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Key to the concept of reflective practice is the notion that professional knowledge, which is theoretical, differs from real-world practice, which is experiential. Donald Schon argued that our practices can inform theory and professional development, as well as vice versa (1983). For Schon, the ‘reflective practitioner’ is one who engages in “an open dialogue” with themselves and their situation, such that reflective practice can be understood as an intentional feedback loop between mindful ‘doing’, analysis, and contemplation (Asfeldt & Stonehouse, 2021). Our theoretical knowledge can sometimes fail to explain a particular experience, which may require creative responses that entail our emotional as well as cognitive presence (Hartog, 2002). Approaching challenges mindfully, we can recognise shortcomings in our understanding and identify areas in our lives that require proactive reflection and development. 

Theories of reflective practice have developed across various disciplines, including nursing, pedagogy, leadership practice, and conservation. Researchers recognise that practitioners are engaged in relationships with people and organisations. This means that complex feelings and life histories are at play within the working environment, suggesting that practice necessarily has a moral aspect that sometimes requires humanistic reflection. Mary Hartog claims that developing professionally, within one’s practice, means developing as a moral agent (2002). Theorists thus often emphasise the need for sensitivity to feedback that could illuminate potential gaps between theory and practice within the environments in which we act. Solving challenges can mean revising “our conceptions of self” in how we appear to others and how we should act in the future (Ibid, p.235). Hartog calls this “self-study”, emphasising a framework that can engender the development of moral agency in our lives while fostering openness to agency of others we encounter through our practice (Ibid, p.223).

Scholars argue that reflection should challenge our beliefs and limiting assumptions with the aim of making informed developments within our personal and professional lives. Asfeldt and Stonehouse note that reflection can “take many forms”, including “reflective journaling, semi-structured small group discussion, facilitator lead discussion, pre and post experience role play, … reviews, case studies, … simulations, [and] mind mapping” (2021, p.344). I have drawn upon some of these during my civil engagement /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshops, relating basic philosophical theory to experience through structured reflection. Reflecting on internal and external landscapes, we can think about the ways in which they interact and the demand for presence and reflection that profound environmental experiences can place upon us. 

Self-reflection is central to something psychologists call ‘self-regulation’, which is tied to psychological resilience and problem solving (Artuch-Garde et al., 2017). Reflection can thus be understood as something like a ‘meta-skill’ along the lines of Aristotle’s ‘practical wisdom’ (phronesis) (NE, Book IV). Knowing how to reflect on what we do improves overall psychological unity as we are more likely to be able to continuously adapt to challenges. One review shows that children who are more resilient possess greater self-regulation, which means that they are better able to manage their emotions and direct their thoughts towards academic success (Artuch-Garde et al., 2017). 

Research indicates various potential pathways towards “biopsychosocial” resilience (White et al., 2023). Cultivating one’s reflective practice happens within and alongside tools for reflection, which can learn and adopt for ourselves. However, having the requisite skills, experience, and knowledge for reflective practice does not guarantee reflection and implementation. Both internal and external conditions can present barriers to implementation and limit opportunities for reflection. Such conditions can include social inclusion, income status, diet, as well as mental and physical health. Crucially, environmental circumstances, such as access to greenspace may play a large part in overall well-being but are not always available and are often unavailable to some of the most vulnerable groups (Ingulli & Lindbloom, 2013; White et al., 2023). I would venture to claim that natural environments support resilience by providing opportunities for implicitly structured reflection as well as the obvious benefits of exercise. In any case, environmental experiences can put our lives into perspective, potentially enabling us to confront ourselves in new and interesting ways.

Literature regarding the “resilience potential” of outdoor education currently focuses on practical experiences that “challenge feelings of safety and competence” (Booth & Neill, 2017, p.48). The potential for environment-based reflection is thus typically characterised in terms of opportunities to develop coping strategies in response to stress (Ibid). Individuals witnessing their own ability to overcome adversity often gain transferable capacities for dealing with everyday challenges, such that outdoor education is overwhelmingly effective in promoting self-efficacy and mental wellbeing (Saribas, Teksoz & Ertepinar, 2014). Nature-based environmental education has also been shown to foster pro-environmental attitudes (Collado, Rosa, & Corraliza, 2020). Such outcomes are desirable in the wake of escalating ecological crises, while frameworks for contemplative development have yet to be explored. 

