Nature has monumental power on children’s growth and development. Recent studies show that as children spend less time in nature, they miss out on the profound benefits that outdoor play and learning experiences provide. Nature Sparks is filled with inspiration and instruction to help educators and caregivers of children ages three to eight reclaim and strengthen connections to the outdoors. This resource supplies ideas to create a nature-oriented classroom and curriculum, incorporates Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to encourage children’s individual talents as they experience the natural world, and includes more than fifty sensory-integrated activities, crafts, and instructional strategies.

Support children's connections with nature through classroom activities.

Revision--though in what way is not specified--of a 1970 natural history. Includes some 80 illustrations and photos, and describes about 130 species, including their evolution, anatomy, diet, population, trends, roosting, courtship, and daily life. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Seed + Spark takes its readers in search of a better understanding of the future of learning - and, by extension, the future of humanity. Believing "the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed," Seed + Spark provides a framework for remaking our schools, our workspaces, and our social structures in ways that align with the design principles of the natural world. The result is an eclectic, provocative series of interviews, ideas, and case studies in which parallel worlds collide, and our basic understanding of our place on the planet is forever altered.

"For decades, studies of oil-related conflicts focused on the causes and effects of natural resources mismanagement, commonly known as the "resource curse"-the paradoxical connection between oil wealth and economic busts (as in Venezuela) or, in a later twist, the link between the predatory behavior of armed rebel organizations and the abundant natural resources that funded their existence. Patricia Vasquez notes that oil busts and civil wars associated with the resource curse were quite different from the now-predominant local hydrocarbons disputes that are multiplying rapidly in Latin America. These more recent, localized disputes-over land, population displacement, water contamination, oil jobs that are promised but never materialize, etc.-primarily involve Indigenous groups with a different social and cultural identity from the rest of the population. Vasquez spent fifteen years making regular field visits to the oil-producing regions of Latin America and conducting hundreds of interviews with the various stakeholders in these local conflicts. Her book, based on this field research, analyzes the dynamics that characterize each of fifty-five social and environmental conflicts related to oil and gas extraction in the Andean countries (Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia). She is interested not in promulgating a new theory of conflict but in examining the triggers of local hydrocarbons disputes and providing policy recommendations to resolve or prevent them"--