The Science of Scenery ― How We See Scenic Beauty, What It Is, Why We Love It, and How to Measure and Map It

We all love to view beautiful landscapes! Global tourism relies on them. But did you know that such landscapes are also essential for our health and restoration from stress? Moreover, that the value of views is factored into the price of house blocks – a lovely view can add thousands to the value of a block of land. And did you know that scientists researching landscapes believe that we like beautiful landscapes because they benefit us by aiding our survival as a species? For millennia, people have loved beauty, whether in landscapes, in flowers and trees, or in human-made objects such as paintings and sculpture. For much of human history, beauty was believed to be a physical attribute of the object being viewed – beauty was as physical as rocks, water and trees. It was as late as the 18th century before philosophers and later psychologists came to understand that what we regard as beauty lies behind our eyes, in our mind’s interpretation of what our eyes see – beauty exists merely in the mind that comprehends it - according to the Scottish philosopher, David Hume.Planners, geographers and environmentalists have tried for decades to measure beauty in the landscape, often by documenting its land forms, trees and vegetation, land uses and other attributes in the hope that its beauty would emerge from the analysis. It never did. The reason is that they were measuring the wrong thing. Instead of measuring what lay before their eyes, they needed to measure what lay behind their eyes, their perception of the landscape. They needed to measure people’s preferences, their likes and dislikes, deriving understanding of what people regard as beautiful. The author of this book, Dr Andrew Lothian, has developed a method for doing this and has applied it in many studies over 20 years, both In Australia and in England. His Community Preferences Method is simple and robust. It provides an accurate measure of the community’s landscape preferences and of the likely visual impact of proposed developments.This profusely illustrated book traces human interest in scenic beauty and places its measurement on a scientific footing. The book, comprising nearly 500 pages, draws from over 1300 landscape research papers and contains over 800 photographs, figures, graphs, maps and tables spread over its 23 chapters. The Science of Scenery provides a rigorous examination of how we view scenic beauty, what it is, why we like it, and how it may be measured and mapped. The book is unique as no other book traces the development of the Western view of landscape beauty in all its dimensions, comprehensively bringing together the findings of relevant research, and detailing how it may be measured and mapped. With its wealth of historical and cultural information the book will appeal to the well-read layperson as well as providing a valuable resource to landscape managers, planners, psychologists, geographers, environmentalists and landscape designers.The Science of Scenery is available only through Amazon.com as a print-on-demand publication.