Environmental education, with respect to pro-environmental outcomes, could benefit from structured reflections that focus on more conceptual relationships with the environment. These can be axiological, reflecting on the ways in which we value nature. They can be phenomenological, concerning our experience of nature and the environment, and they can be ontological or metaphysical, regarding our ideas about what the natural environment is. A phenomenological approach to environmental reflection would be particularly useful for environmental education as it would begin with the ways in which we experience and relate to the world. Part of my project is thus to develop reflective tools that align with phenomenology.

Philosophy is replete with environmental metaphors that are more or less obvious in their function and reflective potential. For Edmund Husserl human subjectivity is fundamentally experienced in relation to a shifting ‘horizon’ of intentionality (Drummond, 2022). Our “life-world”, according to Husserl, consists in a ““world-horizon” of potential future experiences” (Beyer, 2010). By this, he means that we anticipate future “indexical” experiences by granting objects the identity that we experience of them over time (Ibid). Even though we usually see objects from one point of view, our assignment of objects to an indexical category X enables us to have any number of beliefs about the object that lie beyond our empirical horizon (Zahavi, 2003). When we change our perspective, the intentional horizon moves with it, while our categorical beliefs enable us to maintain the continuity of the objects we perceive. As such, Husserl holds that this “horizon-structure” is essential to human subjectivity and fundamentally concerns the transcendence of objective reality.  

One can apply Husserl’s phenomenology to environmental reflection. In contemplating a landscape, we  can encounter the role of the imagination in our experience of the world. We are hardwired, says Husserl, to reach beyond our empirical horizon in a pre-conscious act of implicit anticipation. This means that our imagination is at work behind the very scene of a landscape, generating higher-order beliefs and a sense of perceptual unity that grants the world its identity. Engaging with the environment really does mean engaging with our beliefs about it. A well-structured reflective practice should be able to bring those beliefs to the surface. The challenge appropriate to an environmental reflective practice, I think, is the apprehension and appreciation of a landscape for what it is in itself. This requires an understanding of what we bring to that experience.

Landscape apprehension may thus serve as a tool for reflection that aligns with the theory of reflective practice while also making room for thinking about philosophy. While I considered Husserl too advanced for a public /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop, the notion of a subjective horizon serves as a useful metaphor for introducing a core tenet of environmental philosophy – that of unearthing our presuppositions about the environment. In this respect, reflection, and particularly nature-based reflection bears structural similarities to philosophy. Through both, we can bring our implicit beliefs into view and begin to build better theories about how we relate to the world. 

Philosophy is very good at speculating about perceptual and cognitive scaffolds that shape our experience. According to Immanuel Kant, our beliefs are constrained by structures in the mind (1908). He observes that we are unable to imagine objects outside of space and time, which suggests that the concepts of space and time are ‘transcendental’ to the human subject. Attempting to imagine objects without endurance and spatiality readily shows that we are constrained in this way. Reality beyond those concepts is unknowable, and this demonstrates that we are subject to our own internal horizon. Through environmental metaphor, Kant bears relevance to environmental reflective practice and to our attempts to uncover the beliefs that structure our landscape appreciation. 

Descartes offers another potentially useful thought experiment. In his Meditations, he encourages the reader to imagine a ten sided shape, commenting that polygons become harder to imagine the more complex they become. Descartes notes that we can conceptualise about any number of sides a shape can have, yet we usually find it difficult to picture, within our minds, shapes with more than seven or eight sides. This simple thought experiment can also lead us to the mind’s ‘horizon’, whilst speaking to Descartes’ infamous dualism. Our ideas consist in an infinite substance, while the structures of our mind that deal with extension are constrained by extension’s discrete nature.   

The takeaway is that structures in the mind can determine who we are and how we experience the world. Certain experiences and thought experiments can put us into contact with the limits of our minds and present to us a subjective horizon of understanding. This can be very humbling as we recognise that our experience of landscape fundamentally involves us. On the very level of our perception, we play a formative role in the world as we know it. Paying attention to ourselves as we appreciate an environment can give us a sense of curiosity about whatever lies beyond our own internal horizon. When we think in such a way, then, I believe, do we truly appreciate an environment.   

