say that out loud?

The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.

And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.

Brian, Thank you for sharing. I moved with your words through each paragraph. And surprisingly at the end, I really felt as though I had been reading a truly great nature essay, almost simultaneously with your essay. I very much enjoyed the imagery.

Thank you for this, brilliantly done. I feel this way when I read Annie Dillard’s essays.

Who made the b/w photographic image at the head of your column? When you wrote “image” I thought you were referring to this epigraphic view, which is lovely but not forceful enough to do what your written image purported to accomplish.

In other words, the greatest nature essay ever moves like a poem? Imagery and metaphor, showing and not telling, all in as tight and concise a space as possible given the form and genre?

Ah yes, changed. What all us nature mystics aspire to do and how skillfully you worked the other side of the mirror, seeing us seeing you writing to us turning on a dime, change changing indeed . . . .

The Greatest Comment Ever on ‘The Greatest Nature Essay Ever’ would begin with a compliment on the author’s deft use of words, words like flowing water, organic sentences sprouting one from the other like vines climbing up and over a wall and into the sunlight. The compliment would be short, just a sentence or two, complimentary of course, ending with a quiet phrase such as, ‘nicely done Brian Doyle.’

Reminds me of Abbott’s Waste-land Wonderings. Though it must belong to conservatives, I see something fresh and new. Thanks.

Brian, congratulations on a finely constructed piece. I liked it to much I’m going to feature it in my December newsletter and will mention it on my blog (www.pagelambert.blogspot.com) With credits to Orion, of course, whose link is already on my blog. I lead outdoor writing adventures and look forward to sharing your piece with clients.

I nominate David Quammen’s “The Same River Twice”

Seth Zuckerman’s The Same River Twice should be in the running too.

I don’t know why I was led down the path that led to Portland Magazine Brian Doyle but I followed it today on the day that I needed to find it. Thank you.

Very, very beautiful and inspirational.

As what I expect is becoming usual, for me, when I read an essay of You: Yeah! When I read your Essays it feels like my grandmother has just offered me a magnificent bowl of fruit. There’s not a duplicate in the basket. I just heard you speak at In Praise of the Essay, and I was the one, with my daughter at my side, who was overcome with both laughter and tears, a shaken, not stirred mixture of the two. When you’d waltz our way with your emphatic delivery of your heart on that delicate platter, I got a real sense of you. And then, as soon as you were through, and not a moment later, I opened up the issue of your Portland review, and there, on the inside cover you delivered again that same heart on the same delicate platter, when you gave me “All Legs and Curiosity.” And I thought, this man has the power to make Women Burst into tears! And I did, right there at that table. And as I tried to compose myself, my daughter at my side, age 17 having visited Fordham in the Bronx not some 15 hours before, I hand the issue over to the woman at my side. She’s told me her daughter will soon be to school, but she has serious peanut allergies, and the delicacy of finding the right roommate for that situation has her beside herself, knowing there are things she can’t control.

I think to myself, I need to talk to this guy. What and how he says it and What he writes are delivered the Very same. But, I shy a way.

I go home and I find a Brevity Gem: the one you wrote about your children, and you being a stone. I’m filled up again, and I post it on My facebook, and one of my more sensitive man friends, who’s really a real friend, leaves a sensitive comment, and I realize then, This Man has the Power to Make Men cry too! And I decide there and then, He needs to be my mentor too. Will You?

What on earth is this all about? Was ist das?

A massive loss in natural disaster is afoot if you don’t stop writing essays so nobody will remember the images anyhow. So something helpful. Dreamers dream, ideas create ideologies.

brian ilove u very much for a beautiful poem . i delivered the ur nature essay & i got 1’st prize thank u a lot brian

Can someone tell me what a nature essay is about? Particularly this one

I’m trying to answer some questions for my school assignment.

(Eng.Comp 101)

Thank you, Cliff G

wonderful essay

What’s with the goat?

I just want to make sure this is the same Brian Doyle who wrote Joyas Volardores. Both beautifully written!

Yes, Vince, the same Brian Doyle. Here’s just a few of the other essays of his that Orion has published:

http://orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/65/

Many more have only appeared in the print edition. He’s a real favorite of ours, and our readers!

Erik, Orion

I agree with @melvin, The Same River twice is my favorite essay of all time.

Very helpful and informative article. If you do not mind then I will share it. Thank you !

When we choose to simply sit in nature together, we are writing it’s great essay.

Brian, I just read this. I haven’t yet read anything that brought me to the near tears situation but yours made me feel things I hadn’t felt in a while. At one point, minor goosebumps too.

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Environmental Aesthetics

Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field of philosophical aesthetics. It arose within analytic aesthetics in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to its emergence, aesthetics within the analytic tradition was largely concerned with philosophy of art. Environmental aesthetics originated as a reaction to this emphasis, pursuing instead the investigation of the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. Since its early stages, the scope of environmental aesthetics has broadened to include not simply natural environments but also human and human-influenced ones. At the same time, the discipline has also come to include the examination of that which falls within such environments, giving rise to what is called the aesthetics of everyday life. This area involves the aesthetics of not only more common objects and environments, but also a range of everyday activities. Thus, early in the twenty-first century, environmental aesthetics embraced the study of the aesthetic significance of almost everything other than art. Together with this broader scope of environmental aesthetics, the twenty-first century has also given rise to renewed and more intense investigations of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism as well as to several new interests and directions.

1.1 Eighteenth Century Aesthetics of Nature

1.2 nineteenth century aesthetics of nature, 2.1 the neglect of the aesthetics of nature, 2.2 the emergence of environmental aesthetics, 3.1 cognitive views, 3.2 non-cognitive views, 4.1 the aesthetics of human environments, 4.2 the aesthetics of everyday life, 5.1 environmental aesthetics and environmentalism, 5.2 environmental aesthetics: new interests and future directions, other internet resources, related entries.

Although environmental aesthetics has developed as a sub-field of Western philosophical aesthetics only in the last forty years, it has historical roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century European and North American aesthetics. In these centuries, there were important advances in the aesthetics of nature, including the emergence of the concept of disinterestedness together with those of the sublime and the picturesque, as well as the introduction of the idea of positive aesthetics. These notions continue to play a role in contemporary work in environmental aesthetics, especially in the context of its relationship to environmentalism. (See also Section 5.1 below.)

In the West, the first major philosophical developments in the aesthetics of nature occurred in the eighteenth century. During that century, the founders of modern aesthetics not only began to take nature as a paradigmatic object of aesthetic experience, they also developed the concept of disinterestedness as the mark of such experience. Over the course of the century, this concept was elaborated by various thinkers, who employed it to purge from aesthetic appreciation an ever-increasing range of interests and associations. According to one standard account (Stolnitz 1961), the concept originated with the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who introduced it as a way of characterizing the notion of the aesthetic, was embellished by Francis Hutcheson, who expanded it so as to exclude from aesthetic experience not simply personal and utilitarian interests, but also associations of a more general nature, and was further developed by Archibald Alison, who took it to refer to a particular state of mind. The concept was given its classic formulation in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment , in which nature was taken as an exemplary object of aesthetic experience. Kant argued that natural beauty was superior to that of art and that it complemented the best habits of mind. It is no accident that the development of the concept of disinterestedness and the acceptance of nature as an ideal object of aesthetic appreciation went hand in hand. The clarification of the notion of the aesthetic in terms of the concept of disinterestedness disassociated the aesthetic appreciation of nature from the appreciator’s particular personal, religious, economic, or utilitarian interests, any of which could impede aesthetic experience.

The theory of disinterestedness also provided groundwork for understanding the aesthetic dimensions of nature in terms of three distinct conceptualizations. The first involved the idea of the beautiful , which readily applies to tamed and cultivated gardens and landscapes. The second centered on the idea of the sublime . In the experience of the sublime, the more threatening and terrifying of nature’s manifestations, such as mountains and wilderness, when viewed with disinterestedness, can be aesthetically appreciated, rather than simply feared or despised. These two notions were importantly elaborated by Edmund Burke and Kant. However, concerning the appreciation of nature, a third concept was to become more significant than that of either the beautiful or the sublime: the notion of the picturesque . Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were three clearly distinct ideas each focusing on different aspects of nature’s diverse and often contrasting moods. One historian of the picturesque tradition (Conron 2000) argues that in “eighteenth-century English theory, the boundaries between aesthetic categories are relatively clear and stable”. The differences can be summarized as follows: objects experienced as beautiful tend to be small and smooth, but subtly varied, delicate, and “fair” in color, while those experienced as sublime, by contrast, are powerful, vast, intense, terrifying, and “definitionless”. Picturesque items are typically in the middle ground between those experienced as either sublime or beautiful, being complex and eccentric, varied and irregular, rich and forceful, and vibrant with energy.

It is not surprising that of these three notions, the idea of the picturesque, rather that of the beautiful or the sublime, achieved the greatest prominence concerning the aesthetic experience of nature. Not only does it occupy the extensive middle ground of the complex, irregular, forceful, and vibrant, all of which abound in the natural world, it also reinforced various long-standing connections between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the treatment of nature in art. The term “picturesque” literally means “picture-like” and the theory of the picturesque advocates aesthetic appreciation in which the natural world is experienced as if divided into art-like scenes, which ideally resemble works of arts, especially landscape painting, in both subject matter and composition. Thus, since the concept of disinterestedness mandated appreciation of nature stripped of the appreciator’s own personal interests and associations, it helped to clear the ground for experience of nature governed by the theory of the picturesque, by which the appreciator is encouraged to see nature in terms of a new set of artistic images and associations. In this way the idea of the picturesque relates to earlier conceptions of the natural world as comprised of what were called “works of nature”, which, although considered in themselves to be proper and important objects of aesthetic experience, were thought to be even more appealing when they resembled works of art. The idea also resonates with other artistic traditions, such as that of viewing art as the mirror of nature. The theory of the picturesque received its fullest treatment in the late eighteenth century when it was popularized in the writings of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight. At that time, it provided an aesthetic ideal for English tourists, who pursued picturesque scenery in the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, and the Alps.

Following its articulation in the eighteenth century, the idea of the picturesque remained a dominant influence on popular aesthetic experience of nature throughout the entire nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Indeed, it is still an important component of the kind of aesthetic experience commonly associated with ordinary tourism—that which involves seeing and appreciating the natural world as it is represented in the depictions found in travel brochures, calendar photos, and picture postcards. However, while the idea of the picturesque continued to guide popular aesthetic appreciation of nature, the philosophical study of the aesthetics of nature, after flowering in the eighteenth century, went into decline. Many of the main themes, such as the concept of the sublime, the notion of disinterestedness, and the theoretical centrality of nature in philosophical aesthetics, culminated with Kant, who gave some of these ideas such exhaustive treatment that a kind of philosophical closure was seemingly achieved. Following Kant, a new world order was initiated by Hegel. In Hegel’s philosophy, art was the highest expression of “Absolute Spirit”, and it, rather than nature, was destined to become the favored subject of philosophical aesthetics. Thus, in the nineteenth century, both on the continent and in the United Kingdom, relatively few philosophers and only a scattering of thinkers of the Romantic Movement seriously pursued the theoretical study of the aesthetics of nature. There was no philosophical work comparable to that of the preceding century.

However, while the philosophical study of the aesthetics of nature languished in Europe, a new way of understanding the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world was developing in North America. This conception of nature appreciation had roots in the American tradition of nature writing, as exemplified in the essays of Henry David Thoreau. It was also inspired by the idea of the picturesque and, to a lesser extent, that of the sublime, especially in its artistic manifestations, such as the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church. However, as nature writing became its more dominant form of expression, the conception was increasingly shaped by developments in the natural sciences. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was influenced by the geographical work of George Perkins Marsh (Marsh 1865), who argued that humanity was increasingly causing the destruction of the beauty of nature. The idea was forcefully presented toward the end of the century in the work of American naturalist John Muir, who was steeped in natural history. Muir explicitly distinguished this kind of understanding of the aesthetic appreciation of nature from that governed by the idea of the picturesque. In a well-known essay, “A Near View of the High Sierra” (Muir 1894), two of Muir’s artist companions, who focus on mountain scenery, exemplify aesthetic experience of nature as guided by the idea of the picturesque. This differs from Muir’s own aesthetic experience, which involved an interest in and appreciation of the mountain environment somewhat more akin to that of a geologist. This way of experiencing nature eventually brought Muir to see the whole of the natural environment and especially wild nature as aesthetically beautiful and to find ugliness primarily where nature was subject to human intrusion. The range of things that he regarded as aesthetically appreciable seemed to encompass the entire natural world, from creatures considered hideous in his day, such as snakes and alligators, to natural disasters thought to ruin the environment, such as floods and earthquakes. The kind of nature appreciation practiced by Muir has become associated with the contemporary point of view called “positive aesthetics” (Carlson 1984). Insofar as such appreciation eschews humanity’s marks on the natural environment, it is somewhat the converse of aesthetic appreciation influenced by the idea of the picturesque, which finds interest and delight in evidence of human presence.

2. Twentieth Century Developments

Western philosophical study of the aesthetics of the natural world reached a low point in the middle of the twentieth century, with the focus of analytic aesthetics almost exclusively on philosophy of art. At the same time, both the view that aesthetic appreciation of nature is parasitic upon that of art and even the idea that it is not in fact aesthetic appreciation at all were defended by some thinkers. However, in the last third of the century, there was a reaction to the neglect of the natural world by the discipline of aesthetics, which initiated a revival of the aesthetic investigation of nature and led to the emergence of environmental aesthetics.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophy largely ignored the aesthetics of nature. However, there were some noteworthy exceptions. For example, in North America, George Santayana investigated the topic as well as the concept of nature itself. Somewhat later, John Dewey contributed to the understanding of the aesthetic experience of both nature and everyday life, and Curt Ducasse discussed the beauty of nature as well as that of the human form. In England, R. G. Collingwood worked on both the philosophy of art and the idea of nature, but the two topics did not importantly come together in his thought. However, other than a few such individuals, as far as aesthetics was pursued, there was little serious consideration of the aesthetics of nature. On the contrary, the discipline was dominated by an interest in art. By the mid-twentieth century, within analytic philosophy, the principal philosophical school in the English-speaking world at that time, philosophical aesthetics was virtually equated with philosophy of art. The leading aesthetics textbook of the period was subtitled Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism and opened with the assertion: “There would be no problems of aesthetics, in the sense in which I propose to mark out this field of study, if no one ever talked about works of art” (Beardsley 1958). The comment was meant to emphasize the importance of the analysis of language, but it also reveals the art-dominated construal of aesthetics of that time. Moreover, if and when the aesthetic appreciation of nature was discussed, it was treated, by comparison with that of art, as a messy, subjective business of less philosophical interest. Some of the major aestheticians of the second half of the century argued that aesthetic judgments beyond what became known as the “artworld” must remain relative to conditions of observation and unfettered by the kind of constraints that govern the appreciation of art (Walton 1970, Dickie 1974).

