Art, imagination and the environmental movement

"Like putting a scratch across the Mona Lisa." These are the words of Australian environmentalist Bob Brown in the early 1980s, as he, Christine Milne and a host of other activists protested the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. Brown's likening of a natural heritage site to a well-known artwork of cultural significance demonstrates the growing efforts to make environmentalism accessible, to capture people's imaginations by using evocative imagery so as to warn people of the irreversible dangers of inaction and inappropriate action. Comparing the Franklin River to an artwork further impressed the importance of preserving the world's aesthetic beauty, which would be equally as critical to the environmental movement as the scientific rationale for environmentalism, the economic rationale and the complementary rationale of social justice. In this chapter, Jacobs, a researcher in creative arts education and aesthetic literacies, and Milne, founding member and former federal leader of the Australian Greens, analyse the importance of the rarely discussed matter of aesthetic awareness in the environmental movement. They discuss the impact of aesthetics when campaigning, the challenges of educating the world through an aesthetic lens, and the centrality of aesthetics as a rasion d'etre for environmental protection.