“Nature, while often fragile in reality, is durable in our imaginations” (McKibben 49). Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature set a precedent for this course to get us thinking what “nature” really is – and more importantly, the cycle of violence we have perpetuated against it. The connection to technology and culture is right under the surface of this. McKibben argues that humans have so fundamentally changed the natural environment that we have effectively ended nature. He points to climate change, species extinction, and the pollution of air, water, and soil as evidence that humans have become a force of nature unto themselves. The technological changes we have induced on nature have not only altered nature as a whole, but also our perceptions of nature and the ways in which we think about it. When we think about the physical space we occupy, a significant amount of that thinking correlates to the natural world. Our relationship to nature is paramount in our philosophical considerations.

In Kant’s “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” we see how orienting ourselves through intentional considerations allow us to better relate to our relationships to the world around us. This is especially important in our considerations of the environment, as we need to be able to orient ourselves in order to think about the environment and our relationship to it. We need to be able to think about the ways in which we impact the environment and the ways in which the environment impacts us. We also need to be able to think about the ways in which our thinking about the environment can change the environment. The concept of Orientation, for Kant, is the ability to judge what is good and bad in the world. People who are oriented are able to reason and make decisions based on what is good for themselves and others. People who are not oriented are unable to reason and make decisions based on what is good, and instead make decisions based on what is bad. We must work to discover this Orientation, so we are not doing the latter out of ignorance. Finding orientation for us is combining what we discover with our aspirations. Kant believes that humans are born without any innate knowledge, and that we must rely on our own experiences and observations to orient ourselves in the world. We must use our reason to understand the world around us, and to determine how we should behave in it. This means that we must learn about the world through our own observations and use our reason to figure out how to behave in it. While there may be a lot of pre-determination to our ideas, we  cannot rely on pre-determined ideas or notions about the world as guidance. Instead, we must figure that out for ourselves. Technology continues to have a significant impact on this, particularly when it comes to “figuring out for ourselves” our understandings and perceptions.

In his Bremen Lectures, Heidegger discusses a similar concept, what he calls Positionality. Heidegger's positionality states that humans are always situated in a specific place and time, and that this affects the way they view the world. Heidegger's positionality has a significant impact on our relationship to the environment. He argued that humans can never view the environment objectively, because they are always situated within it. Essentially, our understanding of the environment is always filtered through our own perspective. In reference to technology, Heidegger himself says “technology essences as positionality” (Heidegger, 43). We find ourselves in the entrapment, so to speak, of our positionality’s essence being that of technology. Further looking at positionality, its technological essence manifests itself in how we interact with the world. To us, not only are tangible instruments perceived as resources to be arranged, rearranged, then thrown out, but so are other humans. Every thing presents itself to us technologically, thus, losing its very foundation – its independence, its form. There is a dually existing nature of man and technology: we are subservient to technology, while also being the ones who construct it. To expand, “In the age of technological dominance, the human is placed into the essence of technology, into positionality, by his essence” (35). While the concepts from this course are quite theoretical, they pertain to my final project in a few specific ways.

As one of the three pieces of my final project, the Environmental Philosophy toolkit aims to introduce philosophical rhetoric surrounding how we think about the environment around us – and how we engage within it. There are five total modules within it, covering different “themes” of environmental philosophy. The goal is to invite readers to think about the world around them and how they interact within it – particularly living in the state of Montana. Looking back at our Orientation or our Positionality – our immediate surroundings play a big part of this. Living in Montana, students are fortunate to be close to some of the most spectacular natural environments. Here we find a tangible example. We start with talking about how we interact with the environments around us. Next, we look at the actual environments around us – where we are currently situated. In Montana, we have vast wildernesses, National Parks, whitewater rivers, and keystone animal species all in our backyard. There is an existing and underlying theoretical thread connecting how we talk about environments and how we interact within our environments. A section of my toolkit invites discussion of why it matters that we live in Montana. Besides the material specific to Montana’s environments, the toolkit could be taught anywhere. However, there would be a notable difference in how a student in Montana processes this information in relation to their environment versus a student in say, Ohio. That is what much of my final project became.