The domination of analytic aesthetics by an interest in art had two ramifications. On the one hand, it helped to motivate a controversial philosophical position that denied the possibility of any aesthetic experience of nature whatsoever. The position held that aesthetic appreciation necessarily involves aesthetic judgments, which entail judging the object of appreciation as the achievement of a designing intellect. However, since nature is not the product of a designing intellect, its appreciation is not aesthetic (Mannison 1980). In the past, nature appreciation was deemed aesthetic because of the assumption that nature is the work of a designing creator, but this assumption is simply false or at least inadequate for grounding any aesthetics of nature. On the other hand, the art-dominated construal of aesthetics also gave support to approaches that stand within the many different historical traditions that conceptualize the natural world as essentially art-like—for example, as a set of the “works of nature”, or as the “handiwork” of a creator, or as picturesque scenery. For example, what might be called a landscape model of nature appreciation, which stems directly from the tradition of the picturesque, proposes that we should aesthetically experience nature as we appreciate landscape paintings. This requires seeing it to some extent as if it were a series of two-dimensional scenes and focusing either on artistic qualities dependent upon romantic images of the kind associated with the idea of the picturesque or simply on its formal aesthetic qualities. Such art-oriented models of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, in addition to being supported by powerful and long-standing traditions of thought (Biese 1905, Nicolson 1959), are reconsidered in some recent work in environmental aesthetics (Stecker 1997, Crawford 2004, Leddy 2005a, Tafalla 2010, Paden 2015b). Likewise, the defense of formalist aesthetic appreciation of nature has recently been renewed (Zangwill 2001 2013, Welchman 2018), along with related discussion and debate (Parsons 2004, Parsons and Carlson 2004, Moore 2006).

In the last third of the twentieth century, a renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature emerged. This revival was the result of several different factors. In part, it was a response to the growing public concern about the apparent degeneration of the environment, aesthetic and otherwise. It was also the result of the academic world becoming aware of the significance of the environmental movement—at the level of both theoretical discussion and practical action. It is noteworthy that the emergence of the philosophical study of environmental ethics also dates from this time. Some of the earlier work in environmental aesthetics focused on empirical research conducted in response to public apprehension about the aesthetic state of the environment. Critics of this research argued that the landscape assessment and planning techniques used in environmental management were inadequate in stressing mainly formal properties, while overlooking expressive and other kinds of aesthetic qualities (Sagoff 1974, Carlson 1976). Empirical approaches were also faulted as fixated on “scenic beauty” and overly influenced by ideas such as that of the picturesque (Carlson 1977). In general, the area was thought to be beset by theoretical problems (Sparshott 1972), and the empirical research in particular was said to lack an adequate conceptual framework, often being conducted in what one critic called a “theoretical vacuum” (Appleton 1975b). Attempts to fill this vacuum prompted the idea of sociobiological underpinnings for the aesthetic appreciation of nature, such as “prospect-refuge theory” (Appleton 1975a 1982), as well as other kinds of evolution-related accounts (Orians and Heerwagen 1986 1992), the idea of which has recently received more attention from some philosophers (Davies 2012, Paden et al 2012, Paden 2015a 2016, Bartalesi and Portera 2015). In addition, the concerns of this period motivated the development of a variety of theoretical models of aesthetic response grounded in, for example, developmental and environmental psychology (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989, Bourassa 1991). There are overviews (Zube 1984, Cats-Baril and Gibson 1986, Daniel 2001) and collections (Saarinen et al 1984, Nasar 1988, Sheppard and Harshaw 2001) of this and related kinds of research, as well as more recent studies that, although they are essentially empirical in orientation, are of considerable theoretical interest (Porteous 1996, Bell 1999, Parsons and Daniel 2002, Gobster et al 2007, Hill and Daniel 2008, Gobster 2008 2013). One comprehensive review of this kind of research also includes some discussion of its relationship to philosophical work in environmental aesthetics (Thompson and Tarvlou 2009).

Within philosophical aesthetics itself, the renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature was also fueled by another development: the publication of Ronald Hepburn’s seminal article “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” (Hepburn 1966). Hepburn’s essay is commonly recognized as setting the agenda for the aesthetics of nature for the late twentieth century (Brook 2010, Saito 2010, Sepänmaa 2010, Carlson 2014b). After noting that by essentially reducing all of aesthetics to philosophy of art, analytic aesthetics had virtually ignored the natural world, Hepburn argued that aesthetic appreciation of art frequently provides misleading models for the appreciation of nature. However, he nonetheless observed that there is in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, as in the appreciation of art, a distinction between appreciation that is only trivial and superficial and that which is serious and deep. He furthermore suggested that for nature such serious appreciation might require new and different approaches that can accommodate not only nature’s indeterminate and varying character, but also both our multi-sensory experience and our diverse understanding of it. By focusing attention on natural beauty, Hepburn demonstrated that there could be significant philosophical investigation of the aesthetic experience of the world beyond the artworld. He thereby not only generated renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature, he also laid foundations for environmental aesthetics in general as well as for the aesthetics of everyday life.

In the wake of Hepburn’s article, the next major developments in the emerging field of environmental aesthetics challenged both the idea that nature appreciation is not aesthetic and the persistence of art-oriented approaches to the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Although these views about the appreciation of nature had found some grounding in analytic aesthetics’ reduction of aesthetics to philosophy of art, as art’s monopoly on philosophical aesthetics began to weaken, they were increasing recognized to be deeply counterintuitive. Concerning the former, many of our fundamental paradigms of aesthetic experience seem to be instances of appreciation of nature, such as our delight in a sunset or in a bird in flight. Moreover, the Western tradition in aesthetics, as well as other traditions, such as the Japanese, has long been committed to doctrines that explicitly contradict the nonaesthetic conception of nature appreciation, such as the conviction that, as one philosopher expressed it, anything that can be viewed can be viewed aesthetically (Ziff 1979). Concerning the art-oriented models, it was argued by some that such approaches do not fully realize serious, appropriate appreciation of nature, but rather distort the true character of natural environments. For example, the landscape model recommends framing and flattening environments into scenery. Moreover, in focusing heavily on artistic qualities, these accounts are thought to neglect much of our normal experience and understanding of nature (Hepburn 1966 1993, Carlson 1979 2000, Berleant 1985 1988 1992, Saito 1998a 1998b). The problem, in short, is that they do not acknowledge the importance of aesthetically appreciating nature, as one aesthetician puts it, “as nature” (Budd 2002).

3. Basic Orientations in Environmental Aesthetics

After the emergence of environmental aesthetics as a significant area of philosophical research, some initial positions crystallized. In the last part of the last century, these positions developed distinct orientations concerning the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. At that time, the positions were frequently distinguished as belonging in one or the other of two groups, alternatively labeled cognitive and non-cognitive (Godlovitch 1994, Eaton 1998, Carlson and Berleant 2004), conceptual and non-conceptual (Moore 1999), or narrative and ambient (Foster 1998). The distinction marks a division between those points of view that take knowledge and information to be essential to aesthetic appreciation of environments and those that take some other feature, such as engagement, emotion arousal, or imagination, to be paramount. The distinction thereby gives structure and organization to the diverse points of view represented in the field. Moreover, it is in line with similar distinctions used in aesthetic theory concerning the appreciation of art, music, and literature.

What are called cognitive, conceptual, or narrative positions in environmental aesthetics are united by the thought that knowledge and information about the nature of the object of appreciation is central to its aesthetic appreciation. Thus, they champion the idea that nature must be appreciated, as one author puts it, “on its own terms” (Saito 1998b). These positions tend to reject aesthetic approaches to environments, such as that governed by the idea of the picturesque, that draw heavily on the aesthetic experience of art for modeling the appreciation of nature. Yet they affirm that art appreciation can nonetheless show some of what is required in an adequate account of nature appreciation. For example, in serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of works of art, it is taken to be essential that we experience works as what they in fact are and in light of knowledge of their real natures. Thus, for instance, appropriate appreciation of a work such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937) requires that we experience it as a painting and moreover as a cubist painting, and therefore that we appreciate it in light of our knowledge of paintings in general and of cubist paintings in particular (Walton 1970). Adopting this general line of thought, one cognitive approach to nature appreciation, sometimes labeled the natural environmental model (Carlson 1979) or scientific cognitivism (Parsons 2002), holds that just as serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation of art requires knowledge of art history and art criticism, such aesthetic appreciation of nature requires knowledge of natural history—the knowledge provided by the natural sciences and especially sciences such as geology, biology, and ecology. The idea is that scientific knowledge about nature can reveal the actual aesthetic qualities of natural objects and environments in the way in which knowledge about art history and art criticism can for works of art. In short, to appropriately aesthetically appreciate nature “on its own terms” is to appreciate it as it is characterized by natural science (Carlson 1981 2000 2007, Rolston 1995, Eaton 1998, Matthews 2002, Parsons 2002 2006b).

Other cognitive or quasi-cognitive accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of environments differ from scientific cognitivism concerning either the kind of cognitive resources taken to be relevant to such appreciation or the degree to which these resources are considered relevant. On the one hand, several cognitive approaches emphasize different kinds of information, claiming that appreciating nature “on its own terms” might well involve experiencing it in light of various cultural and historical traditions. Thus, in appropriate aesthetic appreciation, local and regional narratives, folklore, and even mythological stories about nature are endorsed either as complementary with or as alternative to scientific knowledge (Sepänmaa 1993, Saito 1998b, Heyd 2001). On the other hand, another at least quasi-cognitive approach strongly supports the idea that nature must be appreciated “as nature”, but does not go beyond that constraint. The justification for accepting the “as nature” restriction is that the aesthetic experience of nature should be true to what nature actually is. This, however, is the extent of the approach’s commitment to cognitivism and marks the limits of the similarity that it finds between art appreciation and the appreciation of nature. It rejects the idea that scientific knowledge about nature can reveal the actual aesthetic qualities of natural objects and environments in the way in which knowledge about art history and art criticism can for works of art. Moreover, it holds that, unlike the case with art, many of the most significant aesthetic dimensions of natural objects and environments are extremely relative to conditions of observation. The upshot is that aesthetic appreciation of nature is taken to allow a degree of freedom that is denied to the aesthetic appreciation of art (Fisher 1998, Budd 2002).

Standing in contrast to the cognitive positions in environmental aesthetics are several so-called non-cognitive, non-conceptual, or ambient approaches. However, “non-cognitive” here should not be taken in its older philosophical sense, as meaning primarily or only “emotive”. Rather it indicates simply that these views hold that something other than a cognitive component, such as scientific knowledge or cultural tradition, is the central feature of the aesthetic appreciation of environments. The leading non-cognitive approach, called the aesthetics of engagement, draws on phenomenology as well as on analytic aesthetics. In doing so, it rejects many of the traditional ideas about aesthetic appreciation not only for nature but also for art. It argues that the theory of disinterestedness involves a mistaken analysis of the concept of the aesthetic and that this is most evident in the aesthetic experience of natural environments. According to the engagement approach, disinterested appreciation, with its isolating, distancing, and objectifying gaze, is out of place in the aesthetic experience of nature, for it wrongly abstracts both natural objects and appreciators from the environments in which they properly belong and in which appropriate appreciation is achieved. Thus, the aesthetics of engagement stresses the contextual dimensions of nature and our multi-sensory experiences of it. Viewing the environment as a seamless unity of places, organisms, and perceptions, it challenges the importance of traditional dichotomies, such as that between subject and object. It beckons appreciators to immerse themselves in the natural environment and to reduce to as small a degree as possible the distance between themselves and the natural world. In short, appropriate aesthetic experience is held to involve the total immersion of the appreciator in the object of appreciation (Berleant 1985 1988 1992 2013b).

Other non-cognitive positions in environmental aesthetics contend that dimensions other than engagement are central to aesthetic experience. What is known as the arousal model holds that we may appreciate nature simply by opening ourselves to it and being emotionally aroused by it. On this view, this less intellectual, more visceral experience of nature constitutes a legitimate way of aesthetically appreciating it that does not require any knowledge gained from science or elsewhere (Carroll 1993). Another alternative similarly argues that neither scientific nor any other kind of knowledge facilitates real, appropriate appreciation of nature, but not because such appreciation need involve only emotional arousal, but rather because nature itself is essentially alien, aloof, distant, and unknowable. This position, which may be called the mystery model, contends that appropriate experience of nature incorporates a sense of being separate from nature and of not belonging to it—a sense of mystery involving a state of appreciative incomprehension (Godlovitch 1994). A fourth non-cognitive approach brings together several features thought to be relevant to nature appreciation. It attempts to balance engagement and the traditional idea of disinterestedness, while giving center stage to imagination. This approach distinguishes a number of different kinds of imagination—associative, metaphorical, exploratory, projective, ampliative, and revelatory. It also responds to concerns that imagination introduces subjectivity by appealing to factors such as guidance by the object of appreciation, the constraining role of disinterestedness, and the notion of “imagining well” (Brady 1998 2003). A related point of view, which stresses the metaphysical dimensions of imagination, might also be placed in the non-cognitive group, although doing so requires making certain assumptions about the cognitive content of metaphysical speculation. According to this account, the imagination interprets nature as revealing metaphysical insights: insights about things such as the meaning of life, the human condition, or our place in the cosmos. Thus, this point of view includes within appropriate aesthetic experience of nature those abstract meditations and ruminations about ultimate reality that our encounters with nature sometimes engender (Hepburn 1996).

4. Environmental Aesthetics beyond Natural Environments

Since they first took form in the late twentieth century, the initial positions in environmental aesthetics expanded from their original focus on natural environments to consider human and human-influenced environments. At the same time, the discipline has also come to include the examination of that which falls within such environments, giving rise to what is called the aesthetics of everyday life. This area involves the aesthetics of not only more common objects and environments, but also a range of everyday activities. Concerning both the aesthetics of human environments and the aesthetics of everyday life, approaches that combine the resources of both cognitive and non-cognitive points of views have become more common and seem especially fruitful.

