“When I See … I Will Remember”: Exploring the Memorability of Rainbows and Stars in Genesis through Mnemonatures

Contact with nature and youth well-being: Insights from natural and urban contexts.

The authors provide three case examples of the evaluation of assessment-based intervention strategies within the natural classroom context for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comorbid disorders. For each of the participants, several hypotheses were generated concerning potential environmental correlates of undesirable behavior based on information obtained during student and teacher interviews as well as descriptive observations. The utility of these assessment-based, nonintrusive intervention strategies was evaluated within the natural context and ongoing routine of the classroom using an alternating-treatments design. For each participant, results demonstrated that assessment-based environmental modifications can decrease problematic classroom behaviors. In addition, results of the hypothesis testing suggested feasible and effective classroom intervention strategies.

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 13 No. 1 (2003) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations Kahn, Peter H. Jr. and Kellert, Stephen R. (2002). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 348 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0262611759. Nature nurtures children who become adults who nurture nature; as nature disappears from children’s lives, what then? Do experiences of the natural world play a crucial role in children’sdevelopment– in who they become and what they care about? In thisbook, distinguished authors examine this notion through a diversecollection of disciplinary lenses, using perspectives from cognitivescience, developmental psychology, ecology, education, environmentalstudies, evolutionary psychology, political science, primatology,psychiatry, and social psychology. Some of the ideas are familiar butimportant in this context, and there is much that is new here as well.The result is an intellectual banquet– a succession of varied entréesforming a surprisingly unified whole. Three themes run through this slim, important volume. The first is thatexperiences with nature play a unique, irreplaceable role in healthychild development. The second is that early experiences with nature arevital to the forging of later environmental commitments. The third isthat children’s contact with nature is increasingly diluted and alteredin modern society and that this has far-reaching implications for bothchildren and nature. Healthy Child Development The primary theme of the bookis that contact with nature is not merely beneficial to children butcrucial and even irreplaceable in their healthy development. This is anambitious thesis; nonetheless, Children and Nature goes a long way in 235 establishing the importance, if not the necessity, of contact with nature. Some of the arguments are theoretical and explain why we might expectvarious distinguishing features of the natural world to be uniquelypowerful in fostering child development. The arguments are diverse:Verbeek and de Waal, and then Heerwagen and Orians examine myriad waysin which children may be suited for the natural world as a result ofevolution, suggesting that child development is, in a sense, designedto unfold in a natural context. Other authors, especially Kellert andPyle, offer reasons why contact with nature might facilitatedevelopment in particular domains, whether physical, cognitive,affective, moral, social, or character development. For example,Kellert points out that the natural world is extraordinarily rich ininformation and hence may be unmatched as a ground for learning,reasoning, and observing. On another note, Katcher joins Myers andSaunders in exploring how and why children’s social and emotionallearning might uniquely benefit from interactions with social,nonhuman beings. These and other proposals are given substance in the book through closeanalysis, illustrative examples and phenomena, and a few dollops ofsystematic evidence. What evidence is provided is intriguing andsuggests that perhaps the relationship between children and nature isspecial. Heerwagen and Orians provide numerous examples for theirthesis that children show instinctive, stage-specific, and adaptivepatterns of attraction and fear with respect to the natural world; thisis later echoed in Kaplan and Kaplan’s chapter on adolescents andnature. Coley, Solomon, and Shafto note that children show a strikingproclivity and talent for inferring larger principles about thebiological world, for constructing models of the natural world fromlimited input. Thus children seem to possess a special competence withrespect to the natural world; moreover, they seem to have a specialresponsiveness or resonance to the world of nature. Kahn studiesinner-city San Antonio children and finds a reverence for nature evenin 236 children whose experience of nature is severely limited. Kellertreports that most participants find an outdoor challenge experience tobe one of the most important in their lives and one that exerted majorimpacts on their personality and character development. Katcherobserves that working with animals can bring striking, often profound,changes in children with developmental disorders including autism,Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), and oppositionaldefiant disorder and cites research demonstrating that children withpets are better at decoding nonverbal human emotional cues (Guttmann,Predovic and Zemanek 1985). Taken together, these arguments and phenomena demand seriousconsideration, particularly in light of their diversity and cumulativeweight. At the same time, the grain of salt with which findings areusually best taken is sometimes wanting here. Much work remains to bedone, primarily by way of making more careful comparisons between whatis “natural” and what is not– or perhaps more tenably, between what ismore natural and...