These concepts also translate into the event that I assisted in facilitating in Helena on Philosophy and Grief. We had three panelists present different ways in which we think about grief – one through storytelling, one through their artwork, and one through a historical lens. If one looks beneath the surface, all of the presentations contain connections to how we Orient ourselves in the world around us, in this case using grief and loss as a focal point. One may refer back to Heidegger’s writings on technology’s impact on positionality. The technology becomes an intimate and intrinsic part of our positionality. Tim Holmes creates both painting and bronze sculptures that often strongly depict negative emotions, portrayals of haunting and despair. One of his oil paintings, Some Grievance for our Heart to Tear depicts a wooden boat with two individuals being swallowed by the sea in a storm. His description of the painting is as follows,

“Are we not all suddenly cast to sea, our world shaken to liquid around us? The horizon heaves as we scramble moment by moment to make sense of our surroundings and to try to make progress toward solidity. Our condition is beyond understanding, rooted only in hope. I am painting this frustration in oils, over and over, trying to find a place of peace.”

To Heidegger’s point, when we swing a hammer with the intention of building a house, we don’t often think about the hammer. However, it is precisely the use of this hammer which is an extension of our positionality. Creation necessitates a way of being created. The ways in which we use things are quite grounding if given the thought. The paintbrush, the pen that writes the words of a grieving daughter. Heidegger’s concept of positionality helps us to think about how we engage with the environment by considering the “thing” as both something that is embedded within our world and also something that has its own agency. Heidegger argues that a thing has not just a physical presence, but also an ontological presence, which is why it can be meaningful to us. By understanding this relationship between ourselves and the environment, we can begin to understand our individual and collective responsibilities to one another and the environment. By thinking about our positionality in relation to the environment, we may develop a better understanding of how we interact with it and how we can work together to sustain it.

Going back to McKibben, our relationship to nature is quite important. We can think of our relationship to nature, our Orientation, and our Positionality as reciprocal benefactors. Nowhere could this be more present than in the setting of Western Montana. A toolkit that begins to inform the thinking of high schoolers in a philosophical way reinforces all these notions. Questions asking what we value about humans, about the environment, non-human values, and how they affect a shared community requires one to consider the physical space they occupy. There is an interconnectedness between understanding our relationship to the natural world, our place within it, and how we can better inform ourselves and engage with that knowledge.

The Environmental Aesthetics course provided me with an invaluable perspective on how our views of beauty, art and the environment can shape the way we interact with them. Our aesthetic appreciations have serious implications for how we interact with, use, and treat the environment, both in urban and natural settings. It is therefore essential to take into consideration the role humans have in the environment and use our aesthetic appreciations to guide us in cultivating greater care and respect for it. The knowledge I gained in this course has been instrumental in formulating my views on environmental aesthetics and values and has had a significant theoretical impact on the development of my CEP. By understanding the far-reaching consequences of our interactions with the environment, we can use our aesthetic appreciations to develop a more harmonious relationship between ourselves and our surroundings.

When pondering our aesthetic experiences, one presumably considers the pleasant aspects of them initially. The vibrant colors of a painting, the harmonic symphony of an orchestra, and the delight that comes with watching a favorite film all come to mind. In the natural world, we may gaze at a magnificent sunset, feel excitement exploring the wilderness, and develop strong emotions and attitudes towards it due to our interactions within it.

Aesthetic appreciation at first glance seems to draw from a hedonistic approach. Aesthetic hedonism has dominated the aesthetic value theory domain. As Servaas Van der Berg states, “hedonism could arguably lay claim to being the commonsense view of aesthetic value. After all, who would deny that our encounters with the aesthetic are often a source of great enjoyment?” (Van der Berg 1).  As aesthetic hedonists “reduce aesthetic value to the value of the experience” (van der Berg 4), the intuitive answer is that the experience necessitates a positive emotion, as it is deriving from the sought pleasure. The hedonistic approach requires an inherent preference that looks to aesthetic experience as having value in the capacity of afforded pleasure. Aesthetic hedonism is a viable theory when considering the criteria inherent to our aesthetic experiences. However, perspectives of what constitutes hedonistic are not the same for different groups of people. This will be clearer in how the BIPOC community may relate to aesthetic experiences, particularly on the environmental side.

