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.

Chapter 2 contemplates the environment’s ‘aesthetic’ value from philosophical perspectives. It outlines themes in the philosophy of environmental aesthetics, paying particular attention to Emily Brady’s integrated theory of environmental aesthetics. Brady attempts to marry subjective elements of aesthetic value – sensory, imaginative and emotional responses shaped by different cultures – with an objective ‘disinterest’ that permits comparisons for the purposes of environmental policy. The chapter then examines international legal scholarship on ‘aesthetic’ value as a term of international environmental treaties. Often framed by environmental ethics, the aesthetic value described by these scholars is one of several motivating states in their international agreement to protect the environment. This literature typically associates aesthetic value with natural beauty in ways rejected in the philosophy of environmental aesthetics as privileging only visual appreciations of nature, and critiqued as an Anglo-American ideal. The chapter argues that understandings of aesthetic value in international environmental law should be informed by philosophies of environmental aesthetics.

The final chapter 8 considers the implications of an aesthetic analysis of images for international legal practice. International bodies making decisions under the three treaties examined in the book conflate and displace aesthetic value in favour of other environmental values, risking the integrity of their decisions and, ultimately, the protection of the environment for its aesthetic value under international environmental law. Photographs could be formally acknowledged for their relevance to the interpretation of the treaties and used in decision-making processes to conceive aesthetic appreciation of the environment in ways important for all nation states. They can encapsulate a sensorial experience of the natural environment shaped by imagination, emotion and knowledge from different cultures. But a critical analysis of such images is also important to distinguish aesthetic value from other environmental values such as natural beauty, cultural value and ethical value. An accommodation of aesthetic concepts and methods to develop meanings from images for the interpretation of international environmental treaties could also be taken up for other fields of international law.