Environmental Aesthetic Emotions: A Rasa-Based Rapport with Nature

Environmentalist trajectories gave rise to sustainability-based arts, alongside theorising valleys, rivers and trees as relationally situated agents with rights and the capacity for sentient experience. The newly emerging discipline of Environmental Aesthetics intersects understandings of the natural world as embodying interests, desires and self-transformation in this way. Nature is seen to have a power to turn the aesthetic gaze back towards the human observer and unlock a spectrum of common emotions, including wonder, love, grief, anger, disgust, and tranquility. This paper assesses contemporary environmental art, tracing the theoretical criteria to poets who make distinctions between aesthetic-emotions, and subjective mundane emotions.

This talk was originally presented at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference, Santa Fe New Mexico, July 2026, with support from the University Research Board, Ahmedabad University