This book presents a fascinating analysis of expertise and policy formation, based on an in-depth study of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. The Commission provided expert advice to governments from 1970 to 2011. Often portrayed as a 'scientific body', it was in fact an interesting hybrid, which embodied wide-ranging expertise. It delivered thirty-three reports, leaving a significant mark on British environmental policy, and having influence within Europe and beyond. Drawing upon an extensive literature and a wide range of sources, Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise provides the only full account of this important advisory body, covering a period in which the policy landscape was profoundly transformed. It offers a rich and detailed analysis of authority, autonomy, and trust; of the diverse roles that advisors can play and the networks within which they operate; and of the 'circumstances of influence' in which expert advice comes to be accepted gratefully, used strategically, absorbed in diffuse ways, or ignored. Above all, this book demonstrates the complexity and contingency of knowledge-policy relations, contributing substantially to a theory of expertise, and drawing out important implications for the future of 'good advice'.

Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise: The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

Science & Math

Owens, Susan

Earth Sciences

Oxford University Press

From the fifteenth century onwards, as European explorers sailed forth on grand voyages of discovery, their encounters with exotic plants and animals fanned intense scientific interest. Scholars began to examine nature with fresh eyes, and pioneering artists transformed the way nature was seen and understood. In Amazing Rare Things, renowned naturalist and documentary-maker David Attenborough joins with expert colleagues to explore how artists portrayed the natural world during this era of burgeoning scientific interest.
The book focuses on an exquisite selection of natural history drawings and watercolors by Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Mark Catesby, and from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzoworks all held in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Attenborough and his coauthors offer lucid commentary on topics ranging from the 30,000-year history of human drawings of the natural world, to Leonardo’s fascination with natural processes, to Catesby’s groundbreaking studies that introduced Europeans to the plants and animals of North America. With 160 full color illustrations, this beautiful book will appeal to readers with interests that extend from art and science to history and nature.

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery

Clayton, Martin

ATTENBOROUGH, DAVID

Alexandratos, Rea

History & Philosophy

Yale University Press

A gorgeously illustrated volume devoted to the natural history drawings and watercolors of Leonardo da Vinci and other outstanding artists of the Age of Discovery From the fifteenth century onwards, as European explorers sailed forth on grand voyages of discovery, their encounters with exotic plants and animals fanned intense scientific interest. Scholars began to examine nature with fresh eyes, and pioneering artists transformed the way nature was seen and understood. In Amazing Rare Things, renowned naturalist and documentary-maker David Attenborough joins with expert colleagues to explore how artists portrayed the natural world during this era of burgeoning scientific interest. The book focuses on an exquisite selection of natural history drawings and watercolors by Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Mark Catesby, and from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo—works all held in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Attenborough and his coauthors offer lucid commentary on topics ranging from the 30,000-year history of human drawings of the natural world, to Leonardo’s fascination with natural processes, to Catesby’s groundbreaking studies that introduced Europeans to the plants and animals of North America. With 160 full color illustrations, this beautiful book will appeal to readers with interests that extend from art and science to history and nature.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

The first art book to explore Rossetti's art and poetry together, including her own artworks, illustrations to her writing, and art inspired by her Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) is among the greatest of English Victorian poets. The intensity of her vision, her colloquial style, and the lyrical quality of her verse still speak powerfully to us today, while her striking imagery has always inspired artists. Rossetti lived in an exceptionally visual environment: her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the leading member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and she became a favorite model for the group. She sat for the face of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, while both John Everett Millais and Frederick Sandys illustrated her poetry. Later on, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the great Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff were inspired by Rossetti’s enigmatic verses. This engaging book explores the full artistic context of Rossetti’s life and poetry: her own complicated attitude to pictures; the many portraits of her by artists, including her brother, John Brett, and Lewis Carroll; her own intriguing and virtually unknown drawings; and the wealth of visual images inspired by her words.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art

Tromans, Nicholas

In a new and critical analysis, this book explores the impact of an influential idea - sustainable development - on the institutions and practices governing use of land. It examines the paradox that in spite of increasing attention to sustainability, land use conflict is as ubiquitous and intense as ever.

