Page - 308 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

308 who focus on changing people’s conservation behaviour. Thus, providing support for this second vision seems a useful place to conclude. It turns out that the second vision, like behavioural entrepreneurship, is neither a radical nor an unfamiliar approach to environmental stewardship. 13.6.1 Conservation Aesthetic Aldo Leopold (1933) is remembered for his promotion of a conservation and land ethic. However, near the end of his book, A Sand County Almanac (1949), he intro- duced the idea that the planet also could be restored using a conservation aesthetic. The distinction between these approaches to behaviour change is dramatic. A land ethic, whether voluntary or mandatory, involves “a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence” (Leopold 1949: 202), an obligation to exercise restraint. In contrast, a conservation aesthetic would have us seek interactions with nature because we derive satisfaction from them. A conservation aesthetic is revit- alising, unleashing pleasures derived from the hidden riches of interacting directly with the biodiversity of nature. 13.6.2 Behavioural Aesthetic Modern industrial society rejoices in its many technical efficiencies and innova- tions. However, these accomplishments are challenged by new data (Bonaiuti 2017). What seems efficient from one perspective is brittle from another. Material produc- tion and consumption on a global scale turns out to require complex systems and demand massive energy inputs. This leads to increasing economic and social system vulnerabilities as the complexity reaches diminishing marginal returns (Tainter 1988) and as the production of natural resources both becomes less predictable and suffers from declining energy surpluses. Furthermore, focusing on the output from this vulnerable complex system reveals that consumer consumption, the end goal of the entire enterprise, is an astonishingly inefficient means of providing for social and spiritual well-being (De Young and Princen 2012; Kasser 2009; Kjell 2011; O’Brien 2008). Critiques of modernity are not new. Nevertheless, there is a new claim that indus- trialisation destroys the aesthetic quality of everyday life. Berry (1987: 165–166) has made this observation about what one gains from daily work in non-industrial enterprises. He cites the work of Gill (1983: 65) on the higher calling that working manually fulfills, “…every [one] is called to give love to the work of [their] hands. Every [one] is called to be an artist”. Berry makes this same claim throughout his poetry, fiction and non-fiction writing, frequently offering up small-scale agricul- ture as an instance of an artistic enterprise involving multiple and overlapping daily decisions centered on the concepts of beauty, resourcefulness and feeding of spiritual R. De  Young