On a final note, it is worth mentioning that horizons have a dual nature that speaks to the very dialectic of reflective practices. The subjective horizon represents the line between what is known and whatever lies beyond. Contemplating open landscapes, or complex natural environments, can open a space for a sustained dialogue within oneself, between thoughts, emotions, or whatever contents we bring to the experience. If we understand those contents as the contents of our subjective horizon, then we can begin to think about the possibilities that lie beyond them. Understanding how we structure our perception of the world gets us some of the way towards restructuring our perception, perhaps to be more accommodating to the world and to recalibrate our internal and external practices. 

Artuch-Garde, R., González-Torres, M. D. C., de La Fuente, J., Vera, M. M., Fernández-Cabezas, M., & López-García, M. (2017). Relationship between resilience and self-regulation: a study of Spanish youth at risk of social exclusion. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 612.

Asfeldt, M., & Stonehouse, P. (2021). On becoming a reflective practitioner. Outdoor environmental education in higher education: International perspectives, 337-348.

Beyer, C. (2010). Edmund Husserl. The Routledge Companion to nineteenth Century Philosophy (pp. 887-909). Routledge.

Booth, J. W., & Neill, J. T. (2017). Coping strategies and the development of psychological resilience. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 20, 47-54.

Collado, S., Rosa, C. D., & Corraliza, J. A. (2020). The effect of a nature-based environmental education program on children’s environmental attitudes and behaviors: A randomized experiment with primary schools. Sustainability, 12(17), 6817.

Drummond, J. J. (2022). Historical dictionary of Husserl's philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield.

Ekebergh, M. (2007). Lifeworld‐based reflection and learning: a contribution to the reflective practice in nursing and nursing education. Reflective practice, 8(3), 331-343.

Hartog, M. (2002). Becoming a reflective practitioner: a continuing professional development strategy through humanistic action research. Business Ethics: A European Review, 11(3), 233-243.  

Ingulli, K., & Lindbloom, G. (2013). Connection to nature and psychological resilience. Ecopsychology, 5(1), 52-55.

Jones, M. (2024). The nature and importance of reflection. In (Re) learning as Reflective Practitioners: Insights for Other Professions from Reflective Practice in Teacher Education (pp. 33-42). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Salafsky, N., Margoluis, R., & Redford, K. H. (2001). Adaptive management: a tool for conservation practitioners.

Saribas, D., Teksoz, G., & Ertepinar, H. (2014). The relationship between environmental literacy and self-efficacy beliefs toward environmental education. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 116, 3664-3668.

White, M. P., Hartig, T., Martin, L., Pahl, S., van den Berg, A. E., Wells, N. M., ... & van den Bosch, M. (2023). Nature-based biopsychosocial resilience: An integrative theoretical framework for research on nature and health. Environment International, 181, 108234.

Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford University Press.

The most relevant to reflective practice has been a seminar on the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s writing is often political and historically situated. He was an abolitionist who developed his own ideas about what it means to be an American within a context of western expansion and increasing industrialisation. More famously, Thoreau’s writing was environmentally concerned, inspired by encounters with nature, which he often made sense of through his classical education. He raised age-old questions about what it meant to live well as a human being and with respect to contemporary issues. Within the ecosystems of a recently colonised America, he found answers in the metaphors and principles suggested throughout his environment. Much of Thoreau’s work is thus the result of nature-based reflective practices. I will now examine Thoreau’s use of the environment as a tool for extended reflection and personal transformation. 

Throughout Walden, Thoreau is often explicit about his intention to engage emotionally and intellectually with the contents of his environmental experience. His reflection was driven by a desire to ensure that he was living life in the best way that he could, and to make sure that he was living his life at all. Thoreau intended to conclude his “mortal career” having sucked “out all the marrow of life” (2004, p.88; p.96, original italics). In trying to make the most of his reality, he developed an attitude towards facticity to which he attributed moral force. He sought “moral reform” but also  “went to the woods … to live deliberately, [according to] the essential facts of life” (Ibid, p.87; p.88). Thoreau valued a kind of attentiveness to the emotional and intellectual offerings of his environment, always reflecting on its normative potential with respect to his conduct. Attempting to join the is of life with his ought, Thoreau sought to reconcile his internal and external horizons.

