SELECTIVE ECOLOGY - Oreste Patrone - ETHICA SOCIETAS-Rivista di scienze umane e sociali

Aesthetics, perception, and invisibility in contemporary environmental choices

Abstract: This article examines the role of aesthetic experience in shaping contemporary ecological sensitivity, showing how public and political attention tends to focus on visually compelling natural elements while overlooking essential environmental infrastructures that lack symbolic appeal. Drawing on the thought of Aldo Leopold and Friedrich Schiller, the text highlights the risk of a selective ecology grounded in emotional and aesthetic hierarchies. It ultimately calls for a more mature environmental awareness capable of recognizing the value of environmental infrastructures and the invisible processes that sustain the balance of ecosystems.

Keywords: #SelectiveEcology #EnvironmentalAesthetics #EcologicalSensitivity #EnvironmentalInfrastructures #EcologicalBalance #EnvironmentalPolicy #Ecosystems #Sustainability #OrestePetrone #ethicasocietas #ethicasocietasjournal #scientificjournal #humanities #socialsciences #ethicasocietasupli

Oreste Patrone (1976), engineer and public employee, he has worked for many years in the field of environmental protection and waste management, where he has developed solid experience through both consultancy activities and institutional roles. He currently deals with integrated environmental permits, waste treatment plants, and single authorization procedures, and he is a member of the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional section of the National Register of Environmental Managers.

versione italiana

Aesthetics and ecology: the roots of environmental sensitivity

Much of contemporary ecological sensitivity is based on an aesthetic experience.
Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of modern ecology, wrote in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that we can be ethical only toward what we are able to see, feel, understand, or love.

Images of retreating glaciers, polar bears stranded on ice floes, and burning forests speak directly to emotion and evoke an immediate sense of protection. These are images that mobilize public awareness, guide media campaigns and fundraising efforts, and influence political decisions.

The limits of photogenic nature

But not all nature is photogenic.

A wastewater treatment plant or a waste management facility does not generate empathy. Yet it is precisely in these invisible, often undesirable spaces that a crucial part of ecological balance is at stake. We defend more strongly what we can see, narrate, photograph, and post on Instagram, while neglecting what operates in the shadows and does not lend itself to emotional storytelling.

Humans as visual beings

This is not a matter of flawed morality. Human beings are visual creatures who construct hierarchies of value through sensory experience. The landscape, in the European cultural tradition, became an aesthetic category before it became an ecological one. We learned to recognize the beauty of places long before understanding their systemic complexity.

Friedrich Schiller, in his letters on the aesthetic education of man, observed that aesthetic experience precedes full rational knowledge, and that feeling often paves the way for what reason will only later understand.

The risk of selective environmentalism

Thus, environmentalism itself, despite its deep intentions, can at times become selective. It mobilizes to defend a biotope, yet struggles to recognize the environmental dignity of a technical infrastructure. It is moved by a charismatic animal species or by a tree threatened by a bicycle path project, but remains wary of a facility that silently ensures the environmental conditions upon which both depend.

The invisible importance of environmental infrastructures

This survival often depends on elements that possess no scenographic quality.

Many environmental infrastructures in our territories exist precisely to protect these balances. Treatment plants, waste systems, and disposal networks prevent the cumulative effects of individual behaviors—domestic discharge, abandoned waste, industrial residues—from altering the natural cycles upon which the stability of ecosystems depends.

They are imperfect devices, like all human technologies, yet their function is to prevent the sum of millions of private actions from producing, over time, an irreversible disruption of environmental balance.

The political paradox of visibility

Within this gap lies a political paradox.

Collective decisions tend to favor what generates immediate emotional consensus. What fails to produce powerful images—or produces distorted ones filtered through disinformation—struggles to enter the public agenda. The maintenance of environmental systems appears less urgent than the symbolic protection of an iconic place.

Necessary but invisible technologies

Technological infrastructures are essential, yet rarely loved. They do not embody a romantic idea of nature and therefore remain at the margins of the collective imagination.

Toward ecological maturity

A deeper ecological maturity may require a shift in perspective. Not the abandonment of beauty, but the recognition that ecology is not only landscape.
It is system. It is the balance between what moves us and what functions.

Learning to care also for what is not beautiful but necessary means overcoming a form of selective ecology and moving toward a more mature awareness. It means understanding that environmental protection does not coincide with defending the image of nature, but with safeguarding the material conditions that make it possible.

Conclusion: extending our gaze

The challenge is not to stop loving forests or mountains, but to extend that love to the processes and structures hidden from view—to those technologies operating in the shadows. Because it is often there that the fate of the landscapes that move us is truly decided.

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