ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aesthetic case for landscape conservation. The main claim is that the experience of beautiful landscapes is an essential part of human flourishing; it is not just an enriching option for all of us and, certainly, not merely a subjective preference for some of us. Beautiful landscapes can make us feel at home in the world; this constitutes their great and irreplaceable value. The aesthetic argument provides a metaphysically innocent understanding of our feeling that we are part of nature and should try to fit in rather than stand out. It serves to underpin in a deeply humanistic fashion our horror of the ever-growing grey crust that threatens to cover the whole surface of the Earth.
First, I clarify the concept of landscape: a landscape is a larger natural whole whose principle of unity is its gestalt, character, ‘Stimmung,’ mood, or atmosphere. Then, I distinguish various ways of how we experience landscape atmosphere, namely perception, empathy, sympathy, and infection, in order to prepare the ground for the specifically aesthetic claim in the last and main section: how, when we experience the atmosphere of a landscape aesthetically, we respond to it by resonating or feeling at home.
