Excerpt from “Useless Beauty” by Scott Russell Sanders from The Way of Imagination: Essays (Counterpoint Press, 2020):
Note: This article first appeared in Notre Dame Magazine.
Everywhere we look, from the dirt under our feet to the edge of the expanding cosmos, and on every scale from atoms to galaxies, the universe appears to be saturated with beauty. What are we to make of this?
If you believe that so much stunning design can only be the work of a cosmic Designer, then the Designer must be inordinately fond of beauty (as the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have remarked about God’s regard for beetles). It would seem to follow, for anyone who holds such a belief, that this beauty is sacred to the Designer, and is therefore deserving of our care. We can’t protect the glittering stars or flaming sunset or cycling moon, but we can protect the streams that salmon need for spawning, the high plains where sage grouse dance, the ancient forests required by spotted owls, the Arctic calving grounds of caribou. We can defend the last groves of redwoods from loggers, the creeks and mountaintops of Appalachia from miners, the ocean floor from trawlers, the atmosphere from polluters.
On the other hand, if you believe these ubiquitous beauties can be accounted for entirely by the operation of material processes, you may nonetheless treasure them. Indeed, you may treasure them all the more, as gifts we have no reason to expect from an indifferent universe. You may feel an obligation to protect whatever falls within your reach, not because it is divinely created, not because you can eat it or wear it or display it above your hearth, but because you love the beautiful thing itself—a creature, a species, a place. Even if you happen not to marvel at salmon or wolves, even if you’ve never seen an unplowed prairie or unlogged forest, you might still favor the protection of these and other natural beauties out of a respect for the people who do know and love them.
Or you might argue that what I call beauty is not a feature of the universe at all, sacred or secular, but only a quality of experience, a certain inner weather, like sorrow or joy. Even on this view, if “beauty” is merely a label for a feeling, that inner state is so enthralling, so invigorating, so nourishing, you might wish to protect whatever source outside of consciousness gives rise to it, for your own sake and for the sake of others who could enjoy the same experience. If it thrills you to hear owls call from a deep woods, you want the woods and owls to survive, and you want your own children or children yet unborn to have a chance of feeling the same thrill.
Whatever our philosophical or scientific or religious views, a close attention to beauty in the natural world ought to inspire in us an ethic of ecological care. It ought to make us live lightly. It ought to make us ardent supporters of laws aimed at protecting air, water, soil, endangered species, and wilderness. Ought to—but frequently doesn’t. Those who regard “beauty” as only the name of a pleasurable feeling might find all the stimulation they desire in movies or museums, without recourse to nature. Those who regard the universe as a machine that has been grinding away for billions of years, without purpose or direction, might regard natural beauty as having no intrinsic value, but only as a commodity to be used up or discarded to suit our appetites. Those who believe in a beauty-loving Creator often claim, based on a literal reading of the Bible, that the universe is a few thousand years old, and that everything in it, on Earth and beyond, was created for humans to exploit.
Our collective behavior suggests that the dominant view, at least in America, is that nothing in nature has value except insofar as it is useful to humans—and useful today, not in some future generation. What good is a wilderness if we can’t drill it for oil or mine it for minerals? What good is an ancient forest if it doesn’t yield board-feet of lumber? Why protect wild salmon if we can grow fish in concrete vats laced with chemicals? Why worry about any nonhuman creature if it stands in the way of our plans?
This is not a minority view. These utilitarian sentiments resound from legislatures, boardrooms, and editorial pages; they permeate economics textbooks and the buy-it-now babble of advertisements; they guide shoppers looking for the cheapest deal.
Measured by its consequences, the utilitarian ethic has proven to be disastrous. A child born in America today enters a world chockfull of human comforts and contrivances, but sorely depleted of natural wealth—topsoil lost, rivers dammed, air and water poisoned, wetlands drained, roadsides and oceans littered with trash, resources squandered, species extinguished. We are trading forested mountaintops for cut-rate electricity. We are swapping the sound of meadowlarks and the sight of prairie coneflowers for casinos and parking lots. We are sacrificing rainforests for hamburgers, coral reefs for island cruises, glaciers for SUVs. With every upward tick of the GDP, the richness and resilience of the greater-than-human world declines.
Of course, that same child born in America today may never know what has been lost. She may take the diminished world as the way things must be if we are to enjoy what Madison Avenue and Wall Street call progress and prosperity. With each passing year, we spend more and more of our time inside human constructions—buildings and vehicles; symbolic zones made out of numbers, musical notes, or, like this essay, out of words; and inside the trance of TV, video games, and cyberspace. Cut off from direct contact with natural beauty, we make do with indoor substitutes—wildlife documentaries, flowers in vases, water in fountains, posters on walls. If these tokens are all we know of nature, then natural beauty is in jeopardy, for we will not protect what we do not know.
Our urge to simulate nature’s beauty inside the artificial world we’ve made reveals that we cannot separate ourselves from the greater world that made us. Painting, poetry, music, dance, storytelling, photography, film, and all other form of art are human expressions of the cosmic penchant for creating beauty. The universe out of which we have evolved is inscribed in our intelligence and imagination. This does not justify our dominion over Earth, but it does confirm that we belong here, in spite of what otherworldly religions claim. The creative genius of nature runs right through us, as it runs through the amoeba and monarch butterfly and humpback whale.
I will let the philosophers define what beauty is. But I think I understand some of what beauty does. It calls us out of ourselves. It feeds our senses. It provides standards for art and science, for language and literature. It inspires affection and gratitude. How then should we live, in a world overflowing with such bounty? Rejoice in it, care for it, and strive to add our own mite of beauty, with whatever power and talent we possess.
Photo Credit: Ruth Sanders
Scott Russell Sanders is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Hunting for Hope, A Conservationist Manifesto, and A Private History of Awe. His recent books include Earth Works: Selected Essays and Divine Animal: A Novel. In August 2020, Counterpoint Press published his new collection of essays, The Way of Imagination, a reflection on healing and renewal in a time of social and environmental upheaval. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.