Kira Meyer

The European Union’s energy transition, which targets climate neutrality by 2050, is reshaping landscapes through the rapid expansion of infrastructure for renewable energy. While this transformation’s ecological and technical aspects have been extensively studied, its aesthetic considerations remain undervalued, and are often dismissed as merely subjective. This article argues that aesthetic experiences constitute part of nature’s eudaimonic intrinsic value, and thus carry ethical weight. It examines three approaches to evaluating aesthetic impacts: (1) Landscape Character Assessment (LCA), (2) atmospheric aesthetics, and (3) landscapes as material horizons of meaning. The analysis highlights the limitations of methods that objectify aesthetic experiences, such as LCA, and shows that a synthesis of atmospheric and horizon-of-meaning approaches is especially promising, as it connects embodied, sensory perception with the cultural, historical, and collective dimensions of landscapes’ value. Aesthetic arguments, when properly theorized, can inform democratic deliberations on landscape change, counter accusations of subjectivity, and guide the design of renewable energy projects as integral elements of their surroundings rather than alien impositions. The study concludes that incorporating aesthetic reasoning into sustainable energy transitions strengthens their normative foundations by fostering emotional attachment, cultural integration, and environmentally virtuous dispositions.

Sustainability and freedom are not mutually exclusive but compatible if one adopts a relational conception of freedom as it is being developed in this article. Three perspectives on the relationship between freedom and sustainability are being distinguished and it is being argued against a liberal and eco-authoritarian position that we should side with the relational approach which posits that a lack of sustainability is a threat to freedom. If one understands the human being as a corporeal being and thus as nature itself, the natural embeddedness becomes central for the selfhood of individuals and for the understanding of freedom.

Landscapes are paradigm cases for a theory of atmospheres like that of Hermann Schmitz since there are several atmospheres which can be experienced in landscapes. Though, landscape is rather seldomly picked out explicitly as a central theme in Schmitz’s work. An exception, however, is his article Landscape as a Mode of Perception, in which he argues that something becomes a landscape not by belonging to so-called nature, but by a specific mode of perception. I will critically analyze his conception of landscape and argue that landscape is more than a mode of perception: the aspect of naturalness must also be given. Corporeal communication with vastness and, that is, excorporation (Ausleibung), is not enough to understand what is specificity of the landscape. The inclusion of the dimension of naturalness allows us furthermore to better understand one of the most important functions of landscape, namely recovery, and the often-associated transcendence of the subject-object-dichotomy.

Corporeality of human beings should be taken seriously and be included in their self-understanding as the ‘nature we are ourselves’. Such an ecophenomenological account has important normative implications. Firstly, I argue that the instrumental value of nature can be particularly well justified based on an ecophenomenological approach. Secondly, sentience is inseparable from corporeality. Therefore, insofar as it is a concern of the ecophenomenological approach to take corporeality and its implications seriously, sentient beings deserve direct moral consideration. Thirdly, it can strengthen the so-far underestimated category of eudaimonic values of nature, which can be best developed through an ecophenomenological reconstruction. Taken together, ecophenomenology is vital for environmental ethics and helps us to leave behind its widespread ‘centrism’. Ecophenomenology should therefore, both methodically and philosophically, be included in the discussion of environmental ethical problems.