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Positioning aesthetic landscape as economy

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Abstract

Flexibility is required in modern times to comprehend vast and fluctuating levelscapes of information. The ability to observe, simulate, and assimilate situations and circumstances from different points of reference and view is paramount for survival. This ability as preamble to consequence in landscape is valid, and provides an impetus for expanding landscape ecology from its traditional realm of definitive terrafirma to an assimilation of terraform (i.e. the process that alters an environment capable of supporting life forms). The traditional human-nature duplexity, regarding landscape ecology, is simulated with real and virtual fields in a noöspheric configuration. The involvement of culture (i.e. by consensus of value) and history (i.e. by sequencing relevancy) is a contributing determinant of “real” (landscaper) and “virtual” (landscapev) fields of existence and extinction. Within this noöspheric network unique observations of landscape ecology are possible (e.g. eco-field). Suggested in the noöspheric network, aesthetics is an efficiency relevant to life-support systems exemplified by value that precludes aestheticism (i.e. typically limited to a dichotomy of beautiful and ugly). Aesthetics viewed as a transcending process through levels of ecological organization and as a transcending property of transcending processes becomes understood as economy (energetic efficiency) capable of supporting nonmarket and market units of valuation. The consequence of these units of valuation articulates as subjects or objects of criticism within an aesthetic set point model, which measures individual or societal tolerance.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the United States Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology, Madison, Wisconsin committee for organizing the 23rd symposium, Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Processes. Gary and I thank Almo Farina, session chair of Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Processes: The Role of Human Societies for his invitation to present our scholarship. We appreciate the contribution of Jianguo Wu, Editor-In-Chief of Landscape Ecology, for his time and interest regarding this publication.

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Correspondence to Gary W. Barrett.

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Barrett, T.L., Farina, A. & Barrett, G.W. Positioning aesthetic landscape as economy. Landscape Ecol 24, 299–307 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-009-9326-z

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