Recovering Landscape and Landscape Beauty in Environmental Aesthetics

In this article, I will pin down some elements to recover the concept of landscape in the context of environmental aesthetics. Such insertion of landscape in environmental aesthetics entails the questioning of the dualism between nature and culture that still lays at the basis of much literature in environmental aesthetics. My argument will unfold in three steps: first, I will show how the original question of environmental aesthetics, as elaborated by Ronald Hepburn in 1966, presupposes a distinction between nature and culture rooted in the moral contempt for excessive modernization and urbanization. Second, I will criticize some theories, not all coming from environmental aesthetics, according to which landscape is reducible to the cultural codes of the vision in the scopic regime of modernity and pave the way for the rediscovery of the substantive nature of landscape. Third, I will discuss some elements of a substantive account of landscape by adopting a phenomenological framework and following authors like Kenneth Olwig and Arnold Berleant. In this last part, I will also offer some arguments for overcoming the idea according to which landscape beauty only results into compositional, pictorial harmony among its elements. The quest for landscape beauty can still play a key part in aesthetic appreciation and also in architecture and planning, but the kind of harmony to which it refers does not entirely belong to the sphere of the visible and includes reference to ecological, socio-political, and aesthetical balances at the same time.