The different environments we are in shape our aesthetic experiences differently. These environments have important ramifications conducive to the aesthetic experience. There are cases which the environment is the foundational makeup of the aesthetic appreciation. There is a significance that the environment one is in plays into their aesthetic judgements, as well as into the aesthetic itself. There is much conversation and debate in environmental aesthetics surrounding what is encompassed within terms such as “environment” and “nature.” Following human influence and the role technology has played in our relationship with the natural world, there is no clear demarcation for what is natural anymore. This is taken a step further when considering how these fit into concepts of nature. In Carlson’s The Aesthetics’ of Human Environments, he expounds on this, and how we might move forward:

It is no longer plausible to think of nature, in any significant sense, as separate from humans. We are all bound up in one natural system, an ecosystem of universal proportions in which no part is immune from the events and changes in the others. The natural world is incorrigibly artificial and the human world incorrigibly natural. We might conclude that nature has become all-inclusive, in, for example, either Spinoza’s sense of a total world order or Heidegger’s sense of existential habitation, of dwelling poetically (Carlson 15).

The makeup of our idea of what environment is at its core cannot be singular or unified. It itself is a concept created by humans. What it is and what it means are important distinctions

and both require a holistic approach. Carlson further adds to what environment may mean, as it can assume “other forms such as the social, cultural, cognitive, and perceptual context of experience or the whole ‘life-world’” (14). In Carlson’s Appreciation and the Natural Environment, his core claim in his environmental model is that appropriate nature appreciation requires knowledge of natural history, just as appropriate art appreciation requires knowledge of art history. One must appreciate nature in reference to correct categories, and these are specified by natural history. Nature is both natural and an environment, and scientific knowledge guides our appreciation. Carlson states:

Our knowledge of the nature of the particular environments yields the appropriate boundaries of appreciation, the particular foci of aesthetic significance, and the relevant act or acts of aspection for that type of environment (Carlson 671).

There are particular identities to different environments that allow us to better aesthetically appreciate. These identities reveal themselves to us if we possess the appropriate knowledge. We as individuals accentuate this knowledge with our own lived experiences. The knowledge we possess is imbued into our personal cultures, identities, histories, and past. Referring to my first theoretical application, we can see a relationship between aesthetic appreciation and Heidegger’s Orientation. Intuitively, our Orientation influences our aesthetic experiences and our aesthetic experiences influence our Orientation. Our personal sense of place is deeply intertwined with aesthetic theories, and my CEP reflects this in different ways.

Two major components of my CEP are relevant to environmental aesthetics. Community engagement and the environment is the underlying framework of my CEP, and environmental aesthetics have a significant role in how different communities respond to different environments. The environmental philosophy curriculum I am writing for The Democracy Project exemplifies this. The curriculum itself does not mention aesthetics specifically, as it is designed as a toolkit for high school students to start thinking philosophically about the environments around them, and their place and role within them. A goal of this toolkit is encouraging youth to understand the importance of being environmental stewards in appropriate, respectful, and conscientious ways. We may refer to aesthetic hedonism as a baseline. Simply put, we appreciate the environment because it brings us joy. In the myriad of ways we connect to the environment, it is not controversial to say that one of those reasons is because we simply enjoy it and want to be a part of it. It feels good to spend time in nature, feel like we are a part of it, recreate in it, and learn from it. We can follow a hedonistic aesthetic approach into Carlson’s environmental model. This toolkit is educating students on different ways we value the environment. The four modules in look at how we value other humans, non-human animals, the natural world, and values in community, highlighting indigenous values. Following Carlson, we can better aesthetically appreciate the environment with the appropriate knowledge. This toolkit serves as a baseline for this type of knowledge. Even without taking a class on aesthetics, students will have a more robust aesthetic appreciation of environments as they are learning material that allows them to formulate their own environmental philosophies, as well as highlight that the environment is something we ought to care about as it brings us joy.