Both the cognitive and the non-cognitive orientations in environmental aesthetics have resources that are brought to bear on the aesthetic investigation of human and human-influenced environments. Of the initial positions, some non-cognitive approaches have made the most substantial contributions to this area of research. The aesthetics of engagement is particularly significant in this regard, constituting a model for the aesthetic appreciation not simply of both nature and art, but also of every other aspect of human experience; it studies the aesthetic dimensions of rural countrysides, small towns, large cities, theme parks, gardens, museums, and even human relationships. Moreover, although, as is clear from the early collections of essays in environmental aesthetics (Kemal and Gaskell 1993, Carlson and Berleant 2004), the field initially concentrated on natural environments, the aesthetics of engagement, unlike most other approaches, from very early on focused not simply on natural environments, but also on human environments and especially on urban environments (Berleant 1978 1984 1986). Much of this material is available in more recently published volumes (Berleant 1997 2004 2005 2010b 2012). It has become a foundation for a substantial body of research on the aesthetic appreciation of urban and as well as other kinds of environments (Haapala 1998, von Bonsdorff 2002, Blanc 2013, Paetzold 2013, Alvarez 2017). Other non-cognitive accounts, such as that which stresses imagination, likewise illuminate our aesthetic responses to a range of human environments as well as to our use of them for purposes such as resource extraction and agricultural production (Brady 2003 2006).

Cognitive accounts also investigate the aesthetic appreciation of human environments, arguing that, as with natural environments, appropriate appreciation depends on knowledge of what something is, what it is like, and why it is as it is. Scientific cognitivism claims that for human environments knowledge provided by the social sciences, especially history, is equally as relevant to aesthetic appreciation as that given by the natural sciences (Carlson 2009). For appropriate appreciation of rural and urban environments, as well as specialized environments such as those of industry and agriculture, what is needed is information about their histories, their functions, and their roles in our lives (Carlson 1985 2001, Parsons 2008b, Parsons and Carlson 2008). Other approaches emphasize the aesthetic potential of cultural traditions, which seem especially relevant to the appreciation of what might be termed cultural landscapes—environments that constitute important places in the cultures and histories of particular groups of people. What is often called a sense of place, together with ideas and images from folklore, mythology, and religion, frequently plays a significant role in individuals’ aesthetic experience of their own home landscapes (Saito 1985, Sepänmaa 1993, Carlson 2000, Sandrisser 2007, Firth 2008, Nomikos 2018).

Fruitful approaches to the aesthetic appreciation of human environments can also be found in views that draw on both cognitive and non-cognitive points of view. There have been attempts to explicitly forge connections between the two orientations (Foster 1998, Moore 1999 2008, Fudge 2001), and there are several collections and studies that, moving beyond the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction, inform our understanding of the appreciation of an array of environments and address issues that arise concerning them (Berleant and Carlson 2007, Arntzen and Brady 2008, Herrington 2009, Brady et al 2018). There are investigations of both rural landscapes (Sepänmaa 2005, von Bonsdorff 2005, Andrews 2007, Benson 2008, Leddy 2008, Brook 2013, Benovsky 2016) and urban cityscapes (von Bonsdorff 2002, Macauley 2007, Sepänmaa 2007, Erzen and Milani 2013, Frydryczak 2015) as well as more specialized environments, such as industrial sites (Saito 2004, Maskit 2007, Kover 2014), shopping centers (Brottman 2007), restored and rewilded environments (Heyd 2002, Prior and Brady 2017, Brady et al 2018), and even environments after the end of nature (Vogel 2015). Beyond the consideration of these larger, more public environments, the aesthetics of everyday life becomes especially relevant.

The aesthetics of everyday life tends to focus on the aesthetics of smaller environments as well as the common objects and the everyday activities that occupy such environments. Thus it investigates not only the aesthetic qualities of more personal environments, such as individual living spaces, for example, yards and houses (Melchionne 1998 2002, Lee 2010), but also the aesthetic dimensions of normal day-to-day experiences (Leddy 1995 2005b 1012b, Saito 2001 2008 2012 2017b, Haapala 2005, Irvin 2008a 2008b, Mandoki 2010, Maskit 2011). Moreover, it explores the aesthetic aspects of somewhat more specialized and perhaps uniquely human interests and activities, such as the appreciation of the human body (Davies 2014, Irvin 2016b, Saito 2016), of sports (Welsch 2005, Edgar 2013), and of food, cuisine, and dining (Korsmeyer 1999, Sweeney 2017, Ravasio 2018). There are major monographs that address the general topic of the aesthetics of everyday life (Mandoki 2007, Saito 2008 2017a, Leddy 2012b) as well as several collections (von Bonsdorff and Haapala 1999, Light and Smith 2005, Yuedi and Carter 2014a, Irvin 2016a) that pursue particular areas of interest and thus yield insight into and encourage the appreciation of almost every aspect of human life. However, although these various lines of research are clearly very productive, the credentials of the aesthetics of everyday life as an investigation of genuine aesthetic experiences have been challenged, debated, and defended (Dowling 2010, Melchionne 2011 2013 2014, Leddy 2012a 2014 2015, Naukkarinen 2013 2017, Carlson 2014a, Davies 2015, Puolakka 2018).

Nonetheless, in spite of these challenges and concerns about the aesthetics of everyday life, when it turns to the investigation of things such as sports and food, it begins to come full circle, connecting environmental aesthetics back to more traditional aesthetics and to the study of clearly genuine aesthetic experiences. By way of the aesthetics of everyday life, together with the aesthetics of human environments, environmental aesthetics makes contact with the artistic activities involved not only in sports and cuisine, but also in gardening (Miller 1993, Saito 1996, Carlson 1997, Ross 1998, Cooper 2006, Parsons 2008a, Chung 2018, Brady et al 2018) and in landscaping, architecture, and design (Stecker 1999, Carlson 2000, Parsons 2008b 2011 2016, Forsey, 2013, Svabo and Ekelund 2015, van Etteger et al 2016). In addition, and now within the context of environmental aesthetics, traditional art forms, such as poetry and literature (Berleant 1991 2004, Ross 1998, Sepänmaa 2004) and painting, sculpture, dance, and music (Berleant 1991 2004, Ross 1998, Mullis 2014) as well as newer forms, such as environmental art (Crawford 1983, Carlson 1986, Ross 1993, Brady 2007, Brook 2007, Fisher 2007, Lintott 2007, Parsons 2008a, Simus 2008b, Brady et al 2018, Nannicelli 2018), are explored and re-explored—both as aesthetically significant dimensions of our everyday experiences and concerning their roles in shaping our aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments. (For more detailed consideration of the aesthetics of everyday life, see the SEP entry on the Aesthetics of the Everyday.)

5. Environmental Aesthetics, Environmentalism, and Future Directions

Together with wider scope of environmental aesthetics, including both the aesthetics of human environments and the aesthetics of everyday life, the twenty-first century has also given rise to renewed investigations of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism. This relationship has been increasingly scrutinized, resulting in criticism of earlier work on the aesthetics of nature as well as detailed assessments of contemporary positions. Hand in hand with these developments have come several new interests and directions.

The relationships between contemporary environmentalism and the positions and ideas of environmental aesthetics have sources in the aesthetics of nature developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As noted, early environmental movements, especially in North America, were fueled by a mode of aesthetic appreciation shaped not only by the notion of the picturesque but also by ideas developed by thinkers such as Muir (Hargrove 1979, Callicott 1994, Wattles 2013, Brady 2018). However, more recently the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism has seemed somewhat more problematic (Carlson 2010). Some individuals interested in the conservation and protection of both natural and human heritage environments have not found in traditional aesthetics of nature the resources that they believe are needed in order to carry out an environmentalist agenda (Loftis 2003). Others investigate problems posed by environments with unique features, such as isolation, for it is seemingly difficult to justify on aesthetic grounds the preservation of natural environments that are isolated such as to be essentially hidden from human aesthetic appreciation (Parsons 2015). The problem is especially acute concerning environments, such as wetlands, that do not fit conventional conceptions of scenic beauty (Rolston 2000, Callicott 2003). Moreover, in line with earlier criticisms that much of the empirical work in landscape assessment and planning was focused only on scenic, picturesque environments, much of the historical tradition concerning the aesthetic appreciation of nature has been called into question. Various themes in the aesthetics of nature, such as appreciation grounded in the idea of the picturesque, have been criticized in a number of ways: as anthropocentric (Godlovitch 1994), scenery-obsessed (Saito 1998a), trivial (Callicott 1994), subjective (Thompson 1995), and/or morally vacuous (Andrews 1998). Similarly, in agreement with the aesthetics of engagement’s critique of the theory of disinterestedness, some find that concept to be questionable from an environmental standpoint (Rolston 1998).

There are a variety of responses to these kinds of criticisms of traditional aesthetics of nature and of the notions of disinterestedness and the picturesque. Some reassess and defend the idea of the picturesque, arguing that it, as well as some other aspects of the eighteenth century tradition, has been misunderstood by some contemporary aestheticians (Brook 2008, Paden et al 2013, Paden 2013 2015a 2015b, Earle 2015). Others turn to the investigation of the long neglected member of the original eighteenth-century triumvirate of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, finding in the sublime new resources for approaching the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world (Brady 2012 2013, Shapshay 2013, Mahoney 2016). However, whatever the final verdict about the significance of the picturesque and the sublime, the resources of non-cognitive approaches, especially the aesthetics of engagement, are taken to counter the criticisms that, due to the influence of ideas such as that of the picturesque, aesthetic experience of nature must be both anthropocentric and scenery-obsessed (Rolston 1998 2002). The charge of anthropocentricity is also explicitly addressed by the mystery approach, which attempts to give aesthetic appreciation of nature an “acentric” basis (Godlovitch 1994). Concerning the concept of disinterestedness, some philosophers yet hold the view that some form of the theory of disinterestedness is essential, since without it the notion of the aesthetic itself lacks conceptual grounding (Budd 2002), while others claim that an analysis of aesthetic experience in terms of the concept of disinterestedness helps to meet the charges that traditional aesthetics is anthropocentric and subjective, since such an analysis supports the objectivity of aesthetic judgments (Brady 2003). Similarly, cognitive accounts also furnish replies to some of these charges. Scientific cognitivism in particular, with its focus on scientific knowledge such as that given by geology and ecology, is claimed to help meet the worry that aesthetic appreciation of environments is of little significance in environmental conservation and preservation since aesthetic appreciation is trivial and subjective (Hettinger 2005, Parsons 2006a 2008a). Nonetheless, the extent to which scientific cognitivism and related ecology-dependent views can successfully address such problems and doubts concerning the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments is also questioned on various grounds (Budd 2002, Hettinger 2007, Berleant 2010a 2016, Bannon 2011, Stecker 2012, Herguedas 2018, Mikkonen 2018).

Like the movement toward more ecologically informed aesthetic appreciation, the line of thought that connects the aesthetic appreciation of nature with positive aesthetics has also been debated. The contention that untouched, pristine nature has only or primarily positive aesthetic qualities has been related to scientific cognitivism by suggesting that linking the appreciation of nature to scientific knowledge explains how positive aesthetic appreciation is nurtured by a scientific worldview that increasingly interprets the natural world as having positive aesthetic qualities, such as order, balance, unity, and harmony (Carlson 1984). Other philosophers either see the relationship between scientific cognitivism and positive aesthetics somewhat conversely, arguing that the latter should just be assumed, in which case it provides support for the former (Parsons 2002), or simply contend that the positive aesthetics tradition actually has much earlier roots than contemporary scientific cognitivism (Phemister and Strickland 2015). Nonetheless, however it is justified, some versions of the positive aesthetics position are supported by several environmental philosophers (Rolston 1988, Hargrove 1989, Hettinger 2017, Cheng 2017a), while others find it problematic, either since it appears to undercut the possibility of the kind of comparative assessments thought to be necessary for environmental planning and preservation (Thompson 1995, Godlovitch 1998a) or because the idea itself seems unintuitive, obscure, and/or inadequately justified (Godlovitch 1998b, Saito 1998a, Budd 2002, Stecker 2012). Even philosophers who are somewhat open to the idea of positive aesthetics have some reservations about its original formulation, arguing that it depends too heavily on a now out-dated conception of ecology and/or does not adequately stress an evolutionary understanding of nature as an essential component of aesthetic appreciation (Simus 2008a, Paden et al 2012, Paden 2015a 2016). Such considerations may point to a more plausible version of positive aesthetics.

In spite of the above noted reservations about various cognitivist approaches, in light of the seeming relevance of natural sciences such as geology, biology, and especially ecology to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, scientific cognitivim is sometimes interpreted as “an ecological aesthetic” in the tradition of Aldo Leopold, who linked the beauty of nature to ecological integrity and stability (Callicott 1994 2003, Gobster 1995). However, although it clearly has roots in Leopold’s thought, the explicit idea of ecological aesthetics, or as it is sometimes called, ecoaesthetics, seems to have later origins (Meeker 1872, Koh 1988). Moreover, although the idea has had for some time a place within analytic environmental aesthetics, perhaps best filled by scientific cognitivism, more recently it has also been adopted by some philosophers working in the “continental tradition”. For example, it is claimed that although phenomenological work in “ecological aesthetics” is “still in its infancy”, the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty is applicable to its development. Moreover, it is suggested that the aesthetics of engagement is the first and currently the strongest “comprehensive phenomenological theory of ecological aesthetics” and that it in combination with scientific cognitivism would constitute a stronger ecological aesthetics (Toadvine 2010). There is also other recent research in environmental aesthetics that draws, more or less, on both analytic and continental traditions (Tafalla 2011, Leddy 2012b, Maskit 2014, Paetzold 2014, Seel 2015, Jóhannesdóttir 2016).

