[Below is an e-mail conversation that Jim Amon and I had. We decided to polish it up a bit and submit it to the blog, in the hope that others would join in as well]

Hi Jared,

I had an interview recently with one of the young princes of the financial kingdom and early on he turned to me and asked “What do you do for a living, Jim?”

I told him that I was a land steward for a non-profit land trust, but from the blank look on his face it was clear that I had not given him any information that he could register. So I added “My employer buys land in order to create nature preserves and it is my job to take care of it after they have made the purchase.”

This helped a little but he was still perplexed. “What sort of things do you do to take care of a nature preserve?” he asked. “Do you try to make it beautiful?” he persisted.

“Oh, yeah, beauty is always great,” I responded, trying to get off the subject.

The more I thought about this conversation, the more I realized that beauty is always great, but it is a topic that I have never heard or seen in any land steward dialogue. We are full of talk of bio-diversity, stratification of the landscape and protecting native species from deer-browse, but if we mention beauty at all it is as an unintended consequence of what we think of as proper ecological restoration.

Beauty is difficult for us to espouse because it is notoriously subjective and it is the pursuit of beauty that has caused landscape architects and other exterior decorators to create those weird landscapes featuring a drooping beech tree in the center of a lawn, or the rows of bumps and balls along the foundation of a house, or the concentric rings of red geraniums, white petunias and blue ageratum around a flag pole. The spread of Japanese barberry, winged euonymus, ailanthus and all sorts of other nightmares is directly tied to the pursuit of what some consider beauty. But just because the concept of beauty has been so badly abused does not mean that it should be abandoned.

We are not likely to make much headway by telling people that traditional landscape work is not beautiful. I have tried and failed with that line. I used to like to tell people that making a landscape is important, that in doing it you are working with life’s basic elements—earth. air, water and, if you think of the sun, even fire. That got me nowhere. I think that we have to acknowledge that there is real beauty to some of the alien invasives that we work so hard to control in the natural world. The flower on a Japanese honeysuckle is beautiful. It is as lovely as any flower in the natural world, and the aroma from a cluster of these flowers is divine. But the pursuit of beauty is too important for landscape restorationists to ignore it. Beauty moves people; it is not an exaggeration to say that for some people the pursuit of beauty is what makes life worth while.

I am not arguing that we stop trying to control invasives or that we give over a huge amount of our time to doing what I think of as “beautifying” the landscape. But both activities have great merit. When I see one of the stream corridors where we have removed invasives and planted natives it is, in my eye, so beautiful that it is inspiring to do more. I always get pleasure when I drive past on of the preserves where we have focused on restoring native beauty to the road frontage. If we are going to succeed in convincing people that made landscapes should replicate natural ones we have to demonstrate their beauty. Beauty is always great.

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Jim, I agree with you wholeheartedly – beauty is a much-needed and often neglected concept, tool, and goal in our land stewardship work.

Our stewardship work, alone, accomplishes very little in the face of global environmental degradation. I think one of the most important things we are doing is pioneering a cultural practice– environmental healing, really– that’s still in its infancy. In that light, “biodiversity” may be a fantastic concept for scientists, but “beauty” has richer and older cultural resonance.

The problem, as you said, is that beauty is a subjective concept. Once we acknowledge that, however, we don’t need to shy away from utilizing it. Instead, we need to guide people’s concepts of beauty relative to the natural world. If the 20th century proved anything, it’s that virtually anything can be aestheticized. We need to aestheticize the multi-leveled forest, full of life. Christmas fern overhangs the stream cut on the high side, skunk cabbage blooms on the low silty bank.

Because stewardship is such a young practice culturally, I think we lack words for a lot of concepts. We need a word for the beauty-of-the-locally-appropriate-plant-surrounded-by-its-coevolved-cohabitants. The scent of spicebush leaves brushed while leaping from lichen-etched boulder to boulder beneath a canopy of shaggy hickories.

What about beauty as a goal of our stewardship work? On a practical level, what do we make of “beautifying” our preserves? I’m pretty cautious about this. Doing something because we think it looks beautiful (planting some christmas ferns along the parking lot edge, pruning the blackhaws along the swampy trail) doesn’t necessarily accomplish our “conservation objectives”. In a deeply degraded environment, we need to stay focused. That said, doing those things might be good PR. It might help a visitor fall in love with a natural area. Beauty can do that.

Science doesn’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) purport to tell us what to do. For this, we use ethics, philosophy, spirituality: the essences of subjectivity, despite attempts to the contrary. We are the “subjects”, after all, and for something to have deep meaning for us, we must be implicated and interwoven in it.

Science may not tell us what right action is, but it does supply facts with which we can shape, perceive and “ground-truth” (thanks, Jon) our ethics. If our concept of beauty involves popsicle-shaped bushes, shrubs with variegated leaves that look like acid barf, or forests denuded of understories, ecology says: look again. Here is the spicebush thicket, here the tuliptrees, and here the kentucky warbler that lives together with them. This is beauty, this is order so complex it borders on chaos, this is the beauty-of-the-locally-appropriate-plant-surrounded-by-its-coevolved-cohabitants, and more. We need to be healers and stewards and ecologists, but also artists, bridging people’s familiar cultural constructs with the unfamiliar terrain of ecological restoration, and, ultimately, wild beauty.