Does the aesthetic value of species give us reason to work to prevent extinctions? Our own aesthetic preferences seem hopelessly biased. We love big animals with fur or feathers, bright colors, sharp teeth, and social behaviors that we can identify with. Insects, fungi, and plants excite people less. Photographer Sam Droege’s work to document pollinator diversity in North America reveals the stunning beauty of insects. But because we humans live our lives on a different spatiotemporal scale, the beauty of insects may not be salient for us until a photographer makes it so. One worry, then, is that if we lean too much on appeals to the aesthetic value of species, we’ll end up focusing our conservation efforts in ways that reflect and even reinforce our all-too-human biases and predilections.
People often have negative aesthetic reactions to other species. Think of bread mold, or the aroma of a skunk, or the otherworldly features of the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur. That last example is one that environmental philosopher Emily Brady considers in her fascinating exploration of ugliness in nature. The evolved biological function of the skunk’s spray is to be aesthetically repulsive to predators. For the record, Brady also argues that we have good reason to protect and appreciate the uglier things in nature. The worry is that talk about the positive aesthetic value of other species might only carry us so far, and fails to do justice to the aesthetic complexity of the living world.
Together, these worries would seem to suggest that appeals to aesthetic value in conservation contexts are not too helpful. Perhaps we should look elsewhere for better reasons to protect biodiversity.
Although there are many other excellent reasons to protect biodiversity, it would be a mistake to dismiss aesthetic value too hastily. Another possibility is that we’ve been thinking about aesthetic value too narrowly. We tend to think of aesthetic value ahistorically, and to assume that something’s aesthetic value is fully determined by its current perceptual qualities. What matters is how the skunk cabbage smells, or how the fuzzy, iridescent bees in Droege’s photographs look. But this ahistorical view of aesthetic value is implausible.
In her essay “Real Old Things,” Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that genuineness matters to aesthetic value, but that unlike other aesthetic properties, genuineness isn’t perceptual. It is, rather, a matter of causal history. The difference between a genuine antique and a reproduction is historical. In a very different context, in an essay titled “Faking Nature,” Robert Elliot once argued that a painting and an exact replica produced by a superb forger would not have the same sort of value, because they have different causal histories. Elliot developed this point in the service of a critique of ecological restoration. His worry was that natural ecosystems and restored ecosystems would have different causal histories, and that human involvement in the latter would tend to diminish their value. The underlying principle that animates both of these arguments is that causal historical differences make for differences in aesthetic value. (Although I won’t develop the point here, I think one can endorse this underlying principle without necessarily taking on board the other claims about authenticity and naturalness that Korsmeyer and Elliot conjoin with it.)
It’s easy to multiply examples in support of the principle that historical differences make for differences in aesthetic value. For example, knowledge about where one’s food came from can impact one’s enjoyment of a meal. A salad made with tomatoes from a friend’s lovingly tended garden is in some sense a better salad (aesthetically) than one made with store-bought tomatoes, even if someone who didn’t know would have trouble telling the difference. For another example: suppose you learned that this essay was written by an artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. That would surely affect your assessment of whatever aesthetic qualities it might have. Or consider the aesthetic difference between a species that has evolved, in Darwinian fashion, over eons, and one just like it created recently via divine “Shazam!”
In the Connecticut College Arboretum, there is a lovely Franklin tree. I must have walked by it many times without noticing it at all. But on a recent walk with an arborist colleague, I learned its story. The Franklin tree originally grew in a tiny range, along the Altamaha River in Georgia. By the early nineteenth century, it had disappeared entirely from this range. However, the botanist John Bartram and his son William Bartram had noticed the tree on a trip through the area in 1765. William Bartram returned later to collect some seeds, which he planted in his garden. Today, although the Franklin tree is functionally extinct, it lives on in gardens and arboreta. Every single Franklin tree alive today, as far as we know, is descended from the seeds collected by William Bartram. This (very recent) history is itself a reason to care for and protect the remaining members of the species.
Many species have deeper evolutionary histories that are highly distinctive and make a difference to their aesthetic value. Living fossils represent one sort of case. Another favorite tree in the Connecticut College Arboretum is a Metasequoia, or “dawn redwood.” An unusual deciduous conifer, its leaves are barely distinguishable from fossilized ones from the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs were running around forests of Metasequoias. These trees survived a mass extinction 66 million years ago, and then spread across the northern hemisphere during the Paleocene and Eocene, during a warm spell in the earth’s climate, when forests grew high in the Canadian arctic. The fact that unlike most other conifers, they lose their leaves, may be an adaptation to life in the far north, where they evolved in a place that experiences months of darkness. This history is part of what we appreciate when we see a Metasequoia lose its leaves in the fall.
Nature’s beauty is historical, or at least partly so. When we think about the Franklin tree, or the dawn redwood, or any other species that we might cherish and protect, it’s impossible to separate our appreciation of them from our understanding of their more recent ecological and deeper evolutionary histories.
Derek D. Turner
Derek D. Turner is a philosopher at Connecticut College, in New London, Connecticut, where he also serves as the Karla Heurich Harrison ’28 Director of the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment. His most recent book is Paleoaesthetics and the Practice of Paleontology (2019).