There is, in addition, considerable interest in environmental aesthetics in the East, which likewise draws on both analytic and continental traditions as well as on Eastern philosophy (Cheng 2010 2013b 2017b, Yuedi 2014, Chen 2015). Several different topics concerning both natural and human environments are addressed in the recent work in this area, which includes research not only by Eastern but also by Western scholars (Xue 2008 2018, Xue and Carlson 2010, Saito 2014a, Aota 2016, Berleant 2013a 2016, Carlson 2017, Odin 2017, Zeng Y. 2017, Brubaker 2018, Chung 2018, Parsons and Zhang 2018). There are also some collections that contain relevant essays (Cheng et al 2013, Yuedi and Carter 2014a, Callicott and McRae 2017, Nguyen 2018) as well as some journal issues devoted especially to recent work in Eastern aesthetics, for example, Critical Theory , 1, 2 (2017) and Contemporary Aesthetics , Special Volume 6 (2018). Within this body of work, perhaps the most dominate area of interest is ecological aesthetics, which is pursued by several Chinese aestheticians, who have developed robust versions of ecoaesthetics (Cheng 2013a 2016, Zeng F. 2017). Other than the sources cited here, much of this work is available only in Chinese. However, one prominent version of ecoaesthetics, which is accessible in English, embraces, as the “four keystones of ecological aesthetic appreciation”, not only the centrality of ecological knowledge and the rejection of the duality of humanity and the natural world, but also the over-arching value of ecosystem biodiversity and health and the continued guidance of ecological ethics (Cheng 2013c). While the first two of these four “keystones” reflect scientific cognitivism and the aesthetics of engagement, the last two go well beyond these Western positions. By placing ecosystem health and ecological ethics within the framework of ecoaesthetics, Chinese ecological aesthetics directly and powerfully addresses the question of the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics (Carlson 2018). This move is comparable to, and perhaps more successful than, the attempts by Western aestheticians to bring aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments in line with moral obligations to maintain environmental and ecological health (Rolston 1995, Eaton 1997 1998, Lintott 2006, Saito 2007 2008, Varandas 2015) and to forge strong positive links between aesthetic appreciation of nature and nature protection and preservation (Rolston 2002, Brady 2003, Carlson and Lintott 2007, Parsons 2008a, Carlson 2010, Lintott and Carlson 2014, Parsons 2018). Nonetheless, the degree to which aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments and ethical considerations are related to one another continues to be a matter of investigation, discussion, and debate (Loftis 2003, Bannon 2011, Stecker 2012, Carlson 2018, Stewart and Johnson 2018).

The current research in environmental aesthetics that draws on the continental tradition and the extensive work on ecoaesthetics by Eastern scholars are examples of the globalization of environmental aesthetics. Recently there have been calls in both the East and the West for the globalization of aesthetics in general (Li and Cauvel 2006, Higgins 2017) and of environmental aesthetics in particular (Saito 2010, Yuedi and Carter 2014b). Such calls are vital to the continuing growth of the field, yet it is also important to note that, although work on ecoaesthetics within the continental tradition and its development in the East are relatively recent, environmental aesthetics itself has long had a global orientation. Since its inception, there has been interest in the field by a wide range of scholars exploring different philosophical traditions and/or working in different countries. For example, drawing on continental philosophy is not new to environmental aesthetics (Berleant 1985). Likewise, there was significant research on Japanese aesthetics of nature early in the development of environmental aesthetics (Saito 1985 1992 1996) which has continued into the present century (Saito 2002 2014a). Another example is the research produced in Finland, where a number of conferences were hosted during the 1990s and 2000s, each followed by a collection of articles, such as (Sepänmaa and Heikkilä-Palo 2005, Sepänmaa et al 2007). Similarly, several conferences have been held in China in recent years, to which Western scholars have been invited and from which have followed collections of articles (Cheng et al 2013, Yuedi and Carter 2014a). Similar collections have also published papers presented at conferences in Europe (Drenthen and Keulartz 2014) and in North America, from which papers are included in a recent special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Shapshay and Tenen 2018a). Another indication of the global appeal of environmental aesthetics is that many articles and books in environmental aesthetics have been translated from English into a number of other languages, including several European languages as well as Korean and especially Chinese, into which several of the basic Western texts in environmental aesthetics have been translated. Moreover, this global appeal is further evidenced by the prolific research in the field currently being published in several different countries and languages.

The continuing globalization of environmental aesthetics as well as the currently fruitful discussions both within and among the various points of view represented in contemporary research, such as in ecoaesthetics, suggests that the work that is most productive for promoting and supporting the aesthetic appreciation and preservation of all kinds of environments, both natural and human, is that which depends not simply on any one particular approach to environmental aesthetics, but rather on attempts to bring together the resources of several different orientations and traditions (Nassauer 1997, Lintott 2006, Carlson 2009, Moore 2008, Cheng et al 2013, Carlson 2018). For example, in addition to the Chinese research in ecoaesthetics, there are, as noted, similar efforts by Western scholars to combine elements of cognitive and non-cognitive points of view (Rolston 1998 2002, Saito 2007, Toadvine 2010). Moreover, many thinkers explore other topics that they constructively relate to environmental aesthetics, for instance, feminist theory (Lee 2006, Lintott 2010, Lintott and Irvin 2016), political and social issues (Berleant 2005 2012, Ross 2005, Simus 2008b, McShane 2018, Saito 2018), philosophy of biology (Parsons and Carlson 2008), animal treatment and protection (Parsons 2007, Hettinger 2010, Semczyszyn 2013, Brady 2014a, Tafalla 2017, Cross 2018), weather and climate change (Brady 2014b, Diaconu 2015, Nomikos 2018), and, perhaps most important, the enrichment of the quality of human life (Saito 2017a 2018, Jamieson 2018). This kind of work can also pursue the application of these and related topics to environmental policy and practice (Saito 2007, Berleant 2010b 2012, Parsons 2010, Sepänmaa 2010, Robinson and Elliott 2011, Cheng et al 2013, Brady 2014b). In this way, these contributions continue to shape the future directions of environmental aesthetics (Saito 2010 2014b, Blanc 2012, Drenthen and Keulartz 2014, Shapshay and Tenen 2018b). Such innovative, eclectic approaches, coupled with the globalization of environmental aesthetics, will hopefully not only further a wide range of environmental goals and practices but also foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the aesthetic potential of the world in which we live.

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Essay on Nature

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Essay on Nature in 150-250 words

Essay on nature in 300-450 words, essay on nature in 500-1000 words.

Nature is a precious gift that surrounds us, encompassing the world’s landscapes, ecosystems, and living beings. It is a source of immense beauty, inspiration, and solace. From towering mountains to vast oceans, lush forests to serene meadows, nature provides us with breathtaking sights and a sense of awe.

Nature is not only visually captivating but also essential for our survival and well-being. It sustains life by providing clean air, fresh water, and fertile soil. It is home to a diverse array of plants and animals, each playing a vital role in maintaining ecological balance.

Furthermore, spending time in nature has numerous benefits for our physical and mental health. It rejuvenates our spirits, reduces stress, and enhances our overall well-being. Immersing ourselves in nature’s tranquility allows us to disconnect from the fast-paced world and reconnect with our inner selves.

However, human activities have taken a toll on nature. Deforestation, pollution, and climate change threaten the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. It is our responsibility to protect and conserve nature for future generations.

Appreciating nature’s beauty and recognizing its significance is crucial. We must strive to live in harmony with nature, practicing sustainable lifestyles and preserving natural resources. By valuing and respecting nature, we can ensure its preservation and continue to enjoy its countless gifts.

In conclusion, nature is a precious and awe-inspiring entity that sustains life and provides solace and inspiration. It is essential for our physical and mental well-being. As stewards of the Earth, it is our responsibility to protect and conserve nature, ensuring its preservation for future generations to cherish and enjoy.

Nature is a magnificent and awe-inspiring gift that surrounds us, encompassing the diverse landscapes, ecosystems, and living beings that make up our planet. From the majestic mountains to the serene lakes, from the vibrant forests to the vast oceans, nature captivates us with its beauty, power, and serenity.

Nature provides us with numerous benefits and is essential for our survival and well-being. It is the source of clean air, freshwater, and fertile soil that sustains life on Earth. The intricate web of ecosystems, comprising plants, animals, and microorganisms, works together to maintain the delicate balance of nature.

Beyond its practical importance, nature has a profound impact on our physical and mental health. Spending time in nature has been shown to reduce stress, improve mood, and enhance overall well-being. The sight of a breathtaking sunset, the sound of waves crashing on the shore, or the touch of grass beneath our feet can have a soothing and therapeutic effect, allowing us to reconnect with ourselves and find solace in the beauty of the natural world.

Unfortunately, human activities have had a detrimental impact on nature. Deforestation, pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction threaten the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. It is imperative that we recognize the urgency of preserving and protecting nature for future generations.

Conservation and sustainable practices are vital for ensuring the continued well-being of our planet. We must strive to live in harmony with nature, embracing sustainable lifestyles and adopting practices that minimize our ecological footprint. This includes reducing waste, conserving energy and water, practicing responsible consumption, and supporting conservation efforts.

Furthermore, education and awareness play a crucial role in fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of nature. By learning about the intricate interconnectedness of ecosystems and the importance of biodiversity, we can develop a sense of responsibility and take action to protect and conserve the natural world.

Preserving nature is not just about ensuring our own well-being; it is a moral obligation to future generations and a commitment to the intrinsic value of all living beings and ecosystems. By valuing and respecting nature, we can create a more sustainable and harmonious future, where humans coexist with the natural world in a mutually beneficial relationship.

In conclusion, nature is a source of wonder, beauty, and vital resources. It sustains life, nourishes our souls, and provides us with a profound sense of connection. As custodians of the Earth, it is our responsibility to protect and preserve nature, adopting sustainable practices and fostering a deep appreciation for the natural world. By doing so, we can ensure a vibrant and thriving planet for ourselves and future generations to enjoy and cherish.

Title: Nature – A Pristine Gift Nurturing Life and Inspiring the Human Spirit

Introduction :

Nature, with its awe-inspiring landscapes, diverse ecosystems, and intricate web of life, is a pristine gift that surrounds us. It captivates us with its beauty, serenity, and transformative power. This essay explores the profound relationship between humans and nature, highlighting its importance for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It also emphasizes the urgent need to protect and preserve nature in the face of environmental challenges.

The Beauty and Diversity of Nature

Nature encompasses a vast array of breathtaking landscapes, from snow-capped mountains to lush forests, from vast oceans to tranquil meadows. Each holds its unique charm, captivating us with its grandeur, tranquility, and raw beauty. From the vibrant colors of blooming flowers to the graceful flight of birds, nature’s diversity evokes wonder and ignites our imagination.

Nurturing Life and Ecosystems

Nature sustains life on Earth, providing vital resources and supporting intricate ecosystems. It supplies us with clean air, freshwater, and fertile soil, enabling the growth of crops and the survival of diverse species. The delicate balance of ecosystems ensures the survival of plants, animals, and microorganisms, each playing a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity and ecological harmony.

Physical and Mental Well-being

Spending time in nature has numerous physical and mental health benefits. It reduces stress, anxiety, and depression, promoting a sense of calm and well-being. The healing power of nature can be seen in activities such as forest bathing, where individuals immerse themselves in natural environments to enhance their overall health. Nature provides a respite from the fast-paced urban life, allowing us to disconnect, recharge, and rejuvenate our spirits.

Inspiration and Spiritual Connection

Nature inspires us and stirs our innermost emotions. The grandeur of a mountain range, the rhythmic crashing of waves, or the delicate beauty of a flower can evoke a profound sense of awe and wonder. Nature’s beauty stimulates our creativity, kindles our imagination, and nurtures our spirit. It serves as a reminder of our place in the larger tapestry of life, connecting us to something greater than ourselves.

Environmental Challenges and the Need for Conservation

Nature is facing unprecedented challenges due to human activities. Deforestation, pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction pose significant threats to the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. The urgency to protect and preserve nature has never been greater. Conservation efforts, sustainable practices, and environmental awareness are crucial in mitigating these challenges and ensuring a sustainable future.

Cultivating a Connection with Nature

To protect and preserve nature, it is essential to cultivate a deep connection and appreciation for the natural world. Education plays a vital role in fostering environmental awareness and instilling a sense of responsibility. Encouraging outdoor experiences, nature-based activities, and environmental stewardship programs can nurture a love for nature and promote a sense of guardianship of the planet.

Conclusion :

Nature is a remarkable and invaluable gift, nurturing life, inspiring the human spirit, and offering solace and serenity. It is essential for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. However, it faces significant challenges that threaten its delicate balance and the well-being of future generations. By protecting and preserving nature, adopting sustainable practices, and fostering a deep connection with the natural world, we can ensure a vibrant and thriving planet for ourselves and future generations to enjoy and cherish. Let us embrace our role as stewards of the Earth and work collectively to safeguard nature’s invaluable gifts.

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The Impact of The Romantic Era on Nature

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Published: Jul 7, 2022

Words: 1390 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Works Cited

• Discovering Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, & National Park Service Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, www.lewis-clark.org/channel/60. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019.
• Gernhardt, Phyllis. “Early Intellectual Thought and the Environment: The Enlightenment and Romantic Movements.” 2009, Microsoft PowerPoint file.
• ---. “Intellectual Thought and the Environment: The Romantic Era.” 2011, Microsoft PowerPoint file.
• Henderson, David. “American Wilderness Philosophy.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, www.iep.utm.edu/am-wild/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019.
• “Manifest Destiny.” History, A&E Television Networks, 5 April 2010, www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/manifest-destiny#section_3. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019.
• “Transcendentalism, An American Philosophy.” U.S. History.org. Independence Hall Association, http://www.ushistory.org/us/26f.asp. Accessed 14 February 2019.

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Opinion Guest Essay

My Faith Forbade Eclipse Gazing. Now It Inspires My Art.

Credit... Photo Illustration by Balarama Heller for The New York Times

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Photographs and Text by Balarama Heller

Mr. Heller is an artist based in New York City.

• April 7, 2024

As a child growing up in the Hare Krishna community in the United States, I was forbidden to be outside during a solar eclipse.

In our version of Vedic astronomy , eclipses are believed to be a deeply inauspicious time when the demon Rahu’s decapitated head chases the sun and the moon. In this chase, Rahu’s head obscures or swallows the sun. A visceral fear would sweep our community as an eclipse approached. We crowded into the inner sanctum of the temple to recite prayers, hoping to counteract the forces of darkness that were consuming our universe. As totality enveloped us, a profound sense of unity between our community and Lord Krishna crescendoed. As Rahu receded, the sun gradually dispelled the darkness, bringing collective relief as the forces of goodness triumphed over chaos once more.

