In his journal, Henry David Thoreau asked in 1859 "In what book is this world and its beauty described? Who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beauty?" Almost a 100 years later, in his book The Sand County Almanac, ecologist Aldo Leopold addressed Thoreau's question by advocating what he called a "conservation esthetic" as the door to appreciating the richness of the natural world, and a resulting conservation ethic.

Leopold suggested that increased ecological awareness would more finely tune people's perception of the world around them. The word aesthetics is, after all, derived from the Greek word aisthesis, literally "perception by the senses." Leopold claimed that perception, "like all real treasures of the mind, can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality," a necessity if we are to revive our appreciation of the richness and diversity of the world that surrounds us. Instead...