Altered Landscapes

In recent decades the term environment has gained wide usage. Jay Appleton distinguished environment from landscape by referring to the latter as "the environment perceived". An advantage which the term environment has over landscape is, as Bourassa noted, that environment can refer more readily to urban scenes although the term urban landscape is also in common usage. As the term environment embraces the total physical, biological, cultural and aesthetic components of an area, it is generally regarded as too broad and encompassing a term for landscape.
The terms scene, scenic and scenery are inadequate descriptions of landscape. With its roots in the theatre where a scene describes a portion of a play, so a scene can describe a portion of a landscape. Scenery, which describes the decorative backdrops used on a stage, also refers to the general appearance of a place, particularly a picturesque view. While it can be used interchangeably with landscape it does not convey the same depth of meaning.
The term landscape aesthetics or just aesthetics is frequently used in the literature. Aesthetics has a more controversial origin than landscape. It derived from the Greek aisthesis meaning "sense perception". The term was used as the title of the book Aesthetica (1750-58) by Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62), a minor German philosopher who incorrectly applied the Greek term to a critique of the beautiful or the theory of taste (sociology). Thus the term which originally applied to the broad field of sense perception was restricted to the area of taste. Immanuel Kant in 1781 criticised this use and applied it in accordance with its classical meaning "the philosophy of sensuous perception". However, the corrupted term aesthetics gained popular acceptance entering England after 1830 and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, within a century of the coining of the meaning by Baumgarten, it was in use widely throughout Europe.
The dictionary definition of aesthetic perpetuates Baumgarten's error and defines it as "things perceptible by the senses as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial", "pertaining to the sense of the beautiful or the science of aesthetics"Macquarie Dictionary, 1981., or "of, relating to, or dealing with aesthetics or the beautiful". Aesthetics is regarded as a branch of philosophy, that which "deduces from nature and taste the rules and principles of art, the theory of the fine arts; the science of the beautiful..." or "dealing with the nature of the beautiful and with judgements concerning beauty".