Many ideas in Vedic cosmology (which seeks explanations for both human and nonhuman affairs throughout the universe) depict the physical universe as profoundly animate and vibrant. Some explanations for the mechanics of the observable world mirror modern understandings of concepts like the atom , the cyclic nature of time at scale and quantum mechanics’ “ many worlds ” theory. But it is still an ancient set of beliefs where planets possess their own personalities, akin to living deities or demons. I am no longer religious, and do not believe in god nor superstition. But growing up, I regarded existence as a grand stage where conflicting energies of chaos and order perpetually and cyclically clash, each vying for supremacy before gradually reconciling and reaching a delicate equilibrium where they coexist in a harmonious, unified balance.

Observing the sky and fully embracing the belief that an eclipse occurred owing to a demon’s attempt to devour the moon or sun shaped my early worldview. But over the years, my exposure to scientific readings — especially “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, which sought to explain the scientific method to the general public — gradually transformed those views. I shifted away from a mythic-religious perspective and embraced modern science, and learned that a solar eclipse is the moon passing between the earth and the sun, obscuring our view of the sun.

This transition didn’t diminish my sense of awe and wonder toward the cosmos. If anything, it only heightened my appreciation for the complexity of the universe, my curiosity to learn more and my desire to translate these cosmic mysteries through my artistic practice. Celestial bodies aligning with each other now seems like a more miraculous event than a demon head flying through space.

Ontological questions have always been at the root of my artistic practice. My work is an attempt to tap into the mythologies we’ve inherited from our ancestors through cave paintings, religious texts and other materials — and reinterpret them into a modern context that pays homage to these ancestors while creating a new vocabulary of archetypes that are relevant to our era. I believe these archetypes can represent the outer limits of our rational understanding, and live side by side with the gods of old mythologies.

I am grateful for the upbringing that immersed me in a mythological worldview at a young age. I now have a bridge of understanding not only to our ancestors but also to billions of living people who hold beliefs that cannot always be explained by science. As the drama of the cosmos plays out in our tiny and insignificant corner of the universe, events in the sky like solar eclipses are now our mirrors, reflecting our projections and beliefs.

The total solar eclipse, with masses of humanity witnessing it, is the closest most of us will get to the overview effect — the rare experience astronauts have when they are in space and look back to see the Earth, and feel an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. The experience of solar eclipse totality is often described in a similar way : a brief glimpse into an altered state where for a few moments, everything under the sun is reminded simultaneously of its relationship to the whole.

Although god and superstition hold a less prominent place in many of our minds these days, it’s crucial to acknowledge that for millenniums, seers, mystics, alchemists and pagans served as the scientists of their time, employing whatever tools were available to comprehend the turmoil surrounding them. Science is humble, and by definition remains open to revisions and updates as new information comes to light. The study of the physical universe, especially events as rare as solar eclipses, should be seen as an act of reverence — an offering to the infinite mystery we find ourselves living in.

These multiple exposure images were created in studio, using colored lights and cutouts, composed in camera, and finalized in postproduction.

Balarama Heller is an artist based in New York City. His 2019 project, “Sacred Place,” was published in Aperture magazine , and is a forthcoming book with text by Pico Iyer.

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Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning

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Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  2368 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Chemical engineering
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The perception and appreciation of food flavor depends on many interacting chemical compounds and external factors, and therefore proves challenging to understand and predict. Here, we combine extensive chemical and sensory analyses of 250 different beers to train machine learning models that allow predicting flavor and consumer appreciation. For each beer, we measure over 200 chemical properties, perform quantitative descriptive sensory analysis with a trained tasting panel and map data from over 180,000 consumer reviews to train 10 different machine learning models. The best-performing algorithm, Gradient Boosting, yields models that significantly outperform predictions based on conventional statistics and accurately predict complex food features and consumer appreciation from chemical profiles. Model dissection allows identifying specific and unexpected compounds as drivers of beer flavor and appreciation. Adding these compounds results in variants of commercial alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers with improved consumer appreciation. Together, our study reveals how big data and machine learning uncover complex links between food chemistry, flavor and consumer perception, and lays the foundation to develop novel, tailored foods with superior flavors.

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Introduction

Predicting and understanding food perception and appreciation is one of the major challenges in food science. Accurate modeling of food flavor and appreciation could yield important opportunities for both producers and consumers, including quality control, product fingerprinting, counterfeit detection, spoilage detection, and the development of new products and product combinations (food pairing) 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . Accurate models for flavor and consumer appreciation would contribute greatly to our scientific understanding of how humans perceive and appreciate flavor. Moreover, accurate predictive models would also facilitate and standardize existing food assessment methods and could supplement or replace assessments by trained and consumer tasting panels, which are variable, expensive and time-consuming 7 , 8 , 9 . Lastly, apart from providing objective, quantitative, accurate and contextual information that can help producers, models can also guide consumers in understanding their personal preferences 10 .

Despite the myriad of applications, predicting food flavor and appreciation from its chemical properties remains a largely elusive goal in sensory science, especially for complex food and beverages 11 , 12 . A key obstacle is the immense number of flavor-active chemicals underlying food flavor. Flavor compounds can vary widely in chemical structure and concentration, making them technically challenging and labor-intensive to quantify, even in the face of innovations in metabolomics, such as non-targeted metabolic fingerprinting 13 , 14 . Moreover, sensory analysis is perhaps even more complicated. Flavor perception is highly complex, resulting from hundreds of different molecules interacting at the physiochemical and sensorial level. Sensory perception is often non-linear, characterized by complex and concentration-dependent synergistic and antagonistic effects 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 that are further convoluted by the genetics, environment, culture and psychology of consumers 22 , 23 , 24 . Perceived flavor is therefore difficult to measure, with problems of sensitivity, accuracy, and reproducibility that can only be resolved by gathering sufficiently large datasets 25 . Trained tasting panels are considered the prime source of quality sensory data, but require meticulous training, are low throughput and high cost. Public databases containing consumer reviews of food products could provide a valuable alternative, especially for studying appreciation scores, which do not require formal training 25 . Public databases offer the advantage of amassing large amounts of data, increasing the statistical power to identify potential drivers of appreciation. However, public datasets suffer from biases, including a bias in the volunteers that contribute to the database, as well as confounding factors such as price, cult status and psychological conformity towards previous ratings of the product.

Classical multivariate statistics and machine learning methods have been used to predict flavor of specific compounds by, for example, linking structural properties of a compound to its potential biological activities or linking concentrations of specific compounds to sensory profiles 1 , 26 . Importantly, most previous studies focused on predicting organoleptic properties of single compounds (often based on their chemical structure) 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , thus ignoring the fact that these compounds are present in a complex matrix in food or beverages and excluding complex interactions between compounds. Moreover, the classical statistics commonly used in sensory science 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 require a large sample size and sufficient variance amongst predictors to create accurate models. They are not fit for studying an extensive set of hundreds of interacting flavor compounds, since they are sensitive to outliers, have a high tendency to overfit and are less suited for non-linear and discontinuous relationships 40 .

In this study, we combine extensive chemical analyses and sensory data of a set of different commercial beers with machine learning approaches to develop models that predict taste, smell, mouthfeel and appreciation from compound concentrations. Beer is particularly suited to model the relationship between chemistry, flavor and appreciation. First, beer is a complex product, consisting of thousands of flavor compounds that partake in complex sensory interactions 41 , 42 , 43 . This chemical diversity arises from the raw materials (malt, yeast, hops, water and spices) and biochemical conversions during the brewing process (kilning, mashing, boiling, fermentation, maturation and aging) 44 , 45 . Second, the advent of the internet saw beer consumers embrace online review platforms, such as RateBeer (ZX Ventures, Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV) and BeerAdvocate (Next Glass, inc.). In this way, the beer community provides massive data sets of beer flavor and appreciation scores, creating extraordinarily large sensory databases to complement the analyses of our professional sensory panel. Specifically, we characterize over 200 chemical properties of 250 commercial beers, spread across 22 beer styles, and link these to the descriptive sensory profiling data of a 16-person in-house trained tasting panel and data acquired from over 180,000 public consumer reviews. These unique and extensive datasets enable us to train a suite of machine learning models to predict flavor and appreciation from a beer’s chemical profile. Dissection of the best-performing models allows us to pinpoint specific compounds as potential drivers of beer flavor and appreciation. Follow-up experiments confirm the importance of these compounds and ultimately allow us to significantly improve the flavor and appreciation of selected commercial beers. Together, our study represents a significant step towards understanding complex flavors and reinforces the value of machine learning to develop and refine complex foods. In this way, it represents a stepping stone for further computer-aided food engineering applications 46 .

To generate a comprehensive dataset on beer flavor, we selected 250 commercial Belgian beers across 22 different beer styles (Supplementary Fig.  S1 ). Beers with ≤ 4.2% alcohol by volume (ABV) were classified as non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic. Blonds and Tripels constitute a significant portion of the dataset (12.4% and 11.2%, respectively) reflecting their presence on the Belgian beer market and the heterogeneity of beers within these styles. By contrast, lager beers are less diverse and dominated by a handful of brands. Rare styles such as Brut or Faro make up only a small fraction of the dataset (2% and 1%, respectively) because fewer of these beers are produced and because they are dominated by distinct characteristics in terms of flavor and chemical composition.

Extensive analysis identifies relationships between chemical compounds in beer

For each beer, we measured 226 different chemical properties, including common brewing parameters such as alcohol content, iso-alpha acids, pH, sugar concentration 47 , and over 200 flavor compounds (Methods, Supplementary Table  S1 ). A large portion (37.2%) are terpenoids arising from hopping, responsible for herbal and fruity flavors 16 , 48 . A second major category are yeast metabolites, such as esters and alcohols, that result in fruity and solvent notes 48 , 49 , 50 . Other measured compounds are primarily derived from malt, or other microbes such as non- Saccharomyces yeasts and bacteria (‘wild flora’). Compounds that arise from spices or staling are labeled under ‘Others’. Five attributes (caloric value, total acids and total ester, hop aroma and sulfur compounds) are calculated from multiple individually measured compounds.

As a first step in identifying relationships between chemical properties, we determined correlations between the concentrations of the compounds (Fig.  1 , upper panel, Supplementary Data  1 and 2 , and Supplementary Fig.  S2 . For the sake of clarity, only a subset of the measured compounds is shown in Fig.  1 ). Compounds of the same origin typically show a positive correlation, while absence of correlation hints at parameters varying independently. For example, the hop aroma compounds citronellol, and alpha-terpineol show moderate correlations with each other (Spearman’s rho=0.39 and 0.57), but not with the bittering hop component iso-alpha acids (Spearman’s rho=0.16 and −0.07). This illustrates how brewers can independently modify hop aroma and bitterness by selecting hop varieties and dosage time. If hops are added early in the boiling phase, chemical conversions increase bitterness while aromas evaporate, conversely, late addition of hops preserves aroma but limits bitterness 51 . Similarly, hop-derived iso-alpha acids show a strong anti-correlation with lactic acid and acetic acid, likely reflecting growth inhibition of lactic acid and acetic acid bacteria, or the consequent use of fewer hops in sour beer styles, such as West Flanders ales and Fruit beers, that rely on these bacteria for their distinct flavors 52 . Finally, yeast-derived esters (ethyl acetate, ethyl decanoate, ethyl hexanoate, ethyl octanoate) and alcohols (ethanol, isoamyl alcohol, isobutanol, and glycerol), correlate with Spearman coefficients above 0.5, suggesting that these secondary metabolites are correlated with the yeast genetic background and/or fermentation parameters and may be difficult to influence individually, although the choice of yeast strain may offer some control 53 .

Spearman rank correlations are shown. Descriptors are grouped according to their origin (malt (blue), hops (green), yeast (red), wild flora (yellow), Others (black)), and sensory aspect (aroma, taste, palate, and overall appreciation). Please note that for the chemical compounds, for the sake of clarity, only a subset of the total number of measured compounds is shown, with an emphasis on the key compounds for each source. For more details, see the main text and Methods section. Chemical data can be found in Supplementary Data  1 , correlations between all chemical compounds are depicted in Supplementary Fig.  S2 and correlation values can be found in Supplementary Data  2 . See Supplementary Data  4 for sensory panel assessments and Supplementary Data  5 for correlation values between all sensory descriptors.

Interestingly, different beer styles show distinct patterns for some flavor compounds (Supplementary Fig.  S3 ). These observations agree with expectations for key beer styles, and serve as a control for our measurements. For instance, Stouts generally show high values for color (darker), while hoppy beers contain elevated levels of iso-alpha acids, compounds associated with bitter hop taste. Acetic and lactic acid are not prevalent in most beers, with notable exceptions such as Kriek, Lambic, Faro, West Flanders ales and Flanders Old Brown, which use acid-producing bacteria ( Lactobacillus and Pediococcus ) or unconventional yeast ( Brettanomyces ) 54 , 55 . Glycerol, ethanol and esters show similar distributions across all beer styles, reflecting their common origin as products of yeast metabolism during fermentation 45 , 53 . Finally, low/no-alcohol beers contain low concentrations of glycerol and esters. This is in line with the production process for most of the low/no-alcohol beers in our dataset, which are produced through limiting fermentation or by stripping away alcohol via evaporation or dialysis, with both methods having the unintended side-effect of reducing the amount of flavor compounds in the final beer 56 , 57 .

Besides expected associations, our data also reveals less trivial associations between beer styles and specific parameters. For example, geraniol and citronellol, two monoterpenoids responsible for citrus, floral and rose flavors and characteristic of Citra hops, are found in relatively high amounts in Christmas, Saison, and Brett/co-fermented beers, where they may originate from terpenoid-rich spices such as coriander seeds instead of hops 58 .

Tasting panel assessments reveal sensorial relationships in beer

To assess the sensory profile of each beer, a trained tasting panel evaluated each of the 250 beers for 50 sensory attributes, including different hop, malt and yeast flavors, off-flavors and spices. Panelists used a tasting sheet (Supplementary Data  3 ) to score the different attributes. Panel consistency was evaluated by repeating 12 samples across different sessions and performing ANOVA. In 95% of cases no significant difference was found across sessions ( p  > 0.05), indicating good panel consistency (Supplementary Table  S2 ).

