Nature and the written word

When we think of nature journaling, the first things that usually come to mind are colourful nature sketches and watercolour paintings. There is another important area of nature journaling that is, perhaps, a little neglected: The written word.

Writing takes many different forms in a nature journal. We can use it to label sketches, take notes about something we notice or describe a scene. It is possible, also, to use the written word to turn inward a little and reflect on our own thoughts and feelings, the things that move us and how time spent in nature can change the story of our lives. There are many benefits to this form of reflective writing, the most significant being that we learn more about our inner lives and increase the connection with ourselves and with our world.

For those not familiar with the process, reflective and creative writing may feel intimidating at first. Just like it is important not to let fears about art prevent us from creating sketches in our journal, it is important not to feel scared to be creative with words. Poems don’t have to rhyme! Words don’t have to make sense to other people! It is our inner journey which is important here, and the process of reflecting and writing our feelings is always an exercise in connection and growth. Try to let go of self-judgment and criticism and let your inner life flow onto the page through the written word.

Some ways to incorporate reflective and creative writing in your nature journal:

• Create a poem from your sensory observations.

• Use simile and metaphor to view common things in a new way.

• Think about a childhood memory of being in nature. Write about what this experience meant to you.

• Try transforming factual nature journaling observations into a poem.

• Reflect on the way you feel emotionally when you are in nature.

• Try using the common journaling prompts of “I notice…I wonder…It reminds me of…” in response to the feelings and thoughts inside of you instead of something external.

• Sit in nature and centre yourself in the present moment. Use stream-of-consciousness writing to fill a page in your journal. Write whatever comes to your mind, without judgment or self censorship.

• Use a sit-spot to connect with a particular place in nature regularly. Visit this place over a period of time and write about your experience here. Some people keep the same sit-spot for decades!

Poetry

Reading a poem is like taking a glimpse into the mind and heart of another person. The power of this is that when a poem speaks to our own personal experience it can make us understand that we are not alone in the things we think and feel. Writing poetry can a joy filled activity. If you need some creative inspiration, take a look at the Poetry section of the Books & Inspiration page. To get started, here is a poem by Emilie Lygren:

FOR THE GRANDMOTHER TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO PLANT SEEDS

IN THE COMMUNITY GARDEN 

“Just a little bit, they only
need to go down an inch,
make a small hole, use your pinkie,
put the seeds in,
gently, gently.”

Elders pass on practice with invocation of earth under fingernails
It doesn’t matter so much if the rows are straight
so long as we remember ourselves.

We can spend a day like this, or a life,
let afternoons pass under
shifting light and swollen clouds.

Plants need no permission, only our exhale,
sunbeams, a thin veil of rain.

How many more hopeful acts do we have left?

After a thousand tragedies,
sleepless nights staring up at the rafters,
the ground beneath
is waiting to begin again,
the seeds will still be true.

When recruiting for a Personal Assistant in 2019, Pallant House Gallery director Simon Martin was inspired by one interviewee’s enthusiastic response to a set task of speaking about their favourite work of art. The chosen work was Eric Ravilious’ wood engraving Hoopoes from The Writings of Gilbert White, and it planted the seed of an idea for an exhibition: a display of the modern illustrators of Revd. Gilbert White’s much-loved book, Natural History of Selborne, which would celebrate White’s lasting influence on artists.

The exhibition was planned for the following year – 2020 – to coincide with the tercentenary of White’s birth, but the outbreak of the Covid pandemic meant that the Gallery had to be closed to the public only three days after the exhibition opened. Undeterred by this inauspicious start, Simon Martin resolved to ensure that those who wanted to experience the beauty of the exhibition’s historic prints and newly-commissioned works by contemporary artists and illustrators would still be able to do so. He wrote a book.

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Simon Martin writes…

Since its publication in 1789, Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne has inspired generations of artists, writers and naturalists. From Thomas Bewick to Clare Leighton, many artists’ depictions of animals, birds and wildlife have illustrated White’s celebrated book, together creating a microcosm of natural history illustration. Writing a book about the artists who have illustrated White’s Natural History was not something I originally set out to do, but it has been an immensely rewarding outcome of circumstances created by the Covid pandemic.

Natural history and the art of poetry

I must confess that whilst it was visual art that started my journey into White’s Selborne, this point of entry led me into a study of nature: endlessly cross-referencing photographs of different species with artists’ depictions and White’s descriptions, reading and re-reading certain passages. It is easy to see why poets such as W.H. Auden, John Clare and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have admired the naturalist’s turn-of-phrase. White used vivid poetic analogies, observations such as ‘vast, swaggering, rock-like clouds’ and rooks making ‘a pleasing murmur…not unlike the cry of a pack of hounds in hollow echoing woods, or the rushing of the wind in tall trees, or the tumbling of the tide upon a pebbly shore’. Such descriptions were the perfect brief for artists and illustrators.

