“Picturesque Environmentalism: The Curious Case of the Landfill Park”--Sandra Shapshay (Hunter College, CUNY)

The European ‘picturesque’ environmentalist tradition developed concurrently with sublime-based environmentalism but has garnered far less attention. The aim of this paper is to investigate what I see as the vanguard of this tradition— ‘landfill’ or ‘garbage’ parks—by offering a genealogy. In tracing the origins and development of the large, urban public park—in the European and North American context—I hope to show that the picturesque aesthetic is quite potent for environmentalism today. Focusing on the Freshkills Park project on Staten Island in New York City, I shall argue versus critics that the creation of a landfill park is indeed an important way to address contemporary social and environmental problems, but that to do so effectively, it should function simultaneously to memorialize as well as to remediate the environmental devastation that lurks just below the surface.

Sandra Shapshay is the chair and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is also a Deputy Executive Officer and Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as the co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Professor Shapshay received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, dual master’s degrees from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on aesthetics, nineteenth-century philosophy (especially Kant and Schopenhauer), and the history of ethics.