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.

My essay utilizes a comparative interdisciplinary approach to read William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) alongside paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by George Robertson. The essay considers how Caribbean people see their landscape, but more crucially how that seeing has been shaped by visual and scribal pre-texts. As Helen Tiffin argues, Caribbean people’s relation to their landscape is linked ‘with histories of transplantation, slavery and colonialism’ but also with our assimilation of ‘imported European traditions of land and landscape perception and representation’. How we see the Caribbean landscape now is largely determined by earlier ways of seeing which constructed tropical colonies. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I argue that ‘imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics’ in Beckford’s text are reinforced by the images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.

The representation of nature is central to Wagner’s Ring cycle on a number of levels.  The Nordic-mythic sources and setting, the role of original or partially re-invented nature deities (Erda, Donner, and Froh, and the three Rhinemaidens) or semi-divine beings linked to the natural world (Valkyries, Norns) inspired a range of sophisticated Romantic musical nature “painting” throughout the score, including some of the best-known passages. Classical-Romantic traditions of pastoral or other imitative nature topics in music of the Classical and Romantic eras play an important role in the development of the network of leitmotifs in the Ring cycle. Readings of the Ring as an allegorical critique of modern industrial capitalism connect the traditional mythography of a lost golden age with a potential parable of environmental degradation driven by the loveless, reckless profit motive of modern capitalism. Alberich’s forging of the Ring from the Rhinegold and Wotan’s violation of the World Ash Tree to create the symbol of his divine legal authority (his spear) project parallel symbols of the transgression of a natural order. Mythographic vs. modern environmental readings of the apocalyptic conclusion of the cycle are also discussed.