Cryosphere Aesthetics

This essay proposes a mini-toolkit for ‘cryosphere aesthetics’: the conceptual foundations providing a guide for action for positive environmental change. The essay emphasizes the significance of global and intergenerational aesthetics since climate change means that we must take on board transspatial and trans-temporal phenomena and experiences. Also important is cultivating appreciative virtues such as wonder, receptivity, sensitivity, and humility. Given the connections between the earth’s systems and global governance and justice in a climate-changed world, this aesthetic-ethical stance should be accompanied by an awareness of “icy geopolitics.” That is, in thinking through how environmental aesthetics and ethics can support the protection of the cryosphere, understanding indigenous communities and nature-society relationships is very important.