Ecological science has wrought a change in the mental eye. —Aldo Leopold

I. Introduction

Thomas Kuhn describes a scientific paradigm as a conceptual framework or set of background beliefs and values held by members of a scientific community. Part of a scientific education, he argues, is learning how the background beliefs and values that underlie scientific practices articulate a paradigm. Part of an aesthetic education, I argue, is learning how to appreciate natural beauty differently and appropriately when new discoveries trigger what Kuhn calls a paradigm shift—a shift in the beliefs and values that determine scientific theory and practice. In 1992 scientists S. T. A. Pickett, V. T Parker, and P. L. Fielder announced that ecology had undergone such a shift. The new paradigm in ecology emphasizes dynamic change, disturbance, and nonequilibrium in natural systems, and it presents some challenges for contemporary environmental aesthetics, one of which has to do with the thesis known as "scientific cognitivism." Scientific cognitivism holds that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature must be informed by scientific knowledge. If this thesis is correct, and if the new paradigm in ecological science tells us that nature is in a state of dynamic nonequilibrium, then aesthetic appreciation must adapt to constant change in natural systems. More generally, if aesthetic appreciation of nature must be informed by scientific knowledge, and if ecological science undergoes a paradigm shift, then a cognitivist model of aesthetic appreciation must adapt to the new paradigm. Another challenge the new paradigm presents has some bearing on the positive aesthetics thesis—that pristine nature has only positive aesthetic qualities such as balance, order, and harmony. The new paradigm's emphasis on random and fluctuating disturbances may require us to abandon the notion of purely "pristine" nature and replace the positive aesthetic qualities with which it is associated because under the new paradigm nature is described as imbalanced, disorderly, and disharmonious.