1 Daisy Dixon

Imagine you had some relatively untouched piece of nature. And then, a mining company discovered there were valuable minerals there. And they wanted to extract the minerals. And they were going to make a complete mess of the landscape. But it was OK because they said that they would restore the landscape to exactly how it looked before. Now do you think that would make everything all right? Or do you think there would be some kind of loss of value?

I suppose it depends on what kind of value we're talking about. Because there might be a loss of value on a more sort of perhaps scientific level with some of the habitats might have been disturbed in some way. And they're unable to sort of rebuild after this disturbance. And if we just assume that everything is exactly the same as it was, I'd say, obviously, weighing up the values, if the value of getting these minerals was just as important, say, as the beauty of the piece of nature, then I think it would be OK to do that in some cases.

If this replica sounds the same, looks the same, even tastes the same or smells the same. Then you might think that the aesthetic value of that piece of nature hasn't changed. Because we've just got the very same formal elements that we had originally.

But on the other hand, if you think that beauty, especially with this piece of nature, part of what made it beautiful was the fact that it was untouched. You might think that knowing that it's artificial, and that it is a copy, more or less, that might kind of affect our experience of those sensorial features. So whilst we're getting all the same kind of inputs, like it sounds the same and looks the same, we can take all those on board. But we know that it's a bit artificial and that might affect our kind of aesthetic experience.