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

Encounters at the Mound in Old Norse Literature: Dialogues between Landscape and Narrative

Vitamin N For the Soul

A case study is expected to capture the complexity of a single case, which should be a functioning unit, be investigated in its natural context with a multitude of methods, and be contemporary. A case study and, normally, history focus on one case, but simultaneously take account of the context, and so encompass many variables and qualities. When a physical artefact is the case the gap between case study and history tends to diminish and case studies often become more or less historical case studies. Case study methodology also bridges the gap between quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences. Still the different concepts of validation in quantitative and qualitative research sometimes create confusion when they are combined, as they often are in case studies. The case might be studied with an intrinsic interest in the case as such, or with an interest in generalising. When a generalisation is based on the deductive principle, the procedure of testing hypothesis is used. A second mode of generalisation is inductive theory-generation, or conceptualisation. The third mode depends on the principle of abduction. Abduction is the process of facing an unexpected fact, applying some rule and, as a result, positing a case that may be. But there are two kinds of abduction: One is when a case is created from a few facts; for instance, historical data or clues. The other is operative when generalisations are made from known cases and applied to an actual problem situation by making appropriate comparisons. This is also called naturalistic generalisation. In a case study, the different modes of generalisation are often combined. The conclusion is that case studies has the potential for further development through the mastery of the combination on different levels of techniques, methodologies, strategies, or theories, like; the combination of case study and history, which is important when the case is an artefact; the combination of differing quality standards in qualitative and quantitative research, which are difficult to codify; and the combination of different modes of generalisation.

Reviewed by: Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War Robert G. Angevine (bio) Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Edited by Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004. Pp. vii+280. $29.95. Reports indicating that the U.S. military accelerated its attack on Iraq in 2003 in order to prevent the destruction of Iraqi oilfields and avert ecological disaster suggest that sensitivity to the possible environmental impact of war is now widespread. Yet the editors of Natural Enemy, Natural Ally note that there have been few systematic academic efforts to explore the historical relationship between war and the environment. Indeed, the lack of scholarly study nearly stymied their attempts to produce a book on this topic. After eight years of work, however, they have drawn together a collection of interesting case studies that provides a useful introduction. Richard Tucker and Edmund Russell's primary purpose is "to argue for the importance of understanding war as a major and distinctive force in environmental change, as well as the environment as a force in shaping warfare" (p. 2). The majority of the nine case studies focus on how war has altered the natural environment. A few, such as Roger Levine's discussion of [End Page 657] how different perceptions of the landscape affected the way Zulu and Xhosa speakers conducted war in nineteenth-century Africa, consider how the environment has influenced war. Tucker and Russell's second goal is to illustrate the current state of scholarship in the field. Tucker's historical survey of the impact of warfare on the natural world is intended to serve as a guide to the existing literature, but his melodramatic prose and antitechnology bias weaken its utility. For example, he describes how the superior weaponry of Western nations enabled them to overwhelm their "human prey" by the mid-nineteenth century, and he seems to believe that the principal product of technological advance is greater savagery and destruction (p. 25). The third objective of the book is to encourage further research, and both the high quality of the case studies and the current relevance of the topic should help achieve this goal. Although the editors stress the need for more geographic and temporal diversity in the future, their case studies already cover a wide range of periods and locales. Some of the most interesting address the impact of war on the relationships between government institutions seeking to regulate the environment and private companies. Tucker argues that the intensive demand for forest resources during the world wars greatly expanded public control over those resources in many of the combatant nations. Because the exigencies of war forced governmental forest services to work closely with private-sector timber firms, commercial priorities dominated postwar forest management. Similarly, coeditor Russell suggests that the world wars forged ties between chemical companies and the military that fostered the development of insecticides and chemical weapons, thereby increasing the ability of human beings to kill both insects and other humans on a large scale. Several contributors point out that war has not always had a detrimental effect on the natural world. William Tsutsui's insightful examination of the environmental history of wartime Japan reveals that the impact of war can be "uneven, contradictory, and often equivocal" (p. 210). Japanese mobilization for World War II intensified the cutting of old-growth forests and the hunting of seals, and wartime scarcity encouraged the "harvesting" of songbirds. Simultaneously, however, the destruction of Japan's fishing fleet had the effect of swelling fish-stocks, and energy resource shortages encouraged research in alternative fuels. Simo Laakkonen describes similar effects in Finland, where wartime demands paralyzed environmental policy but also protected forests, reduced the discharge of pollutants into the water, and increased use of local, renewable resources. Another case study tells how the central government's role in developing and preserving the environment in precolonial India depended on its ability to manage its relations with militarized families and prevent destructive local wars. Others reexamine the Battle of Gettysburg and the American Civil War through an environmental lens, recount efforts to stop the spread [End Page 658] of pests and...