The above ways that environmental aesthetics pertain to The Democracy Project toolkit also directly correlate to the work completed for Here Montana, as well as other important ways. Here Montana serves to provide outdoor adventures to People of Color and intersecting communities. Participants can experience backpacking, rafting, skiing, climbing, and more throughout all of Montana. There are two additional major correlations to environmental aesthetics that need to be considered here. First, it is that the ways in which we aesthetically appreciate the environment, particularly through hedonistic views, is different. This also follows for Carlson’s environmental model; the knowledge we bring to our aesthetic experiences can be varying due to personal identities. The BIPOC community faces more barriers to participating in outdoor activities and represent a small margin of those that due recreate in the environment. In her article “A Darker Wilderness: Reconsidering the Black Outdoor Experience,” Rosalind Bentley states, “It's well documented that people of color are much less likely to live in spaces with ready access to nature. There is also research suggesting that the legacy of racial discrimination can make Black people feel unsafe in certain outdoor spaces” (Bentley). Activities like hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, and climbing can be generally associated with white people for people of color. This leads to a couple important points. First, the ways in which we approach aesthetic experiences through a hedonistic lens are not the same for people of color. Historical connections for the BIPOC community to the environment do not at all share the same grandeur that white people have with it. Black Americans may associate wilderness directly with slavery. In their paper African-American Wildland Memories, Johnson and Bowker write,

Collective memory can be used conceptually to examine African-American perceptions of wildlands and black interaction with such places. The middle-American view of wildlands frames these terrains as refuges—pure and simple, sanctified places distinct from the profanity of human modification. However, wild, primitive areas do not exist in the minds of all Americans as uncomplicated or uncontaminated places. Three labor-related institutions—forest labor, plantation agriculture, and sharecropping—and terrorism and lynching have impacted negatively on black perceptions of wildlands, producing an ambivalence toward such places among African Americans (Johnson 57).

The “pleasure” aspect of aesthetic experience does not hold same the merit for everybody. Indigenous peoples were forcefully removed from land that we currently reside on. People of color also bring different knowledge of the environment to their aesthetic experiences. In Indigenous communities, there are many different creation stories and interpretation of the existence of the natural world. It is an entirely different ontological view into our aesthetic experiences. It is important to recognize the ways in which we aesthetically value the environment differ across lines seen and unseen. Environmental aesthetics can serve an important role in addressing the ways different communities relate to the world around them.

Environmental Ethics and Environmental Justice

These two debates within environmental philosophy came up frequently in the course. They show themselves starkly in my CEP as well. Both debates influence each other quite heavily. Discussing environmental ethics may create rhetoric focused on why it is important to care about the environment and different ways me may do so. Environmental ethics itself is an area of study concerned with the moral relationship between humans and their environment. It focuses on the ethical responsibilities that humans have to protect and sustain the natural world  as well as how we should respond to environmental challenges such as climate change. Environmental ethics looks at how our actions and decisions impact the environment in both direct and indirect ways, and how we can work together to ensure a sustainable future for all. This works in tandem with addressing environmental justice, which may be described as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Environmental justice seeks to ensure that all communities and individuals, including racial and ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged populations have the right to live in and enjoy a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

As mentioned, relational ethical approaches such as Indigenous perspective, environmental virtue ethics, and care ethics allow us a different avenue of ethical considerations to the natural world that stray from the binaries that exist in traditional Western ethics. Care ethics “refers to approaches to moral life and community that are grounded in virtues, practices, and knowledges associated with appropriate caring and caretaking of self and others” (Whyte & Cuomo 2) Whyte and Cuomo’s paper, Ethics of Caring in Environmental Ethics is quite emblematic of what I hope students take away from the toolkit, particularly in their layout of indigenous conceptions of care, in how they

            “(1) emphasize the importance of awareness of one’s place in a web of different connections spanning many different parties, including humans, non-human beings and entities (e.g., wild rice, bodies of water), and collectives (e.g., forests, seasonal cycles); (2) understand moral connections as involving relationships of interdependence that motivate reciprocal responsibilities; (3) valorize certain skills and virtues, such as the wisdom of grandparents and elders, attentiveness to the environment, and indigenous stewardship practices; (4) seek to restore people and communities who are wounded from injustices by rebuilding relationships that can generate responsibilities pertinent to current environmental challenges such as biodiversity conservation and climate change; (5) conceive of political autonomy as involving the protection of the right to serve as responsible stewards of lands, the environmental quality of which is vital for sustenance” (6).

