Beauty & the Beast — Decker, Goff, Valuing Wildlife, 2009

"Beauty and the Beast: Aesthetic Experience of Wildlife," pages 187-196 in Decker, Daniel J. and Gary R. Goff, eds., Valuing Wildlife: Economic and Social Perspectives. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/37182

Wild lives are valued aesthetically in diverse ways: (1) Wild lives are spontaneous form in motion, appealing to human emotions. (2) They are kindred yet alien sentient life. (3) They struggle to make the potential actual. (4) Wild lives are taken up as symbols in the culture that humans overlay on the natural world.