Natural World

Emma Watson will strip down to raise environmental awareness, even though she won't do it for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" star tweeted her support for James Houston's book of celebrities posing nude to raise environmental awareness. The book's proceeds will go to Global Green USA, a nonprofit focused on sustainability. PHOTOS: Hermione Granger through the years "My friend is supporting GlobalGreenUSA with his book Natural Beauty.

In "Bestiaire," a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté set amid an animal park in Quebec, viewers watch as all manner of exotic creatures are fed and cared for, hustled from their interior shelters to the out-of-doors. Their human minders are unseen at first, and emerge only through Côté's careful balancing act between an instinctive world and one of human intervention. The film has a meditative calm about it - there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue - with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.

Re "The devolution of a believer," Opinion, Sept. 19 John Darnton paints an incorrect picture of Charles Darwin's views on God. Substantial evidence from many sources indicates that Darwin can best be described as an agnostic, as one might expect from such an insightful man. Darwin understood that atheism is as logically indefensible as is theism, and that agnosticism is the only logically defensible position regarding the existence of a god. ...

Classifying Meredith Monk's music is a fool's errand. Her work blends art song, dance, theater and set design into a total experience centered on her rare and powerful voice. Her newest work, "On Behalf of Nature," explores our relationship and ties to the natural world. Freud Playhouse, UCLA. 8 p.m. Fri. $40-$45. cap.ucla.edu .

Now we all have to live with the so-called transportation corridor, the Southland's newest, meanest and most arrogant development project. But how, short of ignoring it, do we live with a road that, like most roads, will kill us? One recent dewy morning, I joined an El Morro Canyon hike sponsored by the California Native Plant Society. The docent paused, pointing out local species: Sticky Monkeyflower. Laguna Dudlyea. Twiggy reefplant. A red-shouldered hawk.

While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through the forests while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of their gardens dying far away on the mountain while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to them while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red

Nature Wars The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds Jim Sterba Crown, 368 pp., $26 The nature-challenged reader will discover many new and startling facts in Jim Sterba's new book. Among them all one stands out: Not only are America's Eastern forests roaring back to life, they've been doing so for more than a century. Sterba, a veteran reporter for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, literally stumbles onto this truth one day amid the majestic trees of Maine's Acadia National Park.

On an Amazon expedition described in a charming essay in "The Boilerplate Rhino," David Quammen, along with a tropical biologist and a foundation executive, is sitting naked in an outdoor bathing place at dusk. Darkness falls, as it does near the Equator, with, as Quammen says, a "whump." And then, suddenly: "A large glob of orange light comes zigzagging through the trees. It moves slowly, flying a gracefully sinuous path, as though under command of Steven Spielberg.

Sen. Al Gore, columnist Michael Kinsley observed aptly in 1988, is "an old person's idea of a young person." He is also a radical's idea of a moderate. Not long ago, Gore seemed like a legitimate moderate or, more accurately, a centrist. While other ambitious Democrats kowtowed to the party's doves, Gore worked to save the MX missile, supported non-military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and backed the Gulf War.

Nature has always suckled art, supplying inspiration in various forms, including pretty pictures and role models of natural behavior and evolution. The dependent relationship has grown ever more complicated in this century, as modernists rebelled against old traditions--including landscape painting--and tried to find their rightful place in the post-industrial world. Mother Nature still rears her head in the art world, though.

Nature Wars The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds Jim Sterba Crown, 368 pp., $26 The nature-challenged reader will discover many new and startling facts in Jim Sterba's new book. Among them all one stands out: Not only are America's Eastern forests roaring back to life, they've been doing so for more than a century. Sterba, a veteran reporter for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, literally stumbles onto this truth one day amid the majestic trees of Maine's Acadia National Park.

The View from Lazy Point A Natural Year in an Unnatural World Carl Safina Henry Holt: 416 pp., $30 "The View from Lazy Point" is a naturalist's notebook, a record of a year at Carl Safina's home on the Sound side of eastern Long Island, north of Amagansett and south of Montauk. Safina, a marine ecologist and environmental activist, has often been compared with Rachel Carson ? an "ecologist with the soul of a poet," wrote Richard Ellis in these pages. He has written five books and won many awards for his work and his writing, including Pew, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships.

The physicists, biologists and engineers were huddled around every available bar-height table in the Long Beach Convention Center, covering their tiny surfaces with laptops and notebooks. Posters in long, military rows showcased their efforts: An analysis of the movement of milk in English tea, a report on the stripes of gas across Jupiter. In a hotel next door, Aryesh Mukherjee, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, was explaining how he built, with the help of rubber glove-like material, a synthetic voice box that could imitate a range of birdsongs.

The Cat in the Hat is back — again — with his red bow tie and rave-ready stripey soft topper. This time he comes not, as he did in the first book to bear his name, only to make "fun that is funny" but rather in the name of science: "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That," an American-Canadian-British co-production beginning Monday on PBS, designed to teach the wonders of the natural world to preschoolers lulled into believing they...

To his two Pulitzer Prizes and his National Book Award, poet W.S. Merwin can add one more prize: United States poet laureate. The Library of Congress announced Thursday that the much-lauded poet will follow Kay Ryan as the nation's 17th laureate. Although the post comes with an annual salary of $35,000, it has no formal requirements, but it is presumed to bring poetry more to the forefront in American culture. "I always shied away from commitments to Washington — I like living in Hawaii," said Merwin, 82, from his home on Maui.

The oil spill disaster off the coast of my home state of Louisiana is stark evidence that humans have an awesome power to change the natural landscape, often for the worse. But landscapes also have the power to change us, as John James Audubon was reminded when he arrived in Louisiana in 1821. In Louisiana, Audubon encountered a biblical abundance of wildlife that transformed him and his bird art, enlarging his sense of possibility and refining his genius as an observer of the natural world.

The author of 18 collections of poetry, two novels, four plays and an autobiography, Australian John Kinsella is well-known in this country's literary circles. His reputation in the United States, largely as an experimental writer closely associated with the Language poets (writers whose poetry explores the nature of language and who are strongly influenced by postmodern theory), took off in the 1990s. Now Kinsella is making his major U.S.

I speared a superb lily bulb the other day, which I mention for no other reason than to remind gardeners prone to distress that everybody does it sooner or later. Unless the garden is a forest of labels and unless plants stay exactly where planted (and some lilies wander considerably), accidents will happen. I dug up the bulb, which had turned into three very large bulbs, and planted them elsewhere.

"Sweetgrass" is an unexpectedly intoxicating documentary, unexpected because it blends high artistic standards with the grueling reality of one of the toughest, most exhausting of work environments. For though the area of southern Montana where "Sweetgrass" is shot is a visually stunning locale, running a sheep ranch in general and caring for enormous flocks during their months of summer pasture in particular turns out to be a grueling, intensely physical existence grounded in the unforgiving rhythms of the natural world.

Widely acclaimed and oft-celebrated poet Mary Oliver , a recipient of the National Book Award, Lannan Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for 1984's "American Primitive," will visit UCLA Live to regale Angelenos with her passionate, embodied observances of the natural world -- a rare public appearance for the prolific, media-shy New Englander. Royce Hall at UCLA, 340 Royce Drive, L.A. 8 p.m. Friday. $24-$48. (310) 825-2101. www.uclalive.org.