 Utilizing ethical conceptions of care are helpful for unearthing deep connections and moral commitment and for guiding environmental decision making. Similar parallels exist in Indigenous storytelling. A piece from this course is Robin Kimmerer’s Returning the Gift, which is present in my Values and Community module. In Returning the Gift, Kimmerer discusses the idea of gift-giving as a reciprocal act that binds people together and creates relationships of mutual respect and obligation. She observes that gift-giving is a fundamental aspect of human culture, and that it is often used to build and maintain relationships with others. Kimmerer argues that the act of giving is a powerful way to create connections with others, and that it can help to build community. This reinforces Indigenous ethical perspectives that also supplement environmental justice. In my Values and Animals module I reference Katie McShane, who examines the ways in which climate change has had a devastating effect on animal populations around the world. McShane further notes that the effects of climate change on animal populations will continue to worsen unless more is done to mitigate its effects. She emphasizes the importance of taking action to protect animals from further harm and suggests that conservation efforts should take greater priority. I raise questions that revolve around how we ethically consider non-human animals – or more specifically – how we fail to do so.

Wilderness Debates

We read a few different pieces in this course surrounding the wilderness problem. One that I had read previously and find particularly exciting is Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Cronon attacks wilderness environmentalism, saying that the idea of wilderness has been central to environmentalism and is harmful. His criticisms are not of wild nature itself, but the concepts of it. It is acknowledging that wilderness is a culturally and historically relative human creation. Attitudes towards wilderness have shifted from negative to positive through the lens of a Western, Judeo-Christian value system. Cronon argues two intellectual movements fueled this, the romantic sublime and a nostalgic, primitivist ideology. Cronon talks heavily of the influence of God in the idea of wilderness, then offers criticisms. As I mentioned., much of the material in this course worked its way quite directly into my CEP. Cronon’s piece came into play as something covered in this course that then went directly into my CEP, as well as Johnson and Bowker’s “African-American Wildland Memories.” For both of these pieces, I have workshopped a “study guide” to offer fruitful discussion pertaining to these issues.

Johnson and Bowker explore the ways that African Americans have interacted within the context of wildlands within the United States. Johnson and Bowker discuss how black Americans have used and shaped natural spaces, often in the face of discrimination. The authors argue how the collective memory of African Americans related to wildlands is one of exclusion and oppression. Collective memories are shaped by social structures and contexts, as well as individual experiences. The authors elaborate,

            The middle American view of wildlands frames these terrains as refuges-pure and simple, sanctified places distinct from the profanity of human modification. However, wild, primitive areas do not exist in the minds of all Americans as uncomplicated or uncontaminated places. Three labor-related institutions-forest labor, plantation agriculture, and sharecropping-and terrorism and lynching have impacted negatively on black perceptions of wildlands, producing an ambivalence toward such places among African Americans

To fully comprehend black experiences related to wildlands in the United States, we must consider the larger social, economic and historical contexts that have shaped these experiences. African American history in the U.S. is very much intertwined with the concept of land. It is important to recognize the relationship we have to the environment through many different levels. One of those levels is the ways we have interacted with wilderness historically. My initial assumptions of wilderness as something awe-inspiring are not shared by everyone. As we work to address how systemic racism still perpetuates in the environmental sphere, gaining an understanding of racial contexts within that space are paramount in building our own environmental philosophies.

This resource is quite an important one as the intended audience is the BIPOC community and the authors here write from that lived experience, unlike Cronon who is white. The idea of wilderness comes up in one of my modules for the Democracy Project. It is asking students to contemplate what wilderness means to them, and then to explain why they came up with what they did. One can see where ideas of wilderness covered in this course translated directly into my CEP.

From the Environmental Philosophy course, my own environmental ethics have been impacted, particularly in how I view them being able to address environmental justice. This course provided me innumerable subject matter that helped me theoretically work through my CEP. Just as importantly, it provided me with several tangible resources to use to address important underlying themes in environmental philosophy and its relationship with community engagement. I consider this course as the “engine” of my CEP, providing me with excellent theoretical material that I turned into application through community engagement in three important ways.