This summer, while in Denmark, I was interviewed by a lovely journalist for an anthology on sustainable consumption and fashion — my focus being aesthetic sustainability.
I have just received the first draft of “my” chapter, and the journalist has asked me to reflect on a final question. A question I really appreciate, actually.
The simplified version of the question is whether or not aesthetics could hold the answers to the climate crisis. And, my immediate answer is a loud and clear YES!
Maybe you are wondering what on earth I mean by this… And I understand that it sounds odd.
But, let me explain.
Of course the answer is more complex than just a yes; and perhaps it would be necessary to initially alter the question slightly, because aesthetics alone might not be the solution, but aesthetic experiences and aesthetic appreciation could be!
Once we start noticing the beauty around us, not only with our eyes but with all of our senses, and start appreciating the abundance & purity and the edifying changes & cycles in our natural environment, and once we open up to this beauty; a receptiveness that involves the ability to wonder, embrace and become one with our surroundings, we cannot do any harm. We can only bow to the imperfect perfection of nature and humbly receive its gifts with gratitude.
Aesthetic experiences have the power to enhance the feeling of connectivity. When you have an aesthetic experience — a genuine aesthetic experience, meaning not just a visual one, but a sensuous experiences, involving scents, sounds, and textures — you will often experience that the border between you and your surroundings vanishes. You become one with the beauty around you. Likely only momentarily, but the experience will leave you with an altered feeling of interconnectivity. And that feeling has the potential to change the way you look at — and even more importantly — experience and use nature.
In other words, during a sensuous aesthetic experience magical moments might occur. Moments during which you will feel like you become one with your surroundings. Moments in which you forget yourself and turn into a purely sensuous being. Blissful moments. Such moments transform the aesthetic experience from a purely cognitive beauty-experience to a multi-sensory experience. An such moments potentially hold the key to increased environmental awareness.
Aesthetic experiences are not only comfort boosters. They can also (when we talk about nature as the trigger) be interlinked with magnificent, savage and perhaps even scary nature-experiences. Being in the middle of a crazy rain storm, at the mercy of the elements, or watching the expansive, vast view from the top of a mountain, unable to capture it’s magnitude are examples of experiences that might have such qualities, and that can develop into cathartic, sublime experiences. Sublime nature experiences can be so defining that they might form a before and an after — and hence alter the mindset of the experiencing subject.
But regardless of whether the aesthetic nature-experience is beautiful or sublime, it is the moment when you surrender to the experience and let yourself fall into a swoon that the border between you and the natural environment momentarily disappears. When this happens you too become nature.
I think that part of the reason why we take such poor care of our planet — why we pollute and exploit nature, use far to many of its resources, and exterminate species and homogenize it — is because the immediate understanding that we are in fact connected to nature is missing in our modern existence.
We are very rarely outside, and very, very rarely exposed to wild nature — meaning not tamed, homogenized nature in the shape of a city park, a landscaped park or farm-land, but truly wild, untouched, unruly nature. Furthermore, the surfaces we come into contact with on a daily basis are rarely natural, and if they are, they are typically smoothened and formed to meet our modern need for comfort and convenience. There isn’t much natural unruliness in our modern life, if any at all. We are mostly isolated, sheltered from (and scared of) nature, and hence, the immediate understanding that we are fundamentally interwoven with nature has gone awry.
But the aesthetic experience has the power to reconnect us with nature. It requires open mindedness — or maybe more correctly; open-sensuousness — but it is possible! If you are open to aesthetic nature-experience — to the beauty of the cycles of nature; the changing colors of the sky, the rain that comes and goes, sunsets and sunrises, flowers that bloom and wither; and all of the ingenious circularity that surrounds us — you are well on your way. If you continuously force yourself to notice and get awestruck by nature’s beauty, your respect for and appreciation of nature will undoubtedly grow.
I believe that in respecting and embracing the beauty of nature lies a key to an increased environmental awareness. So yes, maybe aesthetics actually has some answers to how we can overcome the climate crisis. And hence, in accordance with great philosophers like Schiller and Kandinsky, I would advocate aesthetic awareness as a means against exploitation and pollution.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Mahdi Soheili on Unsplash
The post Could Aesthetics Solve the Climate Crisis? appeared first on The Good Men Project.