Anna Deplazes Zemp

Aesthetic values are often categorised as a type of relational values, yet their shared characteristics with other relational values remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we turn to Emily Brady’s theory of environmental aesthetics; her interpretation of aesthetic value exhibits important parallels with the concept of relational values. We then build on this framework when analysing go-along interviews conducted in rural Switzerland. In these interviews, participants were asked about personally meaningful places in nature, which often led them to spontaneously describe aesthetic experiences in nature. We found that central concepts of environmental aesthetics are reflected in the participants’ narratives, such as the ability of aesthetic values to establish certain types of human–nature relationships, the framing of these values by memories or scientific beliefs and the possibility of intersubjective understanding and sharing of others’ aesthetic values. Drawing on the theoretical and practical overlaps in the characterisation of aesthetic and relational values, we propose that aesthetic values, as defined in Brady’s aesthetical theory, can be categorised as relational values. This understanding of aesthetic values as relational values can also inform our understanding of other types of relational values, for instance, by demonstrating a role that imagination could play in framing relational values and proposing a model of how other relational values could be intersubjective. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Various scholars have criticized that formal Western thinking was dichotomous and substantialist, leading to an alienation from nature and to its exploitation in industrialized societies. Critics argue that a relational turn towards a more holistic, process-based and relational approach to address the world would be an important step to overcome these problems. Such a relational turn involves a shift towards more flexible and inclusive concepts. We analyse ‘nature’ concepts of local stakeholders in Swiss nature parks to examine whether they contain any relational elements. Indeed, we found that all stakeholders interviewed see themselves as part of nature. Many reported how they experience nature in active processes and see nature as a collaborator and partner. Moreover, they do not strictly separate between natural and cultural elements in their environment. We conclude that a relational turn in environmental policy in Western countries could build on these relational elements in nature concepts of the local population.

Ecologically considerate use of nature (including agriculture) has often been associated with ‘stewardship’ as a human-nature relationship which involves human care, responsibility and accountability and is thus more sustainable than the alternative human-nature relationship of manager of nature. We show that the consideration of nature in agriculture can go further than stewardship by presenting data from qualitative interviews with Swiss Alpine farmers indicating that many of them view their relationship with nature as a form of partnership. Drawing on literature of human-nature partnership, we characterize this relationship by 1) bidirectionality – a give and take between nature and humans–, 2) the understanding of nature as a subject rather than an object and 3) interaction with nature that consists of collaboration rather than giving commands. The mountain farmers expressed all of these features in their farming practices and descriptions of their role in nature. A few farmers even saw their role as subordinates to nature, for which we introduced the new human-nature relationship category of “apprenticeship”. We further suggest that the partnership relation between humans and nature in many respects shares key features with relational values, for instance in its non-centric nature and in its emphasis of the combination of benefits for people with care for nature. In that sense, we aim at combining different accounts of inclusive, non-dichotomous and context-sensitive dealings with nature and we suggest that this combination is applicable also to contexts beyond agriculture.