John Muir's Environmental Aesthetics: Interweaving the Aesthetic, Religious, and Scientific
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2018 The American Society for Aesthetics This article explores John's Muir's writings in order to construct a Muirian environmental aesthetics. To this end, I draw out three key features. First is the aesthetic category of sublimity as it emerges in his explorations of Yosemite. Second, a distinctive, pluralistic environmental aesthetics is found through his interweaving of aesthetic, religious, and scientific ideas. Third, his journals from the Thousand-Mile Walk reveal an active and situated aesthetics, shaped by his practice of exploring and communing with nature. Together, these features support a perspective that is quite contemporary, in tune with environmental and everyday aesthetics, as well as with recent work in environmental ethics.
