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This chapter argues for the need for everyday aesthetics for pragmatic reasons by taking the environmental ramifications of our everyday aesthetic tastes and decisions as an example. We make aesthetic judgments, positive or negative, on natural creatures, landscapes, built environments, and consumer goods, which determine our attitude and subsequent actions regarding them. The consequences of such judgments and actions are often environmentally unsound, though we are seldom aware of them. In addition to raising consciousness about the environmental impact of our actions, our everyday aesthetics must be guided toward environmentally sound ends because of the power of our aesthetic judgments to influence, and sometimes determine, our actions. By reviewing an example of utilizing the power of the aesthetic toward a social agenda, such as 19th-century American landscape aesthetics promotion of national identity and pride, the specific tenets of green aesthetics, as well as strategies to avoid, are outlined.

We normally react to manifestations of aging and different degrees of cleanliness and organization by cleaning, organizing, restoring, or discarding. These familiar reactions are rather complex, presupposing various conceptual considerations, including functionality, context, and personal relationship to the object. The appreciation of aged, messy, or defective appearance was encouraged by the British picturesque movement with its cult of ruins, Japanese wabi aesthetics underlie the tea ceremony, and rebellion against modernist aesthetics reveals a tension between our desire for control over life and the wisdom of submitting to its transient and other uncontrollable aspects. It also creates another tension: to decontextualize those qualities ordinarily depreciated to illuminate their positive aesthetic potential, while analyzing our common reactions to them in the ordinary context. Finally, the discussion highlights the danger of utilizing the power of the aesthetic through aestheticizing the social status quo and transience of life by taking examples from Japanese history.

Several issues emerge from exploring everyday aesthetics. First, its normative mission to illuminate the hidden aesthetic potential of the ordinary may conflict with its descriptive role in analyzing our ordinary aesthetic reaction toward the ordinary. Second, while everyday aesthetics questions our tendency to judge some thing/body by the cover, it cannot dismiss this familiar phenomenon. Third, in fully acknowledging and appreciating the power of the aesthetic for guiding our attitudes and actions, we must be vigilant about utilizing this power toward a certain end, which can range from green aesthetics to the political nationalism promoted in modern Japan. Finally, some contemporary artists' attempt to overcome the gap between art and life by emulating or appropriating the everyday may be fraught with paradoxes created by the inescapable predicament of arthood that stands out from the everyday. These tensions reinforce the point that everyday aesthetics are quite complex, worthy of further exploration.

Despite the charge of triviality and insignificance, everyday aesthetics has a surprisingly powerful impact on the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. From popular attraction to certain natural creatures, landscapes, and fashionable consumer goods to rejection of ‘inglorious’ fresh produce and landscaping with indigenous plants, this power of everyday aesthetics leads to environmental consequences, promotes nationalism, and exacerbates rampant consumerism. Aesthetics is also a vehicle through which to express moral virtues or lack thereof, such as respect, thoughtfulness, and care toward the other, whether it be an object or a human being. By exploring these examples, this chapter demonstrates how everyday aesthetics makes a significant contribution to humanity’s collective, cumulative, and ongoing project of world-making.