‘[The] tenth stage [of the development of Western Environmental Aesthetics] can be called its “coming of age” as a discipline, since it is marked by a proliferation of new books, major anthologies, numerous encyclopedia and reference volume entries, and textbooks. The new books include, in addition to Saito’s 2007 monograph on everyday aesthetics, Malcolm Budd’s The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Brady’s Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, Ronald Moore’s Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts, Glenn Parson and Carlson’s Functional Beauty, and two volumes by Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme and Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World. In addition to Light and Smith’s 2005 everyday aesthetics collection and the two anthologies edited by Berleant and Carlson on the aesthetics of natural and human environments, published in 2004 and 2007, respectively, major anthologies published since 2000 include two collections of original essays, Berleant’s Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics and Sven Arntzen and Brady’s Humans in the Land: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Cultural Landscape as well as an anthology edited by Carlson and Sheila Lintott, Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty. […] Another sign of the coming of age of a discipline is the appearance of dictionary, encyclopedia, and reference volume entries on the subject, and environmental aesthetics has been treated in almost all of such volumes that have been published within the last twenty years. In addition to the earlier entry in Cooper’s 1992 A Companion to Aesthetics, articles on environmental aesthetics and/or the aesthetics of nature have appeared in, to mention only some of the relevant volumes, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, the two editions of the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, the Blackwell Guide To Aesthetics, the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the new second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics. Last but not least, two textbooks have been recently added to the growing assortment of resources available in environmental aesthetics, Parsons’s Aesthetics and Nature and Carlson’s Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics. In addition to these significant and positive developments in environmental aesthetics, the first decade of the new century also brought the unfortunate passing of the founder of the discipline. Ronald Hepburn died on December 23, 2008.’
Allen Carlson, Ten Steps in the Development of Western Environmental Aesthetics. In Drenthen, Martin and Jozef Keulartz (eds.), Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014, 13–24, 22–23.