I would argue that Walden’s most recurrent theme revolves around the reflective attitude of ‘being awake’, which is central to his investigations and to his prescription of the reader. Conceptually, ‘wakefulness’ extends beyond mere attention and empirical reduction to a kind of immediate, ‘whole person’ engagement with being-in-the-world. In Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Thoreau states his intent to “to wake my neighbours up” (Ibid, p.81). His call for wakefulness reflects his desire to cultivate a critical awareness of the world and his place within it. The metaphor of “morning”, which Thoreau presents repeatedly, captures his normative sense of attention towards ontic reality (Ibid, p.87). The awakened mind, he says, should be in a state of “perpetual morning” to which the world is always anew (Ibid). He describes ‘change’ as a “miracle” taking place in every instant, a supposedly humbling fact of life that we as readers should observe and account for (Ibid, p.11). “Reform is the effort to throw off sleep”, he says, to “learn to reawaken”, presumably from tradition, or ‘dogmatic slumber’, so that our lives be “worthy of contemplation” (Ibid, pp.87-88). 

Transience marks the first of nature’s features that Thoreau relates to moral development. He prescribes an openness to the world that echoes the world’s changeability, enabling more intimate and authentic observations about the nature of things. In Solitude, Thoreau says that “sympathy … with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath” (Ibid, p.122). He claims that such experiences offer value in the way of consolidation, encouragement and “friendship”, reflecting the intimacy he experiences in his appreciation of the ‘more-than-human’ (Ibid, p.127). An attitude of openness enabled Thoreau to witness and move with the transient features of his environment, an experience which he finds both liberating and revelatory, as the more permanent features of the world, such as the principle of change, are thrown into relief, contrasting with the more abstract nature of traditions and mental habits.  

Reflection in the sense of reflective practice doesn’t end with fleeting and insightful experiences, but with a substantial change. Change can nominally be achieved by updating one’s theoretical understanding in response to one’s reflective experience. For Thoreau, who insisted on ‘bringing something back’ from his experiences, writing is a key stage in the reflective cycle. He views composition as part of our duty to “express the meaning of Nature” within our lives (Ibid, p.122). One who aspires to do so, he says, commits to the “poetic or divine life” (Ibid, p.87). 

Thoreau held that the attentive wakefulness such a life requires defines what it means to be alive, to be engaged with one’s life as such (Ibid). Thoreau believes that reflection can enable us to alter the very terms on which we experience the world. We can “affect the quality of the day”, he says, by carving and painting “the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” (Ibid, p.88). 

Environmental experiences can thus extend into our everyday lives in such a way that makes them continuous. Of his relationship with Mount Washington, Thoreau writes that “it is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever” (Letters to Harrison Blake, 33). Here, he suggests that reflection completes experience. Having returned from his climb, he asks “what did the mountain say?”, and “what did the mountain do?” (Ibid). Raising such questions about how things seem to us can integrate the environment into our lives so that substantial changes in perspective and one’s ways of life can begin to take place.

By maintaining critical awareness of his experience, Thoreau encounters a kind of ‘something more’, beyond traditional frameworks. He notes that environmental engagement needn’t follow merely walking or climbing, but that one must proactively attain new vantage points from which one can gain perspective. He argues that truly walking has to do with getting ‘somewhere else’ in the most complete sense. The mind as well as the body must travel until one finds an “absolutely new prospect”, away from the “village” (2013, p.248). It is possible, he argues, to saunter for hours with ever shaking off one’s obligations to society (Ibid). If we are to be “exercised in our minds”, Thoreau suggests that we should leave our “harness” in the stable, to undergo the internal change required of us in our appreciation of landscapes as they are in themselves (Ibid, p.247; p.274) 

Proper engagement with an environment has to do with whole person engagement, such that reflective practice begins with challenges appropriate to the embodied mind. Thoreau demonstrates that this can begin with an attentive attitude, a state of openness that reflects the open-endedness of the world. Gaining critical perspective can then allow us to untangle the assumptions we take for granted. In the examples above, Thoreau observes the transience of nature, which he employs as a foil against traditions normally viewed as fixed. Having experienced a potential challenge or foil, one can then learn from it by formulating and integrating the insights one has gained. As I have explored above, Thoreau is explicit about the implications of long term attitudinal shifts derived from environmental experience, with respect to making our lives worthwhile. “We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character” (2004, p.201).  

