What you encounter, recognize, and discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach…When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us…When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.
John O’Donohue
The Columbia River Basin, Wikimedia
Seeing activates dynamic exchanges between sensory engagement, cognitive knowledge, the imagination, emotion, and in some rarefied moments, contemplation of mystery. Environmental aesthetics explores the relative importance of each of these ways of knowing in filtering how we perceive, judge, and appreciate environments. This relatively new subset of the field of aesthetics exposes values and perspectives that are the lens through which we evaluate and value the natural world. Just as contours determine what we see, values inflect how we approach what we perceive.
There are multiple sites in the Columbia River Basin where persistent and pertinent environmental debates test and illuminate human approaches to the natural world over time. Cosmologies, epochal histories, ecology, economics, and identities imbue its landscape. Politically charged debates within this France-sized river basin illustrate parallels between the frameworks for aesthetic appreciation of the natural world and arguments informing environmental policy.
The Columbia River spans 1,243 miles, beginning as a small spring just above the Columbia Lake in a bucolic part of the Canadian Rockies. This tiny gurgle is the source of the main fork of this great river, which travels through seven states and British Columbia. Much of the Columbia Basin’s geology embodies an epoch of geology, formed by molten rock, floods, and glaciers. Thick undulating basalt layers (nearly two kilometers deep!) underlie the basin’s topography; the accumulation of over three hundred lava flows that began 17 million years ago and continued to build, intermittently for around 12 million years. These flows rose from fissures in the earth’s crust. The Columbia River carved into expansive, weighty deposits of molten rock; it flows over a basalt topography whose geologic history springs from a time when the boundaries between the earth’s core and mantle were far more porous.
Ice and water were also critical to the formation of the Columbia Basin. In relatively recent geologic history, merely tens of thousands of years ago, North America was coated in sheets of glacial ice during two distinct Ice Ages. The more recent of these occurred 12,000-15,000 years ago and gave rise to enormous ice dam that obstructed the Clark Fork River, creating the 2,000 foot deep Lake Missoula. This lake stretched 200 miles from east to west and contained over 500 cubic miles of water. When the ice dam broke water flooded from western Montana to the Pacific Ocean, scouring a wide swath of land across the Idaho Panhandle, southeast and central Washington, and upstream into the Willamette Valley. The fast, ferocious water, in a swelling rush, unearthed lava beds, carved coulees, cut river channels, and sculpted the narrow and dramatic Columbia River Gorge.
The Columbia Basin’s geologic history inspires awe and reverence. Ronald Hepburn, one of the founders of environmental aesthetics, writes in his essay, “Wonder,” that while scientific knowledge can “displace” this powerful emotion, understanding the complex forces and extraordinary processes behind “perceptual phenomena” can also complement and even enhance one’s sense of wonder. Hepburn goes on to discuss the ethics of wonder, which operates on affective levels. Wonder, he suggests, is life affirming and promotes a sense of awe and humility. Wonder can also elicit vulnerability through understandings of powers well beyond one’s control, grounded in extraordinary histories and evolving from astonishing processes. It promotes receptive, “other acknowledging” orientations; the more one feels awe for nature and fellow humans, the more one feels respect, compassion, and reverence.
The Columbia Basin’s history is also a familiar story of humankind seeking to control and conquer its wild and wondrous nature. Inscribed in this basin is a story that requires reckonings that may allow us to “walk on the earth with reverence” and regain beauty’s trust.