Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. It highlights three vantages on what it means to value nature on an aesthetic basis – philosophies of environmental aesthetics, aesthetic theories for the visual arts, and practices of international environmental law. It provides an outline of the book over the eight chapters, explaining how the different vantages on nature’s aesthetic value inform the analysis of photographic images in the book’s case studies of the World Heritage Convention, the Whaling Convention and the Biodiversity Convention. An overview of the international materials examined, and the visual art analysed, is provided. Here, particular mention is made of the book’s use of the rules and documentation of the decision-making processes of the World Heritage Committee, the International Court of Justice, and the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention. In a final section, the scholarly theories that inform the book’s methods of analysis are introduced. This includes discussion of academic literature on law and image, sometimes called visual jurisprudence, and debates among philosophers of environmental aesthetics and theorists of visual art.

The Biodiversity Convention, expressly protecting aesthetic value as one of several biodiversity values listed in its preamble, is the last of the three treaties examined for the book. Chapter 7 revisits meanings of the aesthetic value of biodiversity developed earlier, with doctrinal approaches to treaty interpretation, to develop an aesthetic account of the photographs used in the fourth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook – a report that was prepared at the direction of the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention to assess progress towards the Aichi Targets. The chapter’s aesthetic analysis of the photographs suggests fragmented meanings of aesthetic value as scenic beauty, wilderness, culture and subsistence, leaving valuations of biodiversity on observable economic grounds to prevail. The chapter argues that a critical analysis of the photographs can articulate pluralised appreciations of biodiversity in terms distinct from economic gains. Such insights could serve the protection of the range of biodiversity values identified in the Aichi Targets as fundamental to implementing the Biodiversity Convention in ways relevant to future work of the parties.

No international legal judgment has determined the meaning of the environment’s aesthetic value. But many officials interpret words for international law, including those that must negotiate and administer treaties. Chapter 3 looks to such instances of interpretation as it analyses the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ value in accordance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. It considers the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ value as an express term of the conventions on world heritage and biodiversity, and as a term informing the interpretation of the Whaling Convention. Applying doctrinal techniques of treaty interpretation, the chapter argues for understandings of aesthetic value theorised among philosophers of environmental aesthetics. However, the practice of treaty bodies suggests interpretations of aesthetic value that are conflated with natural beauty, cultural value and ethical concerns. The chapter observes that orthodox sources for treaty interpretation are written documents and argues that an examination of visual sources should also be entertained. Images, such as photographs, could provide a rich account of the environment’s aesthetic value in international legal practice.