ABSTRACT
When I first started writing about this topic it struck me that I would be sad if I heard that a certain local junkyard was gone. However, in his “Environmental Aesthetics and the Dilemma of Aesthetic Education,” while speaking of the movement to clear the environment of eyesores, philosopher Allen Carlson argues that my aesthetically positive response to a junkyard would be inappropriate. He thinks it almost inconceivable that I would be saddened by its disappearance. He opposes those who claim that if one takes the right attitude to roadside clutter it can be seen as aesthetic. He thinks that one could appreciate the junkyard in what he calls a “thin” formalist sense, but not in a “thick” knowledge-based sense, and further that my advocating the aesthetic value of junkyards is unethical since I am thereby indirectly advocating many negative values, especially anti-environmentalist ones. Yet I am quite sympathetic to environmentalism and, although I am sad to see that the junkyard is now indeed gone, I would probably be happy enough if (in the unlikely event) I found
later that it was replaced by a lovely meadow. Thus, I must deny Carlson’s premise that junkyards and roadside clutter generally are not aesthetically pleasing, if by that he means (and I think he does) that they are never appropriately aesthetically pleasing.