Memorably, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf declared how, ‘By some apparently unconscious device of the author has a door been left open, through which we hear distant sounds, a dog barking, cart-wheels creaking’. After searching out her beautiful and perceptive essay ‘White’s Selborne’, first published in the New Statesman in September 1939, I was surprised to learn that it had hardly been republished, except in her Collected Writings, and I was determined that if I was able to bring together many of the modern illustrators that this should also be included. Similarly, W.H. Auden’s Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White, first published in the New York Review in 1973, is included together with some of White’s own poems, as well as contemporary poems by Kathryn Bevis and Jo Bell. Fortunately, Sir David Attenborough kindly agreed to us reprinting his thoughtful 1977 essay in which he describes White as a man ‘in total harmony with his world’.

Focusing on 20th-century artists

Setting out to record a visual history of a book is not without its challenges, especially during a pandemic when libraries and archives are closed. Every week multiple parcels would arrive as I bought myself more and more books (partly as research and partly to cheer myself up in the months of lockdown), not just editions of White, but biographies and other books on nature illustrated by the artists I was studying. With so many editions, it became a question of where to draw the line, and I came to dread discovering yet another edition after it became too late to include it. Inevitably the primary focus was on 20th century artists, and particularly those working in wood-engraved illustration, a medium particularly suited to natural history book illustration. These included some of the greatest exponents of the medium: Eric Fitch Daglish, Gertrude Hermes, Eric Ravilious, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, Christopher Wormell. Each of these artists looked back to the engravings of birds and animals by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Painter-printmaker John Piper had even gifted an 1875 edition of the Natural History with illustrations ascribed to Bewick as courtship gift to his wife Myfanwy.

Thomas Bewick: founding father of British wood-engraving

Thomas Bewick had apparently loved White’s Selborne. The first volume of his A History of British Birds, published in 1797, presented a list of nineteen birds which were ‘chiefly selected from Mr. White’s Natural History of Selborne, and are arranged nearly in the order of their appearing’. So, it was disappointing to discover during the course of my research that Bewick had never actually illustrated White’s book, but rather that several of his vignettes were later copied as headpieces and tailpieces for numerous Victorian editions of White’s book. Such is the stuff of detailed footnotes, but many hours were spent comparing images from Bewick’s History of British Birds and the images made after him by the likes of his pupils John Thompson, John Jackson and Charlton Nesbit. What is undeniable is that White and Bewick shared an affinity of approach: both were recorders of the minutiae of country life and precise observers of birds and animals, White in prose and Bewick in his carefully-crafted illustrations. Acknowledged as the founding father of British wood-engraving, Bewick’s birds and animals were an important influence in the 1930s and 40s on the printmakers in the book. Whilst I knew quite a bit about many of these artists, I was intrigued by an almost unrecorded artist called Claire Oldham, who had illustrated a particularly lovely edition in 1947. Through genealogical searches on ancestry websites and articles in 1940s issues of The Studio, I was able to ascertain her life-dates; and discovered that she was actually the niece of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, and had lived in the South Downs.

The challenges of editing (and Timothy the tortoise)

Editing also became an immense challenge: how to standardise spellings across several centuries; should we use capitals or lower case for Linnean names, even when what White used was technically incorrect today? Although the book inevitably features an array of hedgehogs, a kettle of swallows, a parliament of owls, a nest of mice, and a cry of hoopoes, each depiction has its own character and identity that stops it ever becoming repetitive, at least to my eyes. Inevitably there is a creep of tortoises as so many artists have been drawn to the humorous qualities of White’s pet Timothy, as indeed was the poet Sylvia Townsend Warner.

It was a source of great frustration that the cover illustration on her 1946 compendium The Portrait of a Tortoise, extracted from White’s letters, was not credited anywhere. However, thanks to helpful researchers at the University of Reading and Chatto and Windus archives I was able to positively confirm my identification of Irene Hawkins as the artist. In such a way many hours were spent on checking up the kinds of footnote arguments that few notice, but hopefully the end result is something that will stand the test of time and be a contribution to the impressive scholarship on Gilbert White and on British natural history illustration. It has been hugely rewarding to receive kind comments from the likes of Richard Mabey and Alexandra Harris, and – perhaps most of all – to hear that Sir David Attenborough wanted 36 copies to give to his family and friends!

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Drawn to Nature brings together depictions of British wildlife from the 18th century to today, inspired by Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Find out more.

