This book reviews the pedagogy and ecology of education and the philosophical and historical conditions of these theories, and discusses problems of the curriculum. Contents include: (1) "Introduction: Learning to Work Under the Tough Old Stars"; (2) "Under the Tough Old Stars: Meditation on Pedagogical Hyperactivity and the Mood of Environmental Education" (1996); (3) "Returning Home with Empty Hands" (1990); (4) "The Surroundings" (1998); (5) "Littered with Literacy: An Ecopedagogical Reflection on Whole Language, Pedocentrism, and the Necessity of Refusal" (1994); (6) "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" (1995); (7) "Ecopedagogical Reflections on Curricular Integration, Scientific Literacy, and the Deep Ecologies of Science Education"; (8) "Even There, the Gods Themselves Are Present" (2000); (9) "Reflections on Education, Hermeneutics, and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics as a Restoring of Life to Its Original Difficulty" (1992); (10) "Birding Lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas" (1998); (11) "Chapter 32 from Speaking with a Boneless Tongue" (1992); (12) "Piaget's Clay and Descartes' Wax" (1988); (13) "The Child of Writing" (1994); (14) "Immortality and the Gesture of Writing" (1996); (15) "Learning to Love the Invalid" (1996); (16) "Walking in the Pure Land" (1994); (17) "Unable to Return to the Gods That Made Them" (1999); and (18) "All Beings Are Your Ancestors". (Contains 121 references.) (YDS)