Aroma and taste perception reported by the trained panel are often linked (Fig.  1 , bottom left panel and Supplementary Data  4 and 5 ), with high correlations between hops aroma and taste (Spearman’s rho=0.83). Bitter taste was found to correlate with hop aroma and taste in general (Spearman’s rho=0.80 and 0.69), and particularly with “grassy” noble hops (Spearman’s rho=0.75). Barnyard flavor, most often associated with sour beers, is identified together with stale hops (Spearman’s rho=0.97) that are used in these beers. Lactic and acetic acid, which often co-occur, are correlated (Spearman’s rho=0.66). Interestingly, sweetness and bitterness are anti-correlated (Spearman’s rho = −0.48), confirming the hypothesis that they mask each other 59 , 60 . Beer body is highly correlated with alcohol (Spearman’s rho = 0.79), and overall appreciation is found to correlate with multiple aspects that describe beer mouthfeel (alcohol, carbonation; Spearman’s rho= 0.32, 0.39), as well as with hop and ester aroma intensity (Spearman’s rho=0.39 and 0.35).

Similar to the chemical analyses, sensorial analyses confirmed typical features of specific beer styles (Supplementary Fig.  S4 ). For example, sour beers (Faro, Flanders Old Brown, Fruit beer, Kriek, Lambic, West Flanders ale) were rated acidic, with flavors of both acetic and lactic acid. Hoppy beers were found to be bitter and showed hop-associated aromas like citrus and tropical fruit. Malt taste is most detected among scotch, stout/porters, and strong ales, while low/no-alcohol beers, which often have a reputation for being ‘worty’ (reminiscent of unfermented, sweet malt extract) appear in the middle. Unsurprisingly, hop aromas are most strongly detected among hoppy beers. Like its chemical counterpart (Supplementary Fig.  S3 ), acidity shows a right-skewed distribution, with the most acidic beers being Krieks, Lambics, and West Flanders ales.

Tasting panel assessments of specific flavors correlate with chemical composition

We find that the concentrations of several chemical compounds strongly correlate with specific aroma or taste, as evaluated by the tasting panel (Fig.  2 , Supplementary Fig.  S5 , Supplementary Data  6 ). In some cases, these correlations confirm expectations and serve as a useful control for data quality. For example, iso-alpha acids, the bittering compounds in hops, strongly correlate with bitterness (Spearman’s rho=0.68), while ethanol and glycerol correlate with tasters’ perceptions of alcohol and body, the mouthfeel sensation of fullness (Spearman’s rho=0.82/0.62 and 0.72/0.57 respectively) and darker color from roasted malts is a good indication of malt perception (Spearman’s rho=0.54).

Heatmap colors indicate Spearman’s Rho. Axes are organized according to sensory categories (aroma, taste, mouthfeel, overall), chemical categories and chemical sources in beer (malt (blue), hops (green), yeast (red), wild flora (yellow), Others (black)). See Supplementary Data  6 for all correlation values.

Interestingly, for some relationships between chemical compounds and perceived flavor, correlations are weaker than expected. For example, the rose-smelling phenethyl acetate only weakly correlates with floral aroma. This hints at more complex relationships and interactions between compounds and suggests a need for a more complex model than simple correlations. Lastly, we uncovered unexpected correlations. For instance, the esters ethyl decanoate and ethyl octanoate appear to correlate slightly with hop perception and bitterness, possibly due to their fruity flavor. Iron is anti-correlated with hop aromas and bitterness, most likely because it is also anti-correlated with iso-alpha acids. This could be a sign of metal chelation of hop acids 61 , given that our analyses measure unbound hop acids and total iron content, or could result from the higher iron content in dark and Fruit beers, which typically have less hoppy and bitter flavors 62 .

Public consumer reviews complement expert panel data

To complement and expand the sensory data of our trained tasting panel, we collected 180,000 reviews of our 250 beers from the online consumer review platform RateBeer. This provided numerical scores for beer appearance, aroma, taste, palate, overall quality as well as the average overall score.

Public datasets are known to suffer from biases, such as price, cult status and psychological conformity towards previous ratings of a product. For example, prices correlate with appreciation scores for these online consumer reviews (rho=0.49, Supplementary Fig.  S6 ), but not for our trained tasting panel (rho=0.19). This suggests that prices affect consumer appreciation, which has been reported in wine 63 , while blind tastings are unaffected. Moreover, we observe that some beer styles, like lagers and non-alcoholic beers, generally receive lower scores, reflecting that online reviewers are mostly beer aficionados with a preference for specialty beers over lager beers. In general, we find a modest correlation between our trained panel’s overall appreciation score and the online consumer appreciation scores (Fig.  3 , rho=0.29). Apart from the aforementioned biases in the online datasets, serving temperature, sample freshness and surroundings, which are all tightly controlled during the tasting panel sessions, can vary tremendously across online consumers and can further contribute to (among others, appreciation) differences between the two categories of tasters. Importantly, in contrast to the overall appreciation scores, for many sensory aspects the results from the professional panel correlated well with results obtained from RateBeer reviews. Correlations were highest for features that are relatively easy to recognize even for untrained tasters, like bitterness, sweetness, alcohol and malt aroma (Fig.  3 and below).

RateBeer text mining results can be found in Supplementary Data  7 . Rho values shown are Spearman correlation values, with asterisks indicating significant correlations ( p  < 0.05, two-sided). All p values were smaller than 0.001, except for Esters aroma (0.0553), Esters taste (0.3275), Esters aroma—banana (0.0019), Coriander (0.0508) and Diacetyl (0.0134).

Besides collecting consumer appreciation from these online reviews, we developed automated text analysis tools to gather additional data from review texts (Supplementary Data  7 ). Processing review texts on the RateBeer database yielded comparable results to the scores given by the trained panel for many common sensory aspects, including acidity, bitterness, sweetness, alcohol, malt, and hop tastes (Fig.  3 ). This is in line with what would be expected, since these attributes require less training for accurate assessment and are less influenced by environmental factors such as temperature, serving glass and odors in the environment. Consumer reviews also correlate well with our trained panel for 4-vinyl guaiacol, a compound associated with a very characteristic aroma. By contrast, correlations for more specific aromas like ester, coriander or diacetyl are underrepresented in the online reviews, underscoring the importance of using a trained tasting panel and standardized tasting sheets with explicit factors to be scored for evaluating specific aspects of a beer. Taken together, our results suggest that public reviews are trustworthy for some, but not all, flavor features and can complement or substitute taste panel data for these sensory aspects.

Models can predict beer sensory profiles from chemical data

The rich datasets of chemical analyses, tasting panel assessments and public reviews gathered in the first part of this study provided us with a unique opportunity to develop predictive models that link chemical data to sensorial features. Given the complexity of beer flavor, basic statistical tools such as correlations or linear regression may not always be the most suitable for making accurate predictions. Instead, we applied different machine learning models that can model both simple linear and complex interactive relationships. Specifically, we constructed a set of regression models to predict (a) trained panel scores for beer flavor and quality and (b) public reviews’ appreciation scores from beer chemical profiles. We trained and tested 10 different models (Methods), 3 linear regression-based models (simple linear regression with first-order interactions (LR), lasso regression with first-order interactions (Lasso), partial least squares regressor (PLSR)), 5 decision tree models (AdaBoost regressor (ABR), extra trees (ET), gradient boosting regressor (GBR), random forest (RF) and XGBoost regressor (XGBR)), 1 support vector regression (SVR), and 1 artificial neural network (ANN) model.

To compare the performance of our machine learning models, the dataset was randomly split into a training and test set, stratified by beer style. After a model was trained on data in the training set, its performance was evaluated on its ability to predict the test dataset obtained from multi-output models (based on the coefficient of determination, see Methods). Additionally, individual-attribute models were ranked per descriptor and the average rank was calculated, as proposed by Korneva et al. 64 . Importantly, both ways of evaluating the models’ performance agreed in general. Performance of the different models varied (Table  1 ). It should be noted that all models perform better at predicting RateBeer results than results from our trained tasting panel. One reason could be that sensory data is inherently variable, and this variability is averaged out with the large number of public reviews from RateBeer. Additionally, all tree-based models perform better at predicting taste than aroma. Linear models (LR) performed particularly poorly, with negative R 2 values, due to severe overfitting (training set R 2  = 1). Overfitting is a common issue in linear models with many parameters and limited samples, especially with interaction terms further amplifying the number of parameters. L1 regularization (Lasso) successfully overcomes this overfitting, out-competing multiple tree-based models on the RateBeer dataset. Similarly, the dimensionality reduction of PLSR avoids overfitting and improves performance, to some extent. Still, tree-based models (ABR, ET, GBR, RF and XGBR) show the best performance, out-competing the linear models (LR, Lasso, PLSR) commonly used in sensory science 65 .

GBR models showed the best overall performance in predicting sensory responses from chemical information, with R 2 values up to 0.75 depending on the predicted sensory feature (Supplementary Table  S4 ). The GBR models predict consumer appreciation (RateBeer) better than our trained panel’s appreciation (R 2 value of 0.67 compared to R 2 value of 0.09) (Supplementary Table  S3 and Supplementary Table  S4 ). ANN models showed intermediate performance, likely because neural networks typically perform best with larger datasets 66 . The SVR shows intermediate performance, mostly due to the weak predictions of specific attributes that lower the overall performance (Supplementary Table  S4 ).

Model dissection identifies specific, unexpected compounds as drivers of consumer appreciation

Next, we leveraged our models to infer important contributors to sensory perception and consumer appreciation. Consumer preference is a crucial sensory aspects, because a product that shows low consumer appreciation scores often does not succeed commercially 25 . Additionally, the requirement for a large number of representative evaluators makes consumer trials one of the more costly and time-consuming aspects of product development. Hence, a model for predicting chemical drivers of overall appreciation would be a welcome addition to the available toolbox for food development and optimization.

Since GBR models on our RateBeer dataset showed the best overall performance, we focused on these models. Specifically, we used two approaches to identify important contributors. First, rankings of the most important predictors for each sensorial trait in the GBR models were obtained based on impurity-based feature importance (mean decrease in impurity). High-ranked parameters were hypothesized to be either the true causal chemical properties underlying the trait, to correlate with the actual causal properties, or to take part in sensory interactions affecting the trait 67 (Fig.  4A ). In a second approach, we used SHAP 68 to determine which parameters contributed most to the model for making predictions of consumer appreciation (Fig.  4B ). SHAP calculates parameter contributions to model predictions on a per-sample basis, which can be aggregated into an importance score.

A The impurity-based feature importance (mean deviance in impurity, MDI) calculated from the Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR) model predicting RateBeer appreciation scores. The top 15 highest ranked chemical properties are shown. B SHAP summary plot for the top 15 parameters contributing to our GBR model. Each point on the graph represents a sample from our dataset. The color represents the concentration of that parameter, with bluer colors representing low values and redder colors representing higher values. Greater absolute values on the horizontal axis indicate a higher impact of the parameter on the prediction of the model. C Spearman correlations between the 15 most important chemical properties and consumer overall appreciation. Numbers indicate the Spearman Rho correlation coefficient, and the rank of this correlation compared to all other correlations. The top 15 important compounds were determined using SHAP (panel B).

Both approaches identified ethyl acetate as the most predictive parameter for beer appreciation (Fig.  4 ). Ethyl acetate is the most abundant ester in beer with a typical ‘fruity’, ‘solvent’ and ‘alcoholic’ flavor, but is often considered less important than other esters like isoamyl acetate. The second most important parameter identified by SHAP is ethanol, the most abundant beer compound after water. Apart from directly contributing to beer flavor and mouthfeel, ethanol drastically influences the physical properties of beer, dictating how easily volatile compounds escape the beer matrix to contribute to beer aroma 69 . Importantly, it should also be noted that the importance of ethanol for appreciation is likely inflated by the very low appreciation scores of non-alcoholic beers (Supplementary Fig.  S4 ). Despite not often being considered a driver of beer appreciation, protein level also ranks highly in both approaches, possibly due to its effect on mouthfeel and body 70 . Lactic acid, which contributes to the tart taste of sour beers, is the fourth most important parameter identified by SHAP, possibly due to the generally high appreciation of sour beers in our dataset.

Interestingly, some of the most important predictive parameters for our model are not well-established as beer flavors or are even commonly regarded as being negative for beer quality. For example, our models identify methanethiol and ethyl phenyl acetate, an ester commonly linked to beer staling 71 , as a key factor contributing to beer appreciation. Although there is no doubt that high concentrations of these compounds are considered unpleasant, the positive effects of modest concentrations are not yet known 72 , 73 .

To compare our approach to conventional statistics, we evaluated how well the 15 most important SHAP-derived parameters correlate with consumer appreciation (Fig.  4C ). Interestingly, only 6 of the properties derived by SHAP rank amongst the top 15 most correlated parameters. For some chemical compounds, the correlations are so low that they would have likely been considered unimportant. For example, lactic acid, the fourth most important parameter, shows a bimodal distribution for appreciation, with sour beers forming a separate cluster, that is missed entirely by the Spearman correlation. Additionally, the correlation plots reveal outliers, emphasizing the need for robust analysis tools. Together, this highlights the need for alternative models, like the Gradient Boosting model, that better grasp the complexity of (beer) flavor.

Finally, to observe the relationships between these chemical properties and their predicted targets, partial dependence plots were constructed for the six most important predictors of consumer appreciation 74 , 75 , 76 (Supplementary Fig.  S7 ). One-way partial dependence plots show how a change in concentration affects the predicted appreciation. These plots reveal an important limitation of our models: appreciation predictions remain constant at ever-increasing concentrations. This implies that once a threshold concentration is reached, further increasing the concentration does not affect appreciation. This is false, as it is well-documented that certain compounds become unpleasant at high concentrations, including ethyl acetate (‘nail polish’) 77 and methanethiol (‘sulfury’ and ‘rotten cabbage’) 78 . The inability of our models to grasp that flavor compounds have optimal levels, above which they become negative, is a consequence of working with commercial beer brands where (off-)flavors are rarely too high to negatively impact the product. The two-way partial dependence plots show how changing the concentration of two compounds influences predicted appreciation, visualizing their interactions (Supplementary Fig.  S7 ). In our case, the top 5 parameters are dominated by additive or synergistic interactions, with high concentrations for both compounds resulting in the highest predicted appreciation.

To assess the robustness of our best-performing models and model predictions, we performed 100 iterations of the GBR, RF and ET models. In general, all iterations of the models yielded similar performance (Supplementary Fig.  S8 ). Moreover, the main predictors (including the top predictors ethanol and ethyl acetate) remained virtually the same, especially for GBR and RF. For the iterations of the ET model, we did observe more variation in the top predictors, which is likely a consequence of the model’s inherent random architecture in combination with co-correlations between certain predictors. However, even in this case, several of the top predictors (ethanol and ethyl acetate) remain unchanged, although their rank in importance changes (Supplementary Fig.  S8 ).

