Aesthetic value : a challenge for conservation

Windett, Neil and Smith, Darrell and Convery, Ian and Prince, Heather (2025) Aesthetic value : a challenge for conservation. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis corrects the absence of research concerning how conservationists in leadership roles and their organisations’ stakeholders value aesthetically the United Kingdom’s National Parks and how this may influence conservation. This was achieved by providing insight into how divergent aesthetic valuation of the Lake District National Park, may influence conservation of natural capital integral to its cultural landscape. A phenomenological approach enabled deep insight into the core beliefs, held, relational, eudaemonic, and aesthetic values of participants. Understanding was also advanced through a novel qualitative method combining photo elicitation and diamond nine ranking, triangulated by SWOT analysis. Participants perceived the Lake District as a rural idyll, a complex mixture of myth and reality, reflecting their subjective perceptions. But these findings have implications for the real geographical space and the conservation of natural capital. This was illustrated by how the aesthetic value assigned by participants to natural capital, contributed to how they directly or indirectly influenced its physical management. Highly relevant because the conservationist participants in this research hold influential leadership roles in organisations which together own or lease over one third of the National Park. Participants from the anthropocentric National Trust valued aesthetically natural capital in the context of the Lake District cultural landscape, largely reflected in a landscape conservation approach. In contrast, conservationists from other organisations, usually in more eco-centric roles, valued aesthetically natural capital of wild character, mirrored in a nature conservation approach. Stakeholders showed similar aesthetic values and preferences for conservation of natural capital to the National Trust participants. But few perceived the damage that conservationists said natural capital was suffering through factors including climate change, overgrazing and a National Park Authority suffering yearly budget cuts. A series of recommendations applies the findings to the conservation of natural capital in the Lake District.