Summary

Environmental aesthetics encompasses aesthetic relationships to and in the environment, including an urban aesthetic and an aesthetic of nature—which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries both from the sciences and from the distinction from the scientific in the aesthetic observations of nature. Environmental aesthetics notably comprises philosophical, artistic, and geographical work. Increasingly since the 1990s, the social and environmental crisis, and particularly climate change, is and has been causing shifts within this field of research and reflection. As of the 2020s, the admiration humans can bear toward nature is not without fear of its disappearance caused by their own activities. Ethics is more and more linked to aesthetics as humans are morally affected by this catastrophic environmental degradation. Thus, a certain anxiety quickly reveals itself in the face of planetary transformations. What can the geographer do? Since the 1990s, the discipline has been inviting thought about the environment from the aesthetic experience, challenging or interrogating the perception, understanding, and relationship to the natural surroundings. The geographer has been attempting to apprehend through creative research—such as “psychogeographical” situational walks (dérive, situation of inquiry, influence map), and, more generally, artistic works firmly rooted in the whole landscape question—the ways of redefining local situations and places. The need is to face three major challenges. First, there is the necessity to explore how planetary threats transform the perceptions of the environment. Anxieties reflect the difficulties of politics. Second, an aesthetic of the ordinary should be investigated as an ordinary environmentalism, meaning that which is related to the daily creation of environments. Third, the importance of research creation and ecoplastic forms of art needs to be highlighted (art and environment-making processes).