Journal article
Messy natures: the political aesthetics of nature recovery
- Abstract:
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1. Current aspirations for nature recovery to address biodiversity loss and climate change will involve changing what landscapes look like, which can create challenging aesthetic experiences for members of the public.
2. In this study we interrogate the role of aesthetics in shaping visions of nature recovery, focussing on the construction and contestation of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ in nature recovery.
3. We examine the political aesthetics of messy natures using a qualitative approach investigating visual and text materials across different sites of production in Britain, from newspapers to social media, paying particular attention to visual materials.
4. Our results show how the mediated debate around ‘rewilding’ urban environments and a beaver-themed garden winning a horticultural show are examples of a backlash against untidy environments through a politicized discourse, linking messy nature with left-wing ideologies, in contrast to the perceived orderliness and conservative ideals of good citizenship associated with tidiness.
5. In contrast, social media imagery of messy and wild gardens demonstrates how mess is consciously framed aesthetically as a desirable ‘look’ for restored nature, symbolizing progressive and environmentalist ideals of good citizenship through activities like nature-friendly gardening and initiatives such as ‘No Mow May’, which celebrate the aesthetic of a more biodiverse messiness.
6. And finally, we traced how environmental advocacy organisations are prefiguring the future of nature recovery in Britain through commissioned graphical representations that portray a ‘tamed messiness’ and the return of charismatic megafauna. Although these aesthetics may challenge prevailing pastoral aesthetics, they normalise continued inequality in the form of concentrated land ownership, especially in the Scottish Highlands.
7. Policy implications: Our analysis shows that aesthetics play an important role in shaping views of what is ‘natural’, ‘normal’, and ‘good’ and therefore desirable in what a future (recovered) nature looks like. We suggest that nature recovery initiatives take aesthetics seriously, by interrogating how idealisations of ‘how nature should look’ may influencedecision-making alongside ecological and other considerations. Taking aesthetics seriously also opens avenues for engaging with social and environmental justice, where alternative aesthetics can help in imagining more socially and environmentally just futures.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 8.9MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1002/pan3.10743
Authors
- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Journal:
- People and Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 6
- Pages:
- 2564-2576
- Publication date:
- 2024-11-11
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-09-02
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2575-8314
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2025235
- Local pid:
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pubs:2025235
- Deposit date:
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2024-09-03
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Wartmann and Lorimer.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © 2024 The Author(s). People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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