Melbourne Law School - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemAesthetics of Image in International Environmental Law( 2020)Environmental treaties often require judgements of aesthetic value yet how these judgements are made is not well understood. This thesis argues that images, particularly photographic images, are central to such judgements but that neither current practice nor scholarship properly account for the significance of images to decisions made under international law. Drawing on debates about aesthetic conceptions of the environment in the visual arts, and in the philosophy of environmental aesthetics, this thesis develops a critical understanding of image and aesthetic value in international law. My aim is to produce a jurisprudence of aesthetics adequate to the task of making image and aesthetic value meaningful in international environmental law. In the thesis, I undertake doctrinal interpretations of aesthetic value for three international environmental treaties – the World Heritage Convention, the Whaling Convention, and the Biodiversity Convention. I find that aesthetic value is conflated and displaced with other environmental values in treaty practice. Aesthetic value is, for example, combined with natural beauty, cultural and ethical values, and overlooked in favour of scientific and economic values of the environment. I consider these practices to compromise reasoned decision-making and, ultimately, the protection of the environment under those treaties. Referencing Anglo-American aesthetic philosophy, I engage visual art to reflect critically on the meaning of aesthetic value from photographs of the environment that I identify as artefacts used in treaty decision-making processes. I employ eco-critical perspectives to examine aesthetic values of natural beauty, the sublime and the picturesque in 19th century landscape art of Western Europe and Britain. Relying on the philosophy of environmental aesthetics, I conceive aesthetic value instead in terms of sensorial experiences of nature shaped by imagination, emotion and knowledge from different cultures. I maintain that this ‘now world’ aesthetic value of the environment can be understood from photographs as important, distinct and capable of protection in international law. I contend that the interrogation of images by international bodies would facilitate the proper judgement of aesthetic and other environmental values to justify the cooperative efforts of a plurality of states in environmental protection. Yet I find that photographs are treated as records of fact in international decision-making processes. They are not formally recognised as representations with layered meanings. To ignore or refuse the place of representational images in international law is improper in jurisprudential terms and inconsistent with the good administration of justice. It also denies international legal practice the concepts and methods required to exploit images for their rhetorical purchase. I conclude that aesthetic methods for the visual arts must be repurposed to articulate meanings for images in the making, implementation and enforcement of international law. In giving close attention to photographs used in treaty decision-making processes, I introduce the philosophy of environmental aesthetics to the interdisciplinary study of law and image, expanding the role of images in international law. I also make the environment’s aesthetic value visible to the practice of international environmental law in the face of indifference, from so many nation states, to the precious nature of the planet.