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THE DAY OF THE DEAD
Last week, Mexicans celebrated the Day of the Dead. Anthropologist and world expert in this ritual, Stanley Brandes, is the author of a new book entitled Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead. Back from the city of Zamora in the Mexican state of Michoacán Professor Brandes describes the experience and discusses the conventional way of understanding its significance.

USES OF NATURE
Some environmental scientists claim that if the evolution of mankind was mapped out over the course of a week, we would have lived apart from nature for only the last three seconds of Sunday night.  But what is nature? And what does it mean to be out of it? Patients in hospitals are said to recover more quickly if they are played tapes of birdsong; joggers on treadmills have lower heart rates if they are looking at a picture of a country scene; so do we need the real thing if representations of nature are so effective? Laurie Taylor is joined by Professor Jules Pretty, Head of Department of Biological Sciences, University of Essex; Dr Bronislaw Szerszynski, Senior Lecturer in Environment and Culture at Lancaster University and the writer Richard Mabey to debate the uses of nature and asks if it really is so good for us.