The Natural ^NEW^
The Natural is a 1984 American sports film based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel of the same name, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Robert Duvall.[1][2] Like the book, the film recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, an individual with great "natural" baseball talent, spanning the decades of Roy's career. In direct contrast to the book, the film ends in a positive tone. It was the first film produced by TriStar Pictures.
The Natural
During this time when educational resources are more important than ever, we are expanding our digital content and programming to provide them to you. Please help support our efforts to keep curious minds engaged and educated about the wonders of the natural world.
An outdoor experiential area for families to have fun enjoying nature, the Children's Discovery Area has two components at this time: the Kids in Parks Track Trail and the soon to be certified Nature Explore Outdoor Classroom. The Track Trail offers the chance to visit the site with a choice of four self-guided brochures. The brochures teach about pollinators, birds of the Blue Ridge, animals that may be seen in the park and how nature can hide and seek. The outdoor classroom is a play space using natural features to engage children and immerse them in an outdoor environment of creative play. Remember when as a child you would play games in the woods in your neighborhood or explore wild adventures in a woodlot near you? This is exactly the same sort of experience, so come and plan to get dirty and have fun. Sponsored by a generous grant from Dominion Power, The Freedom Food Festival and the Friends of Natural Bridge State Park, this site provides some of the most stunning views in the park. So after you have seen the Natural Bridge take the time to enjoy being a kid again.
At the visitor center, buy admission tickets and check out exhibits in Base Camp that describe the area's natural, historical and cultural heritage. There's also a large shop with gifts, souvenirs, local artisans' work and other items.
It's an unusually fine novel, too, although I don't know how the professionals are going to take it. For Bernard Malamud's interests go far beyond baseball. What he has done is to contrive a sustained and elaborate allegory in which the "natural" player who operates with ease and the greatest skill, without having been taught is equated with the natural man who, left alone by, say, politicians and advertising agencies, might achieve his real fulfillment.
The book's hero, Roy Hobbs, comes out of the West at the age of 19, brought to a major league training camp by a scout. He is shot by a girl in a hotel room and drops out of sight until, at the age of 34, he returns to the last place team in the National League and, with a trick bat not unlike that used by Heinie Groh of the Cincinnati Reds back in the Twenties -- almost single-handed leads the team into a tie for first place. This he does despite various distractions by people whose names sometimes indicate their symbolism, sometimes deliberately obscure it. But Malamud has a mission and we grant him certain privileges, including the use of the super-realism he alternates with naturalism. As when Hobbs, baited by a dwarf in the stands, drives one liner after another, deliberately foul, at the cowering little man. Malamud also draws heavily on baseball legend and history, almost interchangeably.
All the story is here of a natural man -- hurt badly by his first love, recovering late for his profession, almost achieving greatness, then distracted or betrayed by people or objects or events all equated with elements in our environment. In his telling and always deliberate use of the vernacular alternated with passages evocative and almost lyrical, in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture which elaborated it, Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual book.
A capitals approach enables organisations to understand how their success is directly or indirectly underpinned by natural capital, social capital and human capital, empowering them to make decisions that offer the greatest value across all capitals.
Understanding the complex and dynamic relationships that organizations have with the health of natural assets and the ecosystem services they provide enables organizations to make more informed decisions. A capitals approach empowers organizations to deliver benefits their employees, society, the broader economy and the natural world alongside their businesses.
Consequently, they can make decisions that are inefficient, ineffective or damaging. A capitals approach broadens the quantity and quality of business-relevant information available to decision-makers. Traditionally the value of natural capital has, for the most part, been excluded from decision-making. Even when included, methods have been inconsistent, open to interpretation, limited to moral arguments or based on an incomplete understanding of organizational relationships to natural capital.
The Natural Capital Protocol responds to this gap by offering an internationally standardized framework for the identification, measurement and valuation of impacts and dependencies on natural capital in order to inform organizational decisions.
The Natural Capital Protocol Toolkit, was developed by WBCSD and facilitates uptake of the Protocol by consolidating the wealth of tools, methodologies and approaches available for natural capital measurement and valuation.
Training materials are available for application of the Natural Capital Protocol and the Social & Human Capital Protocol. Training sessions on natural capital assessments are also available from our partners at We Value Nature.
While each initiative may have different origins, some differing objectives, and may reflect variations in technique and method, there is much common ground. Indeed, to engage the broader community in tackling the natural capital challenges we collectively face, we cannot afford to focus on distinctions. Instead, we must look to build on the overlaps and seek to build a common language that will enable the exchange of ideas and ongoing innovation.
Developed by the Capitals Coalition and UNEP-WCMC, the Navigation Tool compliments the Biodiversity Guidance by steering practitioners through a series of interactive questions to help them undertake a biodiversity-inclusive natural capital assessment. The tool also offers supporting resources, tools, methodologies and advice to assist an assessment based on user responses.
Biodiversity constitutes the living component of natural capital and underpins the success of businesses around the world. But the benefit that biodiversity provides to organizations can be hard to fully understand, and even harder to effectively measure and value.
The Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Capitals Coalition developed the Biodiversity Guidance to accompany the Natural Capital Protocol. It is designed to help businesses and financial institutions to better understand the value they receive from biodiversity, and to apply this knowledge as they make decisions, through a biodiversity-inclusive natural capital assessment.
The Navigation Tool questions are tied to the stages and steps in the Natural Capital Protocol and guide users through the Frame, Scope, Measure & Value and Apply stages that constitute a natural capital assessment.
Each park in our city is one-of-a-kind and shaped by its natural features, the plants and animals that live there, and the communities it serves. Your students will have fun exploring these unique urban spaces through active and engaging place-based learning experiences that highlight real-world examples of concepts, ideas, and content learned in the classroom. Students will investigate the diversity of parks and green spaces in New York City, how these spaces make life better for New Yorkers, and how NYC Parks cares for parks and recreational spaces.
Biofilms--matrix-enclosed microbial accretions that adhere to biological or non-biological surfaces--represent a significant and incompletely understood mode of growth for bacteria. Biofilm formation appears early in the fossil record (approximately 3.25 billion years ago) and is common throughout a diverse range of organisms in both the Archaea and Bacteria lineages, including the 'living fossils' in the most deeply dividing branches of the phylogenetic tree. It is evident that biofilm formation is an ancient and integral component of the prokaryotic life cycle, and is a key factor for survival in diverse environments. Recent advances show that biofilms are structurally complex, dynamic systems with attributes of both primordial multicellular organisms and multifaceted ecosystems. Biofilm formation represents a protected mode of growth that allows cells to survive in hostile environments and also disperse to colonize new niches. The implications of these survival and propagative mechanisms in the context of both the natural environment and infectious diseases are discussed in this review.
To mobilize natural climate solutions, the NCS Alliance (NCSA) conveys the voice of businesses, NGOs and solution providers on the need to mobilize a high-integrity demand for high-quality NCS. The Alliance focuses on identifying opportunities and barriers to investment in the NCS voluntary carbon market and also serves as a forum for knowledge sharing and technical capacity building to ensure natural climate solutions reach their full potential in abating climate change.
Studies have shown that natural climate solutions (NCS) can provide around 30% of the emissions reductions needed to limit the worst impacts of global warming by 2030. As well as mitigating climate change, NCS can also provide other important solutions, such as the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity, restoration of degraded lands and the support of sustainable livelihoods. 041b061a72