The putative moral dimensions of environmental experience arise again within contemporary aesthetics. In much the way that Thoreau viewed facts about nature as morally salient, as making a claim on our attention and conduct, Allen Carlson has argued that facts about a natural environment can tell us something about how to appreciate landscapes aesthetically. Carlson posits that proper appreciation requires an understanding of the fact that environments are the “setting in which we exist as a sentient part” (2004, p.69). In other words, we play an active role in the environment we are appreciating. He also argues that one must appreciate one’s natural environment as an “obtrusive foreground” of transitory sensations given by one’s perception of natural things (Ibid, p.70). Understanding that landscapes are not a passive background, and that we are intimately involved with them, opens a way towards thinking about how to properly appreciate and reflect upon them.

Carlson emphasises that natural environments consist in nonartificial entities. This means that nature lacks the standard foci of appreciation that we might associate with a work of art. Thus, we are forced to inquire about the nature of natural environments, which fundamentally lacks the boundaries granted by artificial objects. Artefacts, in contrast, present their own conditions for appreciation according to the terms by which they are produced and engaged with. 

One could appreciate and distinguish between the relevant techniques behind an art piece, as well as its form, execution, or social and technical significance (Lopes, 2018). Carlson notes that the treatment of natural environments merely in terms of their visual properties encourages the appreciation of “nature as if it were a landscape painting” (2004, p.67). But nature is no art piece, nor is it passive scenery. It entails a kind of “mutual involvement”, between spectators and objects, in which subjects experience themselves “in an unusual or vivid way” (Hepburn, 2004, p.45). Ronald Hepburn suggests that aspects of the natural environment can modify our sense of subjectivity (Ibid). The hang glider, for example, experiences a feeling of buoyancy as the air keeps her aloft. One could also imagine an experience in which one’s sense of temporality is taken over by the swaying of trees in the wind, or by the pace of the life of the forest.

In any case, understanding natural environments as places in which we are intimately involved is key to their aesthetic appreciation. Our very subjectivity is shaped by place and all the sensations that occur from our perception of it. While technical objects offer normative boundaries for their appreciation, nature presents am aesthetic puzzle: how to determine the boundaries of environmental appreciation once the intimate nature of environmental experience is determined. 

Kendall Walton argues that aesthetic objects, at least of an artifactual nature, belong to categories that determine their standard, contra-standard, and variable features (2017). Standard features qualify an object’s membership of a category, which contra-standard features disqualify, while variable features consist in the variable aesthetic properties of an object within its category. Artists can alter their use of colour, line, and shade within a painting, for example, without threatening the category of their work as a painting. Critiquing an abstract painting in terms of the standards one might associate with a photograph, for example, would be absurd. One would violate the normative demands given by the category of the work. Carlson also argues that appreciating an architectural object in terms of its superficial form would fail to account for its social nature. Buildings have certain functions and are constructed according to social forces. While a work of art can be appreciated in terms of its productive technique, architecture should be regarded in terms of its cultural production as well as its surface aesthetic features. Failing to do so, for Carlson, would be “morally irresponsible” and aesthetically dubious, given that structures can be formed by objectionable forces and values (2007, p.55). 

Apprehending the category of aesthetic objects clearly enables us to bracket relevant features for consideration and appreciation in a morally and aesthetically appropriate way. For artifactual objects, the techniques associated with their production help us to value them on their own terms. Built environments further demand an appreciation of their social significance. Causal history thus emerges as a common source of criterion for technical objects in general. Carlson suggests that the same must then apply to natural environments, such that knowledge about them can help us to aesthetically evaluate our experience in terms of the natural objects we are experiencing. 

