ABSTRACT
This chapter considers where the practices of environmental and land art-making fit into this pragmatic, relational turn. It discusses different forms of environmental art and their connections to aesthetic regard are by no means exhaustive. Carlson specifically discusses what appear to be more extreme cases of aesthetic affronts, but many forms of environmental and land art are included, and he suggests that most environmental art is somehow an aesthetic imposition on nature. Stephanie Ross describes works by Heizer and Smithson as masculine gestures in the environment, due to their scale, their inaccessibility and because traveling to see them requires braving wilderness, rattlesnakes, and the desert's climatic extremes. Ephemeral art, or what Ross calls ephemeral gestures in the environment', presents a sharp contrast to earthworks. Ecological art, presents the most obvious case of art that shows aesthetic regard for nature. In ecological artworks, valuing nature is foregrounded while the human role is backgrounded.