Next, we investigated if a combination of RateBeer and trained panel data into one consolidated dataset would lead to stronger models, under the hypothesis that such a model would suffer less from bias in the datasets. A GBR model was trained to predict appreciation on the combined dataset. This model underperformed compared to the RateBeer model, both in the native case and when including a dataset identifier (R 2  = 0.67, 0.26 and 0.42 respectively). For the latter, the dataset identifier is the most important feature (Supplementary Fig.  S9 ), while most of the feature importance remains unchanged, with ethyl acetate and ethanol ranking highest, like in the original model trained only on RateBeer data. It seems that the large variation in the panel dataset introduces noise, weakening the models’ performances and reliability. In addition, it seems reasonable to assume that both datasets are fundamentally different, with the panel dataset obtained by blind tastings by a trained professional panel.

Lastly, we evaluated whether beer style identifiers would further enhance the model’s performance. A GBR model was trained with parameters that explicitly encoded the styles of the samples. This did not improve model performance (R2 = 0.66 with style information vs R2 = 0.67). The most important chemical features are consistent with the model trained without style information (eg. ethanol and ethyl acetate), and with the exception of the most preferred (strong ale) and least preferred (low/no-alcohol) styles, none of the styles were among the most important features (Supplementary Fig.  S9 , Supplementary Table  S5 and S6 ). This is likely due to a combination of style-specific chemical signatures, such as iso-alpha acids and lactic acid, that implicitly convey style information to the original models, as well as the low number of samples belonging to some styles, making it difficult for the model to learn style-specific patterns. Moreover, beer styles are not rigorously defined, with some styles overlapping in features and some beers being misattributed to a specific style, all of which leads to more noise in models that use style parameters.

Model validation

To test if our predictive models give insight into beer appreciation, we set up experiments aimed at improving existing commercial beers. We specifically selected overall appreciation as the trait to be examined because of its complexity and commercial relevance. Beer flavor comprises a complex bouquet rather than single aromas and tastes 53 . Hence, adding a single compound to the extent that a difference is noticeable may lead to an unbalanced, artificial flavor. Therefore, we evaluated the effect of combinations of compounds. Because Blond beers represent the most extensive style in our dataset, we selected a beer from this style as the starting material for these experiments (Beer 64 in Supplementary Data  1 ).

In the first set of experiments, we adjusted the concentrations of compounds that made up the most important predictors of overall appreciation (ethyl acetate, ethanol, lactic acid, ethyl phenyl acetate) together with correlated compounds (ethyl hexanoate, isoamyl acetate, glycerol), bringing them up to 95 th percentile ethanol-normalized concentrations (Methods) within the Blond group (‘Spiked’ concentration in Fig.  5A ). Compared to controls, the spiked beers were found to have significantly improved overall appreciation among trained panelists, with panelist noting increased intensity of ester flavors, sweetness, alcohol, and body fullness (Fig.  5B ). To disentangle the contribution of ethanol to these results, a second experiment was performed without the addition of ethanol. This resulted in a similar outcome, including increased perception of alcohol and overall appreciation.

Adding the top chemical compounds, identified as best predictors of appreciation by our model, into poorly appreciated beers results in increased appreciation from our trained panel. Results of sensory tests between base beers and those spiked with compounds identified as the best predictors by the model. A Blond and Non/Low-alcohol (0.0% ABV) base beers were brought up to 95th-percentile ethanol-normalized concentrations within each style. B For each sensory attribute, tasters indicated the more intense sample and selected the sample they preferred. The numbers above the bars correspond to the p values that indicate significant changes in perceived flavor (two-sided binomial test: alpha 0.05, n  = 20 or 13).

In a last experiment, we tested whether using the model’s predictions can boost the appreciation of a non-alcoholic beer (beer 223 in Supplementary Data  1 ). Again, the addition of a mixture of predicted compounds (omitting ethanol, in this case) resulted in a significant increase in appreciation, body, ester flavor and sweetness.

Predicting flavor and consumer appreciation from chemical composition is one of the ultimate goals of sensory science. A reliable, systematic and unbiased way to link chemical profiles to flavor and food appreciation would be a significant asset to the food and beverage industry. Such tools would substantially aid in quality control and recipe development, offer an efficient and cost-effective alternative to pilot studies and consumer trials and would ultimately allow food manufacturers to produce superior, tailor-made products that better meet the demands of specific consumer groups more efficiently.

A limited set of studies have previously tried, to varying degrees of success, to predict beer flavor and beer popularity based on (a limited set of) chemical compounds and flavors 79 , 80 . Current sensitive, high-throughput technologies allow measuring an unprecedented number of chemical compounds and properties in a large set of samples, yielding a dataset that can train models that help close the gaps between chemistry and flavor, even for a complex natural product like beer. To our knowledge, no previous research gathered data at this scale (250 samples, 226 chemical parameters, 50 sensory attributes and 5 consumer scores) to disentangle and validate the chemical aspects driving beer preference using various machine-learning techniques. We find that modern machine learning models outperform conventional statistical tools, such as correlations and linear models, and can successfully predict flavor appreciation from chemical composition. This could be attributed to the natural incorporation of interactions and non-linear or discontinuous effects in machine learning models, which are not easily grasped by the linear model architecture. While linear models and partial least squares regression represent the most widespread statistical approaches in sensory science, in part because they allow interpretation 65 , 81 , 82 , modern machine learning methods allow for building better predictive models while preserving the possibility to dissect and exploit the underlying patterns. Of the 10 different models we trained, tree-based models, such as our best performing GBR, showed the best overall performance in predicting sensory responses from chemical information, outcompeting artificial neural networks. This agrees with previous reports for models trained on tabular data 83 . Our results are in line with the findings of Colantonio et al. who also identified the gradient boosting architecture as performing best at predicting appreciation and flavor (of tomatoes and blueberries, in their specific study) 26 . Importantly, besides our larger experimental scale, we were able to directly confirm our models’ predictions in vivo.

Our study confirms that flavor compound concentration does not always correlate with perception, suggesting complex interactions that are often missed by more conventional statistics and simple models. Specifically, we find that tree-based algorithms may perform best in developing models that link complex food chemistry with aroma. Furthermore, we show that massive datasets of untrained consumer reviews provide a valuable source of data, that can complement or even replace trained tasting panels, especially for appreciation and basic flavors, such as sweetness and bitterness. This holds despite biases that are known to occur in such datasets, such as price or conformity bias. Moreover, GBR models predict taste better than aroma. This is likely because taste (e.g. bitterness) often directly relates to the corresponding chemical measurements (e.g., iso-alpha acids), whereas such a link is less clear for aromas, which often result from the interplay between multiple volatile compounds. We also find that our models are best at predicting acidity and alcohol, likely because there is a direct relation between the measured chemical compounds (acids and ethanol) and the corresponding perceived sensorial attribute (acidity and alcohol), and because even untrained consumers are generally able to recognize these flavors and aromas.

The predictions of our final models, trained on review data, hold even for blind tastings with small groups of trained tasters, as demonstrated by our ability to validate specific compounds as drivers of beer flavor and appreciation. Since adding a single compound to the extent of a noticeable difference may result in an unbalanced flavor profile, we specifically tested our identified key drivers as a combination of compounds. While this approach does not allow us to validate if a particular single compound would affect flavor and/or appreciation, our experiments do show that this combination of compounds increases consumer appreciation.

It is important to stress that, while it represents an important step forward, our approach still has several major limitations. A key weakness of the GBR model architecture is that amongst co-correlating variables, the largest main effect is consistently preferred for model building. As a result, co-correlating variables often have artificially low importance scores, both for impurity and SHAP-based methods, like we observed in the comparison to the more randomized Extra Trees models. This implies that chemicals identified as key drivers of a specific sensory feature by GBR might not be the true causative compounds, but rather co-correlate with the actual causative chemical. For example, the high importance of ethyl acetate could be (partially) attributed to the total ester content, ethanol or ethyl hexanoate (rho=0.77, rho=0.72 and rho=0.68), while ethyl phenylacetate could hide the importance of prenyl isobutyrate and ethyl benzoate (rho=0.77 and rho=0.76). Expanding our GBR model to include beer style as a parameter did not yield additional power or insight. This is likely due to style-specific chemical signatures, such as iso-alpha acids and lactic acid, that implicitly convey style information to the original model, as well as the smaller sample size per style, limiting the power to uncover style-specific patterns. This can be partly attributed to the curse of dimensionality, where the high number of parameters results in the models mainly incorporating single parameter effects, rather than complex interactions such as style-dependent effects 67 . A larger number of samples may overcome some of these limitations and offer more insight into style-specific effects. On the other hand, beer style is not a rigid scientific classification, and beers within one style often differ a lot, which further complicates the analysis of style as a model factor.

Our study is limited to beers from Belgian breweries. Although these beers cover a large portion of the beer styles available globally, some beer styles and consumer patterns may be missing, while other features might be overrepresented. For example, many Belgian ales exhibit yeast-driven flavor profiles, which is reflected in the chemical drivers of appreciation discovered by this study. In future work, expanding the scope to include diverse markets and beer styles could lead to the identification of even more drivers of appreciation and better models for special niche products that were not present in our beer set.

In addition to inherent limitations of GBR models, there are also some limitations associated with studying food aroma. Even if our chemical analyses measured most of the known aroma compounds, the total number of flavor compounds in complex foods like beer is still larger than the subset we were able to measure in this study. For example, hop-derived thiols, that influence flavor at very low concentrations, are notoriously difficult to measure in a high-throughput experiment. Moreover, consumer perception remains subjective and prone to biases that are difficult to avoid. It is also important to stress that the models are still immature and that more extensive datasets will be crucial for developing more complete models in the future. Besides more samples and parameters, our dataset does not include any demographic information about the tasters. Including such data could lead to better models that grasp external factors like age and culture. Another limitation is that our set of beers consists of high-quality end-products and lacks beers that are unfit for sale, which limits the current model in accurately predicting products that are appreciated very badly. Finally, while models could be readily applied in quality control, their use in sensory science and product development is restrained by their inability to discern causal relationships. Given that the models cannot distinguish compounds that genuinely drive consumer perception from those that merely correlate, validation experiments are essential to identify true causative compounds.

Despite the inherent limitations, dissection of our models enabled us to pinpoint specific molecules as potential drivers of beer aroma and consumer appreciation, including compounds that were unexpected and would not have been identified using standard approaches. Important drivers of beer appreciation uncovered by our models include protein levels, ethyl acetate, ethyl phenyl acetate and lactic acid. Currently, many brewers already use lactic acid to acidify their brewing water and ensure optimal pH for enzymatic activity during the mashing process. Our results suggest that adding lactic acid can also improve beer appreciation, although its individual effect remains to be tested. Interestingly, ethanol appears to be unnecessary to improve beer appreciation, both for blond beer and alcohol-free beer. Given the growing consumer interest in alcohol-free beer, with a predicted annual market growth of >7% 84 , it is relevant for brewers to know what compounds can further increase consumer appreciation of these beers. Hence, our model may readily provide avenues to further improve the flavor and consumer appreciation of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers, which is generally considered one of the key challenges for future beer production.

Whereas we see a direct implementation of our results for the development of superior alcohol-free beverages and other food products, our study can also serve as a stepping stone for the development of novel alcohol-containing beverages. We want to echo the growing body of scientific evidence for the negative effects of alcohol consumption, both on the individual level by the mutagenic, teratogenic and carcinogenic effects of ethanol 85 , 86 , as well as the burden on society caused by alcohol abuse and addiction. We encourage the use of our results for the production of healthier, tastier products, including novel and improved beverages with lower alcohol contents. Furthermore, we strongly discourage the use of these technologies to improve the appreciation or addictive properties of harmful substances.

The present work demonstrates that despite some important remaining hurdles, combining the latest developments in chemical analyses, sensory analysis and modern machine learning methods offers exciting avenues for food chemistry and engineering. Soon, these tools may provide solutions in quality control and recipe development, as well as new approaches to sensory science and flavor research.

Beer selection

250 commercial Belgian beers were selected to cover the broad diversity of beer styles and corresponding diversity in chemical composition and aroma. See Supplementary Fig.  S1 .

Chemical dataset

Sample preparation.

Beers within their expiration date were purchased from commercial retailers. Samples were prepared in biological duplicates at room temperature, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Bottle pressure was measured with a manual pressure device (Steinfurth Mess-Systeme GmbH) and used to calculate CO 2 concentration. The beer was poured through two filter papers (Macherey-Nagel, 500713032 MN 713 ¼) to remove carbon dioxide and prevent spontaneous foaming. Samples were then prepared for measurements by targeted Headspace-Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionization Detector/Flame Photometric Detector (HS-GC-FID/FPD), Headspace-Solid Phase Microextraction-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS), colorimetric analysis, enzymatic analysis, Near-Infrared (NIR) analysis, as described in the sections below. The mean values of biological duplicates are reported for each compound.

HS-GC-FID/FPD

HS-GC-FID/FPD (Shimadzu GC 2010 Plus) was used to measure higher alcohols, acetaldehyde, esters, 4-vinyl guaicol, and sulfur compounds. Each measurement comprised 5 ml of sample pipetted into a 20 ml glass vial containing 1.75 g NaCl (VWR, 27810.295). 100 µl of 2-heptanol (Sigma-Aldrich, H3003) (internal standard) solution in ethanol (Fisher Chemical, E/0650DF/C17) was added for a final concentration of 2.44 mg/L. Samples were flushed with nitrogen for 10 s, sealed with a silicone septum, stored at −80 °C and analyzed in batches of 20.

The GC was equipped with a DB-WAXetr column (length, 30 m; internal diameter, 0.32 mm; layer thickness, 0.50 µm; Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, USA) to the FID and an HP-5 column (length, 30 m; internal diameter, 0.25 mm; layer thickness, 0.25 µm; Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, USA) to the FPD. N 2 was used as the carrier gas. Samples were incubated for 20 min at 70 °C in the headspace autosampler (Flow rate, 35 cm/s; Injection volume, 1000 µL; Injection mode, split; Combi PAL autosampler, CTC analytics, Switzerland). The injector, FID and FPD temperatures were kept at 250 °C. The GC oven temperature was first held at 50 °C for 5 min and then allowed to rise to 80 °C at a rate of 5 °C/min, followed by a second ramp of 4 °C/min until 200 °C kept for 3 min and a final ramp of (4 °C/min) until 230 °C for 1 min. Results were analyzed with the GCSolution software version 2.4 (Shimadzu, Kyoto, Japan). The GC was calibrated with a 5% EtOH solution (VWR International) containing the volatiles under study (Supplementary Table  S7 ).