For environmental appreciation, we must first acknowledge our natural environments as intimate foregrounds for subjective experience. Our experience becomes determinate, however, through the ‘consummate’ application of knowledge. The smells of hay and horse dung, the “sound of cicadas and of the distant traffic, all force themselves upon us”, yet we distinguish one sensation from the other through the application of categories that we have acquired through learning (2004, p.71). Carlson therefore argues that scientific as well as ‘common sense’ knowledge can contribute to the depth and harmony of environmental experience by enabling us to ‘sort out’ sense data. 

One could argue that while categorical knowledge itself is abstract, we can find ourselves directly experiencing some aspect of whatever our knowledge is about. We may learn a common or scientific name for a plant and begin to notice it where we hadn’t before, perhaps experiencing it literally in relation to its genera. Knowledge about that plant could further introduce value to our experience by enabling us, for example, to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy specimens. However, we may come about them, natural facts can sharpen our valuative experiences by providing us with cognitive resources. We can enrich our experience of the environment, and potentially deepen our reflections about it, through learning and attention.

Carlson’s model of landscape appreciation can help us to inform an environmentally reflective practice because both require, in a Husserlian kind-of-way, an appreciation of the active role that our beliefs play in our experiences. Carlson shows that appreciating an environment for what it is begins with holding beliefs appropriate to that environment. First, we should understand that an environment is not a background landscape and that our experience of it is not value neutral. An environmental reflective practice will thus seek to understand how our beliefs shape the experience of value in each environment and how we can more appropriately respect an environment’s indexical contents. Viewing a forest as purely as a resource would forgo the experience of a forest as a living system and a home to innumerable plants and animals. Reflectively appreciating an environment means confronting the ways we value it and asking if we value it for what it is, more completely, in itself.

If Carlson is correct, then it is possible to value things unsoundly if our beliefs are either inappropriate to or insufficient for the object of our appreciation. This implies that value is at least partly subordinate to knowledge and that moral competence is somewhat determined by epistemic competence. Philosophers Thomas Birch and Henry Bugbee may agree that knowledge can be commensurate with our valuative experiences while also arguing that value is an irreducible feature of immediate experience. Thomas Birch argues that considering the world properly, through “a deep practice of consideration”, involves the appreciation of a universal positive value (1990, p.324). Considering the meaning or moral value of anything, he claims, first involves the attribution of this kind of value. He suggests that ‘considering universally’ is precisely what enables us to determine an “ethical obligation or some other sort of practical necessity” (Ibid, p.323). Being compelled to consider something is part of what he calls the “deontic urge” (Ibid, p.327). 

For Birch, deontic experiences shows that valuative engagement is part and parcel of ‘coming to know about’ the world, and of wanting to engage with it in the first place. Moral agents may sometimes inherit ethical rules and act them out, perhaps unreflectively. Such rules are often “defeasible, not always relevant, and [are] contingent on historical and cultural location” (Ibid, p.329). Engaging in pre-evaluative valuation, on the other hand, can open us up to potentially new areas of authentic concern. So, while we might discover new obligations through practical deliberation, we will only do so if we first attribute prima facie moral value to everything. 

However, ‘universal consideration’ does not settle questions of normativity, meaning that Birch crucially leaves room for the Carlsonian possibility that there are correct and incorrect ways to value. Values which in part derive from knowledge seem to count as second-order, while ‘deep consideration’ is bound up with a kind of first-order valuing. This division can be understood as corresponding to the universal and the, respectively. The former concerns a level of conceptual indifference or generality to which objects are “substitutable for one another insofar as they exemplify the relevance of a concept” (Bugbee, 1958, p.161). For Carlson objects are always at least partly subsumed under abstract universal categories suited to their appreciation. 

First-order valuing, however, concerns “the specificity of the specimen” in concrete experience, a kind of liberating experience in which one sees the nature of an object in its singular existence (Ibid). In his Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee notes that “one’s characterisation of something” can radically shift one’s “mode of appreciation of it” (Ibid). He argues that being “thoroughly specific” about an object, on the other hand, can lead us to an experience of it as concrete and particular (Ibid). Generalities draw us away from the actual “reality of things”, which is composed of objects that are ultimately final in themselves (Ibid, p.162). Following Bugbee, Birch can be understood as prescribing attention to particularity as a way of counterbalancing the potential failures and blind spots of abstract and historically contingent ethics (1993). 

