Aesthetics within the Storm. A Critical Compass to Contemporary Ecological Sensibility.

Since the 1960s, a new discipline has been emerging in the academic field. Environmental aesthetics attempts to bring back to the centre of discourse the conditions of experience of the environment, the possibilities of appreciation and the judgement of its constituent elements and processes. Curiously, however, even though the field of study was born in conjunction with the emergence of environmental scientific and political awareness, the ecological crisis has remained on the margins, treated sporadically and often within theoretical frameworks that pay little attention to the causes and socio-political implications of the aesthetic experience of the same. After mapping the main text of the field of study, the research will try to adopt an approach in line with the most recent developments of political ecology, i.e. by integrating feminist, decolonial and animal issues within the tools of investigation and questioning certain problematic assumptions of environmental aesthetics, in particular the universalist approach that permeates the idea of nature, environment and environmental crisis, their perception and the judgement that follows from it. At the same time, considering how criticisms of the universality of science by marginalised communities and postmodern theories have, on the one hand, allowed progressive demands to be advanced but, on the other, undermined trust in scientific activity, an attempt will be made to temper the possible drifts of such criticisms, namely ontological indeterminacy, perspectival and perceptual incommensurability and lack of criteria for judgment and orientation. Returning to the work of one of the earliest proponents of a social and historical (and thus political) vision of science, Ludwik Fleck, the research concludes by seeking to elaborate possible strategies for the articulation of the crisis, the harmonisation of its multiple perspectives and the research of a possible compass to orient our ecological sensibility.