Climate is but one way to perceive forests. In our comparatively short time on Earth, we humans have forged an inextricable bond with forests. Trees have inspired human imagination for tens of thousands of years. Forests are central to the cultural evolution of humankind and have molded our beliefs and values and societies. Our world would be impoverished without forests. The forest-climate question was of much common knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the scholars in the debate also opined on the aesthetics of trees and their contributions to the human experience. How we view forests, and how we value them, must be considered from a multifaceted standpoint that recognizes their many contributions to humanity and planet Earth, not just as public utilities that influence climate. The rationalism of science must be balanced with the romanticism of forests.

The conclusion summarises the theoretical contribution of Otto von Gierke’s classical pluralism and restates the recommendations made throughout the practical chapters. It emphasises the importance of groups for legal thought, the value of a sophisticated vocabulary of group entities, and the need to guard against institutional entropy. It finishes with an optimistic outlook on the future relationship between British Islam and English law.

Spending equal time with Hughes’s poetry, especially Birthday Letters, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, this chapter examines how the Christological ideas at work in so much of Hughes’s other poetry applies to the life, literary output and tragic death of his first wife. We watch as the Edenic template of the fall repeats in Hughes’s depictions of Plath. Close attention is also paid to Plath’s “Pursuit,” with additional contributions from Yeats and Stevens, setting up a pattern of continual intertextuality. Plath’s foundering efforts to manage and restore her unfallen, divine self produce a range of fascinating effects in both her writing and Hughes’s. These particularly center on a body of landscape poetry written during the couple’s two-year stay in America, and reference is made to the work of artists Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The most explicitly Christological of Hughes’s Birthday Letters poems are discussed, and the argument made that his efforts to understand what happened to Plath in terms of a “symbolic death and rebirth” send him continually, though never with total satisfaction, to the Christian template.