Dr Mariagrazia Portera (University of Florence, Italy)
June 20, 2024 | 17.45 – 19.15 | Auerbach Library, MESH
Recent research in conservation sciences seems to suggest that biological conservation, at many levels, is biased towards protecting not what is actually at risk but what humans like the most (i.e. what is most beautiful). In the last few years studies have been carried out on different animal classes and on plants: fishes, insects, mammals, alpine botanical species, to show, for example, how plant scientists' research attention is skewed towards colourful, conspicuous and broadly distributed alpine flowers (in a word, towards the most aesthetically attractive flowers), rather than on botanical species that actually need protection (this is an article from 2021); how the aesthetic value of reef fishes is globally mismatched to their conservation priorities (this is an article from 2022); how aesthetic values also have an impact in birds conservation, highlighting, furthermore, that an insidious aspect of this human-driven aesthetic valuation of nature is that it can influence wildlife trade, which can in turn spearhead the demise of prized species; with regard to butterflies, recent studies have pointed out that the mean level of charisma (a notion strongly interwoven with that of aesthetics, although “aesthetic” and “charismatic” cannot be understood as synonymic) is higher for species of the EU Habitats Directive than for species of conservation priority and for not-listed species. This means that even some of the international red lists of endangered species (at the EU level) are affected by aesthetic biases.
These studies are relevant. First, they suggest that both at the level of the general public and of non-academic stakeholders and in the intricate dynamics that lead biological conservation researchers within the academia to the choice and development of their own subject of study, not only “objective”, scientific motivations (risk of extinction, for example) matter, but also, it seems, motivations linked to the beauty of the subject of study itself (a certain animal or botanical species) and to its symbolic-cultural value. In this sense, the aesthetic dimension emerges as an affecting factor both upstream, in the construction of scientific research, and downstream, in its dissemination among the general public, stakeholders and policymakers. The impact of the aesthetic bias (i.e.: “I am more willing to protect what is aesthetically appealing to human eyes rather than what is actually at risk”) is an example of anthropogenic selection.
But these studies also open theoretical questions of some importance for those among us working within the field of philosophical aesthetics. What concept of “the aesthetic” is adopted in these studies (which are for the most part carried out by non-philosophers)? How emotions and cognitive information (for instance, expertise or non-expertise) affect the aesthetic bias? Is what I have called “aesthetic bias” re-moldable or re-shapeable, for instance through processes of aesthetic education? What is the role of aesthetics in conserving and protecting biodiversity: just a bias to get rid of or, perhaps, also a resource and a fly-wheel for more effective conservation actions? What is the role of aesthetics against the background of today’s Environmental Humanities?
In support of my argument, I will also briefly present the results of a quantitative-qualitative study, of which I was the coordinator for two years at my university, concerning the issues of the relationship between aesthetics and biological conservation.