ABSTRACT
Ethics and aesthetics are both useful in analyzing the relationships between humans and the land. In the context of this chapter, ethics applies to the right and wrong of permanently committing farmland to urbanization, and aesthetics applies to the resulting good or bad experiences inhabitants have before, during and after changing farmland into cities. This chapter identifies what the author believes to be the driving human values that lead to wasteful land use and urban sprawl and in doing so, it aims to see the loss of farmland in ethical and aesthetic terms. The first objective of this chapter is to trace how these values have come about and to consider some less popular ethical systems that might be more supportive of the preservation of rural landscapes. A second objective is to explain the relevance and importance of agricultural land to the quality of our individual and shared aesthetic experience.