Birch claims that our obligations are not clearly generalisable, meaning that proper moral attention should involve the deep consideration of particulars in each case (Ibid). Carlson’s model of aesthetic appreciation, however, shows that universals correspond to second-order values that help us to maintain a level of coherence over our valuative activities. Both kinds of valuing thus require one another insofar as second-order valuing depends on the particular standard, contra-standard, and variable features of an object, while first-order valuing gives us access to basic universal values. This way, we can appreciate an object in terms of what it is and in relation to the categories it belongs to. 

Bugbee argues that first-order valuing anchors our philosophy in the concrete, philosophy which must begin with a sense of “wonder” at the deep universal value we encounter in our most intimate experience of the world (Ibid, p.162). That first-order valuing presupposes a kind of “listening”, or openness, in which things “stand forth” (Bugbee 1958, p.163; Bugbee 1974, p.616). The attentiveness of which Bugbee speaks, wherein significance appears to us, sounds a lot like Thoreau’s “perpetual morning” and may have a part to play in the reflective process (2004, p.87). 

Thoreau and Bugbee are undoubtedly linked, as Thoreau can be seen trying to trace the dialectic between reflective and theoretical understanding, prescribing a liberative ‘wakefulness’ that can prepare us for further deliberation. Recall that Thoreau’s ‘morning’ models the transience of the world. This is precisely what Bugbee means when he claims that the wild “may lie closer to the whence of speaking” than we often suppose (Bugbee 1974, p.616). Our listening, or openness, can serve as a conduit to the singular presence of things that can call our abstract beliefs into question.

For this reason, Birch considers the deontic experience essential for environmental progress. If individuals can learn to recognise environmental value in concrete experience, then we are more likely to reconsider our beliefs in light of our profoundly specific experiences. Individuals may commit to important debates about conservation, conduct, consumerism, ecosystems, and resources. Birch’s point, and indeed the point of reflective practice is to be awake to the world and the ways it can exceed our theoretical understandings and expectations. Only then can we begin to understand the relevance of our knowledge, our desires, and inherited ethical frameworks. 

Bugbee, Birch, and Thoreau implore us to develop a kind of presence to the world that can enable us to solve problems and to begin forging deeper relationships with ourselves and our environment. Opening oneself up to new information, and perhaps to the experience of new values, is the first step towards reflective practice. Answering questions about whether one lives one’s life well requires something to compare one’s life to. Dwelling within the cultural framework, past experiences and expectations, one may never know any different. By paying close attention to things in themselves, and perhaps one’s immediate experience of a landscape, one can find a way towards a confounding, an opportunity to gain perspective and to learn something radically new. 

Carlson, Husserl, and even Kant, have shown us that beliefs perform an essential role in our experience. The point of the radical attentiveness prescribed by the others is not to dispense of structuring beliefs altogether but to open them up to particularities, nuances, and the possibility of radical behavioural change. Concrete experience can unsettle our presuppositions whilst being simultaneously instructive. Through reflective practice, we can adapt our understanding to changing circumstances and demands, by being radically open to recognising the ways in which significance appears to us. In one way, it can appear relative to the categories of our knowledge, belief, and understanding. In another, significance can occur as a property of the felt finality of things in themselves. Reflecting constructively upon the universals and particulars of our experience is how we improve our practice, which consists in the ways we relate, act, and understand. 

Birch, T. H. (1993). Moral considerability and universal consideration. Environmental ethics, 15(4), 313-332.

Bugbee, H. G. (1974). The inward morning: A philosophical exploration in journal form. University of Georgia Press.

Carlson, A. (2004). Appreciation and the natural environment. The aesthetics of natural environments.

Carlson, A. (2007). On aesthetically appreciating human environments. The aesthetics of human environments.

Hepburn, R. (2004). Contemporary aesthetics and the neglect of natural beauty. British analytical philosophy, 285-310.

Lopes, D. M. (2018). Being for beauty: Aesthetic agency and value. Oxford University Press.

Thoreau, H. D. (2004). Walden: a fully annotated edition. Yale University Press.

Thoreau, H. D. (2013). Essays: a fully annotated edition. Yale University Press.

