This book focuses on the politics of street trees and the institutions, actors and processes that govern their planning, planting and maintenance. This is an innovative approach which is particularly important in the context of mounting environmental and societal challenges and reveals a huge amount about the nature of modern life, social change and political conflict. The work first provides different historical perspectives on street trees and politics, celebrating diversity in different cultures. A second section discusses street tree values, policy and management, addressing more contemporary issues of their significance and contribution to our environment, both physically and philosophically. It explores cultural idiosyncrasies and those from the point of view of political economy, particularly challenging the neo-liberal perspectives that continue to dominate political narratives. The final section provides case studies of community engagement, civil action and governance. International case studies bring together contrasting approaches in areas with diverging political directions or intentions, the constraints of laws and the importance of people power. By pursuing an interdisciplinary approach this book produces an information base for academics, practitioners, politicians and activists alike, thus contributing to a fairer political debate that helps to promote more democratic environments that are sustainable, equitable, comfortable and healthier.
The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie offers the first collected, scholarly edition of poetical writings of one of the most celebrated women writers of the early nineteenth century. It brings together poems from a variety of sources, including three volumes of poetry assembled by the author, annual anthologies, periodicals, songs, manuscripts, fictional tales, broad sheets, separately published pamphlets, and unpublished private correspondence. The poems included cover the entire range of Opie's long career, starting with her earliest surviving works from the 1790s and extending through her last poems in 1850. The arrangement proposed for this edition gives an overall sense of Opie's development from her early experiments with short lyrics appearing in The Annual Anthology, The Cabinet, and The European Magazine to her first large-scale success with Poems and the publication of a number of song lyrics, to the longer narrative poems in The Warrior's Return to the final phase of her publishing life after officially joining the Quakers in 1825 - the appearance of Lays for the Dead, a sequence of elegies for both private and public figures. Until now, Opie has been known primarily through a few frequently anthologized poems focusing on her response to the war with France and her support of the abolition movement. The Collected Poems offers the opportunity to explore more fully the contribution made to literary culture in the period by a woman who throughout her life used poetry as the basis of affective connection with her world.