In my last post, Appreciating Nature with Science, we talked about Allen Carlson's idea that the best framework for properly appreciating nature as nature is science. Knowing a bit of natural history and environmental science can give us guide lines to understand nature without reducing it to a series of picturesque scenes or mere economic calculations.

I like this idea, but I have some concerns that the approach ignores an aspect of appreciation that comes from our personal thoughts, emotions, and imagination ...