Is Scenic Beauty a Proxy for Acceptable Management?

Abstract

Pacific Northwest mountain scenes tested whether perceptions of scenic beauty correspond to those of management acceptability, and for whom. A stratified sample of participants included those favoring resource protection, production, or neither. Scenes were rated for either scenic beauty or acceptability. All participants saw very beautiful scenes as acceptable, and the two rating types were correlated but diverged in ways corresponding to environmental attitudes. Participants with opposite attitudes rendered the two ratings in reversed ways: Those favoring resource production had lower standards for both qualities, rated acceptability higher than beauty, and saw ugly scenes as acceptable. Those favoring resource protection had higher standards for both qualities, rated acceptability lower than beauty, and needed beauty to see acceptable management. The nonaligned respondents were in between, judging the two qualities very similarly. Beauty can be a proxy for acceptability within homogeneous or general constituencies but only with careful interpretation across conflicting value orientations.