HS-SPME-GC-MS

HS-SPME-GC-MS (Shimadzu GCMS-QP-2010 Ultra) was used to measure additional volatile compounds, mainly comprising terpenoids and esters. Samples were analyzed by HS-SPME using a triphase DVB/Carboxen/PDMS 50/30 μm SPME fiber (Supelco Co., Bellefonte, PA, USA) followed by gas chromatography (Thermo Fisher Scientific Trace 1300 series, USA) coupled to a mass spectrometer (Thermo Fisher Scientific ISQ series MS) equipped with a TriPlus RSH autosampler. 5 ml of degassed beer sample was placed in 20 ml vials containing 1.75 g NaCl (VWR, 27810.295). 5 µl internal standard mix was added, containing 2-heptanol (1 g/L) (Sigma-Aldrich, H3003), 4-fluorobenzaldehyde (1 g/L) (Sigma-Aldrich, 128376), 2,3-hexanedione (1 g/L) (Sigma-Aldrich, 144169) and guaiacol (1 g/L) (Sigma-Aldrich, W253200) in ethanol (Fisher Chemical, E/0650DF/C17). Each sample was incubated at 60 °C in the autosampler oven with constant agitation. After 5 min equilibration, the SPME fiber was exposed to the sample headspace for 30 min. The compounds trapped on the fiber were thermally desorbed in the injection port of the chromatograph by heating the fiber for 15 min at 270 °C.

The GC-MS was equipped with a low polarity RXi-5Sil MS column (length, 20 m; internal diameter, 0.18 mm; layer thickness, 0.18 µm; Restek, Bellefonte, PA, USA). Injection was performed in splitless mode at 320 °C, a split flow of 9 ml/min, a purge flow of 5 ml/min and an open valve time of 3 min. To obtain a pulsed injection, a programmed gas flow was used whereby the helium gas flow was set at 2.7 mL/min for 0.1 min, followed by a decrease in flow of 20 ml/min to the normal 0.9 mL/min. The temperature was first held at 30 °C for 3 min and then allowed to rise to 80 °C at a rate of 7 °C/min, followed by a second ramp of 2 °C/min till 125 °C and a final ramp of 8 °C/min with a final temperature of 270 °C.

Mass acquisition range was 33 to 550 amu at a scan rate of 5 scans/s. Electron impact ionization energy was 70 eV. The interface and ion source were kept at 275 °C and 250 °C, respectively. A mix of linear n-alkanes (from C7 to C40, Supelco Co.) was injected into the GC-MS under identical conditions to serve as external retention index markers. Identification and quantification of the compounds were performed using an in-house developed R script as described in Goelen et al. and Reher et al. 87 , 88 (for package information, see Supplementary Table  S8 ). Briefly, chromatograms were analyzed using AMDIS (v2.71) 89 to separate overlapping peaks and obtain pure compound spectra. The NIST MS Search software (v2.0 g) in combination with the NIST2017, FFNSC3 and Adams4 libraries were used to manually identify the empirical spectra, taking into account the expected retention time. After background subtraction and correcting for retention time shifts between samples run on different days based on alkane ladders, compound elution profiles were extracted and integrated using a file with 284 target compounds of interest, which were either recovered in our identified AMDIS list of spectra or were known to occur in beer. Compound elution profiles were estimated for every peak in every chromatogram over a time-restricted window using weighted non-negative least square analysis after which peak areas were integrated 87 , 88 . Batch effect correction was performed by normalizing against the most stable internal standard compound, 4-fluorobenzaldehyde. Out of all 284 target compounds that were analyzed, 167 were visually judged to have reliable elution profiles and were used for final analysis.

Discrete photometric and enzymatic analysis

Discrete photometric and enzymatic analysis (Thermo Scientific TM Gallery TM Plus Beermaster Discrete Analyzer) was used to measure acetic acid, ammonia, beta-glucan, iso-alpha acids, color, sugars, glycerol, iron, pH, protein, and sulfite. 2 ml of sample volume was used for the analyses. Information regarding the reagents and standard solutions used for analyses and calibrations is included in Supplementary Table  S7 and Supplementary Table  S9 .

NIR analyses

NIR analysis (Anton Paar Alcolyzer Beer ME System) was used to measure ethanol. Measurements comprised 50 ml of sample, and a 10% EtOH solution was used for calibration.

Correlation calculations

Pairwise Spearman Rank correlations were calculated between all chemical properties.

Sensory dataset

Trained panel.

Our trained tasting panel consisted of volunteers who gave prior verbal informed consent. All compounds used for the validation experiment were of food-grade quality. The tasting sessions were approved by the Social and Societal Ethics Committee of the KU Leuven (G-2022-5677-R2(MAR)). All online reviewers agreed to the Terms and Conditions of the RateBeer website.

Sensory analysis was performed according to the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) Sensory Analysis Methods 90 . 30 volunteers were screened through a series of triangle tests. The sixteen most sensitive and consistent tasters were retained as taste panel members. The resulting panel was diverse in age [22–42, mean: 29], sex [56% male] and nationality [7 different countries]. The panel developed a consensus vocabulary to describe beer aroma, taste and mouthfeel. Panelists were trained to identify and score 50 different attributes, using a 7-point scale to rate attributes’ intensity. The scoring sheet is included as Supplementary Data  3 . Sensory assessments took place between 10–12 a.m. The beers were served in black-colored glasses. Per session, between 5 and 12 beers of the same style were tasted at 12 °C to 16 °C. Two reference beers were added to each set and indicated as ‘Reference 1 & 2’, allowing panel members to calibrate their ratings. Not all panelists were present at every tasting. Scores were scaled by standard deviation and mean-centered per taster. Values are represented as z-scores and clustered by Euclidean distance. Pairwise Spearman correlations were calculated between taste and aroma sensory attributes. Panel consistency was evaluated by repeating samples on different sessions and performing ANOVA to identify differences, using the ‘stats’ package (v4.2.2) in R (for package information, see Supplementary Table  S8 ).

Online reviews from a public database

The ‘scrapy’ package in Python (v3.6) (for package information, see Supplementary Table  S8 ). was used to collect 232,288 online reviews (mean=922, min=6, max=5343) from RateBeer, an online beer review database. Each review entry comprised 5 numerical scores (appearance, aroma, taste, palate and overall quality) and an optional review text. The total number of reviews per reviewer was collected separately. Numerical scores were scaled and centered per rater, and mean scores were calculated per beer.

For the review texts, the language was estimated using the packages ‘langdetect’ and ‘langid’ in Python. Reviews that were classified as English by both packages were kept. Reviewers with fewer than 100 entries overall were discarded. 181,025 reviews from >6000 reviewers from >40 countries remained. Text processing was done using the ‘nltk’ package in Python. Texts were corrected for slang and misspellings; proper nouns and rare words that are relevant to the beer context were specified and kept as-is (‘Chimay’,’Lambic’, etc.). A dictionary of semantically similar sensorial terms, for example ‘floral’ and ‘flower’, was created and collapsed together into one term. Words were stemmed and lemmatized to avoid identifying words such as ‘acid’ and ‘acidity’ as separate terms. Numbers and punctuation were removed.

Sentences from up to 50 randomly chosen reviews per beer were manually categorized according to the aspect of beer they describe (appearance, aroma, taste, palate, overall quality—not to be confused with the 5 numerical scores described above) or flagged as irrelevant if they contained no useful information. If a beer contained fewer than 50 reviews, all reviews were manually classified. This labeled data set was used to train a model that classified the rest of the sentences for all beers 91 . Sentences describing taste and aroma were extracted, and term frequency–inverse document frequency (TFIDF) was implemented to calculate enrichment scores for sensorial words per beer.

The sex of the tasting subject was not considered when building our sensory database. Instead, results from different panelists were averaged, both for our trained panel (56% male, 44% female) and the RateBeer reviews (70% male, 30% female for RateBeer as a whole).

Beer price collection and processing

Beer prices were collected from the following stores: Colruyt, Delhaize, Total Wine, BeerHawk, The Belgian Beer Shop, The Belgian Shop, and Beer of Belgium. Where applicable, prices were converted to Euros and normalized per liter. Spearman correlations were calculated between these prices and mean overall appreciation scores from RateBeer and the taste panel, respectively.

Pairwise Spearman Rank correlations were calculated between all sensory properties.

Machine learning models

Predictive modeling of sensory profiles from chemical data.

Regression models were constructed to predict (a) trained panel scores for beer flavors and quality from beer chemical profiles and (b) public reviews’ appreciation scores from beer chemical profiles. Z-scores were used to represent sensory attributes in both data sets. Chemical properties with log-normal distributions (Shapiro-Wilk test, p  <  0.05 ) were log-transformed. Missing chemical measurements (0.1% of all data) were replaced with mean values per attribute. Observations from 250 beers were randomly separated into a training set (70%, 175 beers) and a test set (30%, 75 beers), stratified per beer style. Chemical measurements (p = 231) were normalized based on the training set average and standard deviation. In total, three linear regression-based models: linear regression with first-order interaction terms (LR), lasso regression with first-order interaction terms (Lasso) and partial least squares regression (PLSR); five decision tree models, Adaboost regressor (ABR), Extra Trees (ET), Gradient Boosting regressor (GBR), Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost regressor (XGBR); one support vector machine model (SVR) and one artificial neural network model (ANN) were trained. The models were implemented using the ‘scikit-learn’ package (v1.2.2) and ‘xgboost’ package (v1.7.3) in Python (v3.9.16). Models were trained, and hyperparameters optimized, using five-fold cross-validated grid search with the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) as the evaluation metric. The ANN (scikit-learn’s MLPRegressor) was optimized using Bayesian Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator optimization with the ‘Optuna’ Python package (v3.2.0). Individual models were trained per attribute, and a multi-output model was trained on all attributes simultaneously.

Model dissection

GBR was found to outperform other methods, resulting in models with the highest average R 2 values in both trained panel and public review data sets. Impurity-based rankings of the most important predictors for each predicted sensorial trait were obtained using the ‘scikit-learn’ package. To observe the relationships between these chemical properties and their predicted targets, partial dependence plots (PDP) were constructed for the six most important predictors of consumer appreciation 74 , 75 .

The ‘SHAP’ package in Python (v0.41.0) was implemented to provide an alternative ranking of predictor importance and to visualize the predictors’ effects as a function of their concentration 68 .

Validation of causal chemical properties

To validate the effects of the most important model features on predicted sensory attributes, beers were spiked with the chemical compounds identified by the models and descriptive sensory analyses were carried out according to the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) protocol 90 .

Compound spiking was done 30 min before tasting. Compounds were spiked into fresh beer bottles, that were immediately resealed and inverted three times. Fresh bottles of beer were opened for the same duration, resealed, and inverted thrice, to serve as controls. Pairs of spiked samples and controls were served simultaneously, chilled and in dark glasses as outlined in the Trained panel section above. Tasters were instructed to select the glass with the higher flavor intensity for each attribute (directional difference test 92 ) and to select the glass they prefer.

The final concentration after spiking was equal to the within-style average, after normalizing by ethanol concentration. This was done to ensure balanced flavor profiles in the final spiked beer. The same methods were applied to improve a non-alcoholic beer. Compounds were the following: ethyl acetate (Merck KGaA, W241415), ethyl hexanoate (Merck KGaA, W243906), isoamyl acetate (Merck KGaA, W205508), phenethyl acetate (Merck KGaA, W285706), ethanol (96%, Colruyt), glycerol (Merck KGaA, W252506), lactic acid (Merck KGaA, 261106).

Significant differences in preference or perceived intensity were determined by performing the two-sided binomial test on each attribute.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this work are available in the Supplementary Data files and have been deposited to Zenodo under accession code 10653704 93 . The RateBeer scores data are under restricted access, they are not publicly available as they are property of RateBeer (ZX Ventures, USA). Access can be obtained from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of RateBeer (ZX Ventures, USA).  Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code for training the machine learning models, analyzing the models, and generating the figures has been deposited to Zenodo under accession code 10653704 93 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank all lab members for their discussions and thank all tasting panel members for their contributions. Special thanks go out to Dr. Karin Voordeckers for her tremendous help in proofreading and improving the manuscript. M.S. was supported by a Baillet-Latour fellowship, L.C. acknowledges financial support from KU Leuven (C16/17/006), F.A.T. was supported by a PhD fellowship from FWO (1S08821N). Research in the lab of K.J.V. is supported by KU Leuven, FWO, VIB, VLAIO and the Brewing Science Serves Health Fund. Research in the lab of T.W. is supported by FWO (G.0A51.15) and KU Leuven (C16/17/006).

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These authors contributed equally: Michiel Schreurs, Supinya Piampongsant, Miguel Roncoroni.

Authors and Affiliations

VIB—KU Leuven Center for Microbiology, Gaston Geenslaan 1, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium

Michiel Schreurs, Supinya Piampongsant, Miguel Roncoroni, Lloyd Cool, Beatriz Herrera-Malaver, Florian A. Theßeling & Kevin J. Verstrepen

CMPG Laboratory of Genetics and Genomics, KU Leuven, Gaston Geenslaan 1, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium

Leuven Institute for Beer Research (LIBR), Gaston Geenslaan 1, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium

Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution, KU Leuven, Naamsestraat 59, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

Lloyd Cool, Christophe Vanderaa & Tom Wenseleers

VIB Bioinformatics Core, VIB, Rijvisschestraat 120, B-9052, Ghent, Belgium

Łukasz Kreft & Alexander Botzki

AB InBev SA/NV, Brouwerijplein 1, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

Philippe Malcorps & Luk Daenen

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Contributions

S.P., M.S. and K.J.V. conceived the experiments. S.P., M.S. and K.J.V. designed the experiments. S.P., M.S., M.R., B.H. and F.A.T. performed the experiments. S.P., M.S., L.C., C.V., L.K., A.B., P.M., L.D., T.W. and K.J.V. contributed analysis ideas. S.P., M.S., L.C., C.V., T.W. and K.J.V. analyzed the data. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kevin J. Verstrepen .

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K.J.V. is affiliated with bar.on. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Schreurs, M., Piampongsant, S., Roncoroni, M. et al. Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning. Nat Commun 15 , 2368 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46346-0

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46346-0

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