Land and Limits: Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process (Routledge Research Global Environmental Change Series, 7.)

Cowell, Richard

Reference

Routledge

Land and Limits: Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process (RTPI Library Series)

The first edition of this seminal book was written at a time of rapidly growing interest in the potential for land use planning to deliver sustainable development, and explored the connections between the two and implications for public policy. In the decade since the book was first conceived, environmental imperatives have risen still further up the policial agenda and land use conflicts have intensified, lending even greater importance to the authors' research. In a rigorous discussion of concepts, policy instruments and contemporary planning dilemmas, the authors challenge prevailing assumptions about planning for sustainability. After charting the remarkable growth in expectations of planning, they show how attempts to interpret sustainability must lead to fundamental moral and political choices.

Imagining England's Past takes a long look at the country's invented histories, from the glamorous to the disturbing, from the eighth century to the present day. England has long built its sense of self on visions of its past. What does it mean for medieval writers to summon King Arthur from the post-Roman fog; for William Morris to resurrect the skills of the medieval workshop and Julia Margaret Cameron to portray the Arthurian court with her Victorian camera; or for Yinka Shonibare in the final years of the twentieth century to visualize a Black Victorian dandy? By exploring the imaginations of successive generations, this book reveals how diverse notions of the past have inspired literature, art, music, architecture and fashion. It shines a light on subjects from myths to mock-Tudor houses, Stonehenge to steampunk, and asks how - and why - the past continues so powerfully to shape the present. Not a history of England, but a history of those who have written, painted and dreamed it into being, Imagining England's Past offers a lively, erudite account of the making and manipulation of the days of old. Praise for Imagining England's Past 'Susan Owens conjures our imagined past with such vivacity and lyricism that I can see the dawn mist rising over fabled fields and hear the tread of fictional histories on the worn stairs of yesteryear. Packed full of myths, stories, poems and paintings I found this book impossible to put down!' Charlotte Mullins, broadcaster, art critic and author of A Little History of Art

Imagining England's Past: Inspiration, Enchantment, Obsession

History

Europe

Thames&Hudson

Shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year 2020 When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these changes reflected in - and affected by - art and literature? English landscape painting is often said to be an 18th-century invention. But when we look for representations of the countryside in British art and literature, we find a story that begins with Old English poetry and treads a winding path up to the present day. Spirit of Place offers a panoramic view of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, Turner and Constable; from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Robert Macfarlane. Guided by these distinctive voices and imagery, and with a sharp eye for an anecdote, Susan Owens elucidates how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by generations. Each account, whether limned in a psalter, jotted down in a journal or constructed from sticks and stones, holds up a mirror to its maker and their world.

Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers & The British Landscape

Environment, Resources and Conservation (Cambridge Topics in Geography)

Owens, Peter L.

Cambridge University Press

This book deals with important current environmental issues, based on case studies at different geographical scales - local, national and global - concerning living resource management, non-renewable resources and pollution. The discussion is issue and policy-orientated. Introductory chapters deal with the emergence and significance of modern environmentalism. The final chapter looks at policy achievements and prospects, again at both national and international levels. The theoretical background to the case studies covers resources and pollution; case studies themselves include resource issues in the Norfolk Broads, UK; economic, social and environmental implications of exploiting Britain's non-renewable coal resources; ant the trans-fronter pollution problem of acid rain. Throughout, reference is made to important recurring themes such as uncertainty, social equity and the intangible nature of many aspects of environmental quality.

Nature & Ecology

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Owens, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Owens, Susan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Owens, Susan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise: The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery

Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art

Land and Limits: Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process (Routledge Research Global Environmental Change Series, 7.)

Land and Limits: Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process (RTPI Library Series)

Imagining England's Past: Inspiration, Enchantment, Obsession

Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers & The British Landscape

Environment, Resources and Conservation (Cambridge Topics in Geography)

Environment, Resources and Conservation (Cambridge Topics in Geography)