Andy Martin wrote:
Aesthetics are a good substitute argument for some current environmentalism. As
much as we may dislike it, it's doubtless you'll get more public support from a
single baby pygmy hippo video (our dancing D-list celebrity) than from a
million soil cores. One would prefer to use moral standings (intrinsic value),
or survival/health (can't survive without a working ecosystem), but human
nature is to not care about something until it's in one's face. The
strengthened cries for investment in alternative energy last summer, silenced
as soon as gas dropped below $2.50/gallon, showed that beautifully. As soon as
it hit the pocketbook, people were willing to conserve and embrace alternatives.
Peter Singer's version of utilitarian ethics has some interesting
environmental components that do not rely on aesthetic arguments. His
book _Practical Ethics_ is easy to find and I don't recall the
environment chapter being long.
Personally, I find using an aesthetic basis a bit questionable unless
aesthetics is itself based in the relationship between "ourselves in the
world" and our perceptions of "ourselves in the world." There is a
pretty argument to be made that beauty has something to do with the
relationship between what we have experienced and what we currently
perceive.
Heading a little further off-topic here:
The other difficulty is that we have a hard time comprehending things
when we can't see the big picture, much less actually coping with
problems on the big-picture scale. And the difficulty is worse when
information is merely communicated rather than gained through direct
experience. But there are different qualities and kinds of
communication. Some of the great nature writers, documentarians,
photographers, teachers, etc., are able to share their inspiration...
which shares their informed experience with those of us would not
otherwise observe the interactions shaping our environment.
I was inspired by Andy's reference to "a million soil cores."
A single soil core is often uninteresting (though there are certainly
exceptions!) while millions of soil cores can't help but tell at least
one fascinating story. Millions of soil cores are a landscape in the
same way millions of people are a landscape. The others give context to
the individual.
This is an intersection between information and communication; in
particular, it's a great topic for a visual rhetoritician.
Communicating that kind of information through appropriate
visualization, sonification, interactivity, or anything else non-linear
can be powerful because it puts a whole concept forward in a way that no
explanation can: all at once, a little bit like real experience (even if
the data is abstract).
We all know how powerful a good map can be.
Some of us may have opportunities to take advantage of colleagues or
contacts who specialize in communicating complex or overwhelming data in
more accessible ways. We need to take advantage of those people and
learn from their approaches.
Jon
