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Yellowstone Hotspot

Reflections on Scenic Beauty, Ecology, and the Aesthetic Experience of Landscape

Some scholars and practitioners have advocated an "ecological aesthetic" to address issues related to the protection of ecologically significant landscapes. Others see these efforts as an attack on traditional ideas of scenic beauty. Perhaps these two ideas of natural beauty are more complementary than is acknowledged. By examining how scenic landscapes are aesthetically experienced, not only might we better understand their value to people but also discover clues for appreciating ecologically significant landscapes that are "scenically challenged" (Saito 1998, 101). In this essay, a phenomenological approach is applied to examine the scenic beauty of Yellow-stone National Park through three popular modes of landscape experience: driving, sitting, and walking. Each experiential mode offers different insights. Together they challenge distinctions between scenic and ecological beauty, which pertain more to how natural landscape beauty has been conceptualized and measured in quantitative studies of landscape preference than in how it is experienced through real-time interactions between people and landscape. Yet there still remains the problem that many ecologically significant landscapes do not exhibit readily perceptible scenic qualities that draw people to experience them aesthetically. Here the geothermal process of a hotspot is used as a metaphor to suggest how unseen aesthetic qualities of landscape can be made perceptible. The hotspot metaphor also suggests ways in which the model of human-environment interactions proposed by Gobster et al. (2007) might be implemented to communicate to public groups about the beauty of scenically challenged landscapes.

KEYWORDS Landscape perception, ecological aesthetic, phenomenological description