For generations, African beliefs and practices regarding witchcraft and traditional healing have been located at the intersection between the natural world and the supernatural world. Despite the impact of both colonialism and, in the contemporary context, modernization, the complex interplay between these worlds has not been reduced. The interaction between nature and religion, as a facet of culture, has long been a subject of inquiry in anthropology, and nowhere is this more evident than in the study of African witchcraft and traditional healing. A distinct relationship exists between witchcraft beliefs and traditional healing methods. This relationship brings these two aspects of African culture together in such a complex manner that it is difficult to attempt to understand the dynamics of African witchcraft without referring to traditional healing methods, and vice versa. In this paper, the authors outline the various ways in which African witchcraft beliefs and practices, as well as traditional healing beliefs and practices, interact within the nature/culture domain. This interaction will be conceptualised in a Merleau-Pontian sense, focusing on the indeterminacy of the natural and supernatural worlds. In its presentation of an essentially anthropological case study focused on southern Africa, the paper draws on various ethnographic examples of African communities in the southern African context.

Reviewed by: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks Matthew Firth Brooks, Britton Elliott, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2019; hardback; pp. 323; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781843845300. In Restoring Creation, Britton Elliott Brooks brings the environmental humanities into dialogue with early English hagiography. Specifically, Brooks seeks to present 'the sophisticated and considered engagement with the non-human world' (p. 3) that may be revealed through a close reading of early English hagiography. This [End Page 197] he intends to serve as a corrective to the oversimplifications he perceives in much previous environmental humanities scholarship, which has tended to posit nature as having a negative alterity in the medieval worldview. Central to Brooks's thesis is the idea that it is possible to reconstruct how the English themselves understood the natural world. Representations of nature in early English hagiography, he argues, were defined by 'contemporary theological and philosophical views' (p. 3) and tied to the physical landscape through the regionalism of their narratives. Of those contemporary theological and philosophical views, Brooks focuses on the concept of the restoration of Creation: a breaching of the postlapsarian division between humanity and nature, effected by the achievement of holiness and sanctity. Given the wealth of hagiography from pre-Conquest England, Brooks necessarily limits his focus subjects, choosing to structure his study around the vitae of the eremitic saints Cuthbert and Guthlac. The nature of their eremitism provides the two English saints what Brooks terms a 'direct and transformative interaction with Creation' (p. 15). This is well demonstrated in his case studies; each of Brook's five chapters examines a single hagiography, ordered by chronology of authorship. This structure allows Brooks to demonstrate how the vitae built upon one another, adopting and adapting Augustinian and Bedan exegesis of Creation. Chapter 1 focuses on the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (698 × 705), examining those passages of the text in which Cuthbert's sanctity restores Creation, albeit temporarily. It is a sanctity that stems from obedience; Cuthbert's obedience restores Creation just as Adam and Eve's disobedience brought about its Fall. Brooks argues that this obedience is specifically framed in monastic terms and suggests that the hagiographer perceived the 'divine order of the universe' (as it relates to the natural world) to parallel monastic order (p. 28). Chapters 2 and 3 turn to Bede, first his metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (705 × 716) and then his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c. 721). Brooks's examination of the metrical vita is Restoring Creation's most compelling chapter. It is a work that he at once perceives as personal—'a ruminative and poetic exercise for Bede himself' (p. 67)—and as foundational not only to the Cuthbertine tradition, but to the entry of Augustinian exegeses of Creation into English hagiography. The restoration of Creation here is again tied to monastic obedience, Cuthbert portrayed as what Brooks terms 'an idealized Gregorian monk-pastor' (p. 16). It is a characterization of Cuthbert that comes into full focus in Bede's prose vita. In this text, Brooks identifies an authorial interest in Cuthbert's evolving spiritual maturity—miracles of restoration provide both impetus for and evidence of Cuthbert's achievement of 'spiritual majority' (p. 171). Bede draws on Augustinian interpretations of the Fall and Creation to portray Cuthbert as an exemplar of saintliness and obedience, Creation's own obedience to the saint being predicated on his perfect sanctity. Brooks turns to Guthlac in Chapters 4 and 5, first discussing the Vita Sancti Guthlaci (730 × 740) of Felix before going on to examine the terminological nuances of the Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A (both texts that [End Page 198] have proved difficult to date). What is possibly most interesting in these chapters is the explicit tying of Guthlac's vitae to the landscape of the East Anglian fens. In the Vita Sancti Guthlaci, Brooks sees Guthlac's story, like Cuthbert's, as being one of spiritual progression toward saintliness, but here to some degree...

