Yes, Jan Marcin, and this is why people like to watch documentaries on living things on TV, because they are beautiful. A park, a protected area, is characterised by beauty. We are shy to say these things, because we cannot quantify beauty, there is not the equation of beauty, or the budget of beauty. But all our decisions are based on this. We choose our mates on this, our house, our car, everything. Beauty makes the world run. The rest is infrastructure, it is needed and it is much appreciated when it is not there, but we really do not care much about it. Some of the perception of beauty is quantified when we speak about charismatic organisms or habitats. But then all natural things, at the end, come out to be beautiful. One of our main damages is to destroy beauty from our landscapes, with ugly buildings, for instance. Architects are responsible of much ugliness simply because they do not give proper value to biodiversity, they do not know how to read its beauty, and their paradigms are different from ours. We need to mediate all this. I think that we need some sort of revolution in our approach to biodiversity issues, leaving of course the mechanistic side of our research, it is very important and must be pursued, but we need also to explore other things. Things that, paradoxically, make our expertise very important to the public (and, thus, to politicians) and that we consider as futile. I am annoyed to see lions on TV all the time, and that nature is depicted just with these obviously beautiful organisms. There are so many other beautiful things out there. People should learn to appreciate them. It is a luxury, I know. Anyway, again in Papua New Guinea, I was stuck by the beauty that these guys were pursuing. Their tribal art is fantastic, and the way they produce their simple tools requires beauty, is aimed at obtaining beauty and they appreciate the beauty of their environment. OK, I will share some of my rambling thoughts with you. Take the Zen garden of the 13 stones. It is built so that, from any point of the perimeter of the garden, you cannot see all the 13 stones at once. from every point there is a stone that hides some other stone. The more you know about a stone the more this knowledge prevents you to know about other stones (simply because the stone you are looking at is hiding some other stone). This garden is the principle of indetermination of Heisenberg: the more you know about the velocity of a particle the less you know about its position, and the more you know about the position the less you know about the velocity. It has very deep implications in the way we perform our science. You can convey a message with a set of formulae or... with a garden. Of course I am not saying that formulas are useless. They are extremely useful, but most of us survive without using them, we are happy to use the outcome of these formulas, handled by somebody else. Just like we eat meat but we are not butchers. The beauty of the concepts, however, must be part of our culture. And the garden is very appropriate. Then one might even be attracted by the mathematical notation - or not. Who cares? I study jellyfish and I go deep into this topic, but everybody is able to see the beauty of the jellies, and I am not offended if people do not know about them as much as I know. I am very reluctant in saying these things, usually, because scientists do not respect this way of thinking so much. But maybe this is why there is not so much understanding towards us by politicians and the public. Thanks for understanding, Jan Marcin
nando

Tourism&biodiversity Listmanager wrote:

>From: "Jan Marcin Weslawski"
>
>Thanks Fernando for the issue of beauty - and I do hope you book will appear soon in English!
>
>My feeling was always that biologists are shy of speaking about the aesthetic values of nature. To protect biodiversity we used to call economic value of goods and services, value of unknown medicinal plants, importance of functional biodiversity etc. That gave us a feeling of "firm arguments" easy to understand by politicians and economists. But finally, from the tourist point of view, it's the beauty that counts, and it can certainly be valued. The art merchants have no reservations about putting the price tag on a painting people will come to see. He is not arguing that this painting is good in covering the hole on the wall or may be used as an umbrella. He is using our need for aesthetics.
>
>What we have in our responsibility are the nature art galleries. And as you need a proper ventilation, light and walls in a gallery, we need a habitat. There are more analogies - some kind of art is very important - but many people don't like it (majority would go for an easy art - say impressionists). Just like with tourists and biodiversity- the choice is not after the importance or biodiversity richness, but after the sheer beauty of an animal and its display.
>
>So the aesthetics of biodiversity shall be quantified - again sociologists are needed.
>
>Thanks again, Fernando
>
>Jan Marcin Weslawski
>Institute of Oceanology PAS, Poland