Aesthetic Ecologies has emerged from long-standing work across philosophy, aesthetics, environmental research, and the natural sciences. It brings research, observation, and lived experience together to investigate the coupled relation of experiential quality and environmental quality, with particular attention to feedback relations that often remain insufficiently described.

Brit Kolditz’s work forms the research ground of Aesthetic Ecologies. Her interdisciplinary doctoral work engaged three distinct yet connected fields:

• biodiversity loss and the lived experience of gradual environmental change, memory, and shifting experiential baselines
• changes in human experience and perception in the context of the global rise of myopia, particularly in relation to distance, expanse, and spatial orientation
• anthropogenic sensory pollution of the sky environment and the quiet qualitative loss of an undisturbed, deep-blue sky.

Aesthetics is integral to this research as both theory and practice. Beauty, atmospheric quality, and natural phenomena have long shaped its questions, especially where experiential qualities come into tension with anthropogenic conditions and altered environments. Art, literature and other aesthetic forms remain essential because they disclose and articulate dimensions of lived and embodied experience that analytical language alone does not fully reach.

Sky Observation gives public form to a lifelong relation with the sky. Through ongoing observation, experiential documentation, and critical reflection on the shared sky environment, it has become a living public practice of research. Two peer-reviewed papers have grown out of it: The Loss of Sky-Blue: Changes in the Sky-Environment and Aesthetic Vulnerability: An Experiential Category for Anthropogenic Sensory Pollution. At its center is the question of how a deep-blue experiential baseline can still be held, shared, and critically reflected upon under conditions in which atmospheric change may quietly shift what is experienced as normal.

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