Is aesthetics enough?

I would like to expand upon a point that was brought up in Silverman's section on aesthetics in "Stopping the Plant." She writes that one flaw with aesthetics as an argument for conservation is that because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not every person will agree that it is in our best interest to save a given natural landscape. In the case of the Hudson, enough people agree that this river is beautiful for aesthetics to work as a legitimate reason for regulating or inhibiting new development along the Hudson River (for example, the hydroelectric facility on Storm King Mountain and the St. Lawrence Cement Plant). However, valuable ecosystems are not always seen as beautiful. Aesthetics can help preserve land labeled beautiful, but may negate the arguments for conservation on land that is not as visually pleasing to or will rarely be viewed by the human eye. Aesthetics, therefore, is incomplete as an argument for environmental conservation.

A prime example of aesthetics falling short is in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. Much of the land preserved here is far from what the typical American might label beautiful. Furthermore, the great majority of Americans will never see this land or set foot on it in their lives. For many people, this wilderness has value whether they will ever see the landscape in person or not; existence value is the worth that people assign to wilderness just to know that it exists (though the exact amount of such existence value varies greatly from person to person). I could delve into the value associated with biodiversity and preservation of one of the last pristine environments, but that is another discussion. The important point here is that aesthetics will work as an argument for preservation in areas that people find beautiful and in areas that many people will see, but other pro-environment arguments must be developed for areas where this is not the case. Aesthetics, while it has great potential to limit development close to home, will not suffice to stop development in the most remote or barren ecosystems.