The Aesthetics of the Unreachable, Imagination, and Climate Change

Abstract The trans-temporal and trans-spatial nature of climate change demands an understanding of past, present, and future environmental change. This knowledge comes through scientific, cultural, and other sources. While environmental aesthetics has been contributing to this endeavor through progress on ‘intergenerational aesthetics’, and ‘future aesthetics’, a problem arises when we consider that aesthetic experience is usually articulated through present, first-hand perceptual encounters in the world. To address this gap, I argue that imagination’s powers of creativity, individual, and collective imaginings provide a valuable tool for accessing ‘unreachable’ aesthetic qualities, or qualities that are not present to first-hand perception of the world. I show how environmental aesthetic experience and the role of imagination function to complement and enrich scientific and other resources, thus supporting the comprehension of environmental change now and into the future.