Product designers are engaging with new making opportunities that depart from traditional massproduction processes and are forming new collaborations shifting practice and material opportunities. Pioneers in the field of biological art, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have said, Life is increasingly seen as the new frontier for exploitation; from industrial framing through in-vitro meat and bioprospecting to synthetic biology, is extracted from its natural context into the realm of the manufactured (Catts and Zurr, 2013). concept of growing products is an enticing one for both designers and users, with positive impacts on a number of scales including ecosystem impacts. Design and art historian Christina Cogdell (2011) has noted that scale is absolutely critical to the theory and practice of bio-design, yet it is little mentioned by its promoters. In the context of product design, scale is perhaps best considered in relation to scale of production. Such a viewpoint, however, must recognize the impact of this production across various scales. It suggests guilt-free production and consumption at an individual level, and at an urban scale, such production could facilitate a utopian polis that is self-sufficient, existing in equilibrium with the natural world. In this sense, the promise of bio-design is enticing, in addition to the new materials and ways of making that are being opened up to designers. It has been suggested by William Myers that The spread of bio-design promises to be much like mechanization in the 20th century, as described by historians such as Sigfried Giedion… upending accepted practices, extinguishing traditions, attenuating natural beauties, and shaping an alien way of life (Myers, 2012). Designer and a leading thinker in this field Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has asked, When working in such a future-oriented area, a key question that arises is how to inhabit the spaces of promise? (Ginsberg et al., 2014).

Architecture has a role in and responsibility for environmental management. The construction of buildings, installation of foundations, and paving of land result in the ground being unable to “breathe”; likewise, the materials selected for construction influence the surrounding environment. Over time, this situation has been exacerbated by climate change. In this situation, sustainable architecture and environmentally friendly construction are necessary. Built environments must respond to and appreciate their natural world through designs that respect their environment and rely on sustainable energy. This approach will create balance and harmony between built environments and their natural contexts. In developing sustainable architecture, we can learn from local wisdom and borrow from traditional architecture. The traditional architecture of the Indonesian Archipelago is diverse, being designed for varied environmental conditions. However, all traditional Indonesian approaches to architecture have the same approach: responding to and respecting nature. In their form and realization, the traditional architectures of Indonesia are adapted to their specific sites and social systems. Sustainable architecture, thus, can be understood as characteristic of local wisdom. This chapter will discuss the shape and form of Indonesian buildings within the context of sustainable architecture.

Visual short-term memory and motor planning

Dance and somatic educators have an important role to play addressing estrangement from the natural world. In this article, author Robert Bettmann considers how an experiential education model may apply to design of public eco-somatic programmes, and how such programmes may empower practitioners within broader efforts to reconnect humanity to the natural world. Many eco-somatic programmes focus on transmission of information from a teacher directly to a student in a natural context, and an experiential education curriculum model may encourage design of more self-guided approaches appropriate for larger groups. The author reviews theories at the intersection of dance, somatics, and the environment, including the theory of Somatic Ecology, and the example of the Anacostia Swim Club.

Case study is a suitable research methodology for software engineering research since it studies contemporary phenomena in its natural context. However, the understanding of what constitutes a case study varies, and hence the quality of the resulting studies. This paper aims at providing an introduction to case study methodology and guidelines for researchers conducting case studies and readers studying reports of such studies. The content is based on the authors’ own experience from conducting and reading case studies. The terminology and guidelines are compiled from different methodology handbooks in other research domains, in particular social science and information systems, and adapted to the needs in software engineering. We present recommended practices for software engineering case studies as well as empirically derived and evaluated checklists for researchers and readers of case study research.