The aesthetics of environment

by Arnold Berleant

Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but fully integrated and continuous with us, Arnold Berleant explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environment continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. Insisting on the need to reconceptualize environment and recognize its aesthetic implications, he pursues a variety of topics and approaches to environmental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, maintains Berleant, is always contextual. There is no inside and outside, person and environment, human being and external world. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he speaks of environment as "a seamless unity of organism, perception, and place" that is suffused with values. The foremost characteristic of environmental perception, then, is the