Walton, K. L. (2017). Categories of art. Aesthetics (pp. 506-511). Routledge.

Theorists of reflective practice have noted the role of poetry and songwriting in thinking constructively about one’s experiences. Being a folk musician and songwriter, I found an opportunity to develop this potential overlap between my academic and artistic life. Readers should feel free to adopt this songwriting model if they wish and to adapt it as they see fit. 

On April 14th of this year, I successfully facilitated a ‘Nature Songwriting Workshop’ inspired by my emerging approach to environmental reflection. The programme consisted of four parts. The first involved my introduction: setting the scene, explaining the meaning of reflective practice, and engaging participants in a round. Encouraging attendees to sing together prepared them for collaboration later in the /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop.

Next, I opened up a discussion about our different approaches to songwriting and offered randomly selected prompts from which they could build a song or poem. Each received a slip of paper with a line from a famous nature-inspired song or poem, including the work of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and even Robbie Basho. I encouraged participants to ask themselves how the prompt made them feel and to develop those feelings and ideas into lyrical imagery. My rationale was to demonstrate how constructive engagement can take place in response to nature-based or nature-inspired stimuli. We shared what we had written.

Third, I asked participants to imagine a melody and to present it if they felt comfortable. Several attendees had guitars, and many felt comfortable sharing their melodies. The final stage of my /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop required participants to team up and build a song using the lines and melodies that they had written so far. Over half an hour, attendees brought their ideas together and were ready to perform their collaborative compositions. The /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop ended with a successful showcase of beautiful, thoughtful pieces about nature. 

I intended to encourage theoretical engagement with our experiences of nature, and to lead the group towards an understanding of the conceptual challenges posed by the relationship between our internal lives and the environment. This was achieved through a semi-structured discussion in which participants were encouraged to describe aspects of their environmental experience. The /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop was divided into three main sections beginning with the question of how we, as individuals, are changed by certain environments. Attendees offered a variety of stories about how their emotions were affected differently depending on their environment.

My second question was more constructive, asking how participants would conceive of their own internal landscape. I offered slips of paper and pencils with which individuals could imagine their emotional lives as a kind of topography. I suggested using geographical metaphors to create a ‘mind map’ of the things that matter most to them. Participants were also welcome to demonstrate the connections between their values in whichever way they saw fit. I suggested that environmental reflection could entail the contemplation of our internal horizons. Asking ourselves how an environment makes us feel gives us an opportunity to encounter the values, beliefs, and whatever else we bring to that experience.

Finally, I presented the possibility that the environmental crisis can be understood as an asymmetry between our internal and external horizons, ending the /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop on a discussion of the various ways in which our internal landscape can shape the external world as well as vice versa. 

Between each discussion, I offered simplified philosophical tools for thinking about horizons and landscapes. To open the /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop, I discussed the meaning of reflective practice and suggested that it may have a role in confronting the environmental crisis, because the latter seems to raise questions about who we are and how we relate to the world. I offered a story about my own life and the ways in which landscape appreciation has helped me to grow as a person. This opened a space for the first phase of discussion.

After examining the role of external horizons in shaping our lives, I presented Edmund Husserl’s concept of the ‘subjective horizon’. For Husserl, the human subject is always situated by and within a horizon that consists in a series of ‘high-order beliefs’. He suggests that our beliefs enable us to move through the world while maintaining a sense of continuity as our perspective shifts relative to the objects of our attention.

The suggestion that beliefs are always actively shaping our experience opened an opportunity to explore Kant’s transcendental deduction. Kant holds that the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘time’ structure our beliefs a priori, such that we are unable to think or perceive without them. Structures in the mind thus guarantee that our experience of a landscape is never ‘pure’ or ‘direct’, but involves encounters with our own (sometimes implicit) beliefs about the world. Doing philosophy, and indeed reflective practice, means bringing those beliefs to the surface.

At this point, participants were invited to think about their own ‘internal landscape’ and the ways in which their personal horizons are shaped by beliefs and experiences. The /student-projects/2025/matthew-jack-biley/workshop closed with the suggestion that the environmental crisis has something to do with the interplay between our internal and external horizons, and that reflective practice can help us make sense of and potentially alter the beliefs and values that shape our experience of the landscape.