Distributed for Pallant Publications

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Updated on April 14, 2017

Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator’s encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

«In critical practice,» says Michael P. Branch, «the term ‘nature writing’ has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice, and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay. Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda» («Before Nature Writing,» in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

• At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
• The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
• Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
• The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
• In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
• An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
• January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
• The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
• Migration, by Barry Lopez
• The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
• Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

• «Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . ..
  «The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs, literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . .
  «In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir’s words, that ‘the money changers were in the temple’ continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature’s wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs.
  «Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing.»
  (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing. Norton, 2002)

«Human Writing . . . in Nature»

• «By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really ‘nature writing’ anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau’s] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There’s something to celebrate.» (David Gessner, «Sick of Nature.» The Boston Globe, Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

• «I do not believe that the solution to the world’s ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature
  «Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a ‘nature writer’ is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that ‘nature never did betray the heart that loved her.’ Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. ‘Nature writing’ is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically ‘nature writing’ does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things.»
  (Joseph Wood Krutch, «Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer.» New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 1952)

Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. «Nature» can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.^[1]

The word nature is borrowed from the Old French nature and is derived from the Latin word natura, or «essential qualities, innate disposition», and in ancient times, literally meant «birth».^[2] In ancient philosophy, natura is mostly used as the Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics of plants, animals, and other features of the world to develop of their own accord.^[3][4]
The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion;^[1] it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers (though this word had a dynamic dimension then, especially for Heraclitus), and has steadily gained currency ever since.

During the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries, nature became the passive reality, organized and moved by divine laws.^[5][6] With the Industrial revolution, nature increasingly became seen as the part of reality deprived from intentional intervention: it was hence considered as sacred by some traditions (Rousseau, American transcendentalism) or a mere decorum for divine providence or human history (Hegel, Marx). However, a vitalist vision of nature, closer to the pre-Socratic one, got reborn at the same time, especially after Charles Darwin.^[1]

Within the various uses of the word today, «nature» often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature can refer to the general realm of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects—the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth. It is often taken to mean the «natural environment» or wilderness—wild animals, rocks, forest, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, «human nature» or «the whole of nature». This more traditional concept of natural things that can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term «natural» might also be distinguished from the unnatural or the supernatural.^[1]

Earth

Earth is the only planet known to support life, and its natural features are the subject of many fields of scientific research. Within the Solar System, it is third closest to the Sun; it is the largest terrestrial planet and the fifth largest overall. Its most prominent climatic features are its two large polar regions, two relatively narrow temperate zones, and a wide equatorial tropical to subtropical region.^[7] Precipitation varies widely with location, from several metres of water per year to less than a millimetre. 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by salt-water oceans. The remainder consists of continents and islands, with most of the inhabited land in the Northern Hemisphere.

Earth has evolved through geological and biological processes that have left traces of the original conditions. The outer surface is divided into several gradually migrating tectonic plates. The interior remains active, with a thick layer of plastic mantle and an iron-filled core that generates a magnetic field. This iron core is composed of a solid inner phase, and a fluid outer phase. Convective motion in the core generates electric currents through dynamo action, and these, in turn, generate the geomagnetic field.

The atmospheric conditions have been significantly altered from the original conditions by the presence of life-forms,^[8] which create an ecological balance that stabilizes the surface conditions. Despite the wide regional variations in climate by latitude and other geographic factors, the long-term average global climate is quite stable during interglacial periods,^[9] and variations of a degree or two of average global temperature have historically had major effects on the ecological balance, and on the actual geography of the Earth.^[10][11]

Geology

Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed. The field is a major academic discipline, and is also important for mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, knowledge about and mitigation of natural hazards, some Geotechnical engineering fields, and understanding past climates and environments.

Geological evolution

The geology of an area evolves through time as rock units are deposited and inserted and deformational processes change their shapes and locations.

Rock units are first emplaced either by deposition onto the surface or intrude into the overlying rock. Deposition can occur when sediments settle onto the surface of the Earth and later lithify into sedimentary rock, or when as volcanic material such as volcanic ash or lava flows, blanket the surface. Igneous intrusions such as batholiths, laccoliths, dikes, and sills, push upwards into the overlying rock, and crystallize as they intrude.

After the initial sequence of rocks has been deposited, the rock units can be deformed and/or metamorphosed. Deformation typically occurs as a result of horizontal shortening, horizontal extension, or side-to-side (strike-slip) motion. These structural regimes broadly relate to convergent boundaries, divergent boundaries, and transform boundaries, respectively, between tectonic plates.

Historical perspective

Earth is estimated to have formed 4.54 billion years ago from the solar nebula, along with the Sun and other planets.^[12] The Moon formed roughly 20 million years later. Initially molten, the outer layer of the Earth cooled, resulting in the solid crust. Outgassing and volcanic activity produced the primordial atmosphere. Condensing water vapor, most or all of which came from ice delivered by comets, produced the oceans and other water sources.^[13] The highly energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule around 4 billion years ago.^[14]

Continents formed, then broke up and reformed as the surface of Earth reshaped over hundreds of millions of years, occasionally combining to make a supercontinent. Roughly 750 million years ago, the earliest known supercontinent Rodinia, began to break apart. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia which broke apart about 540 million years ago, then finally Pangaea, which broke apart about 180 million years ago.^[16]

During the Neoproterozoic era, freezing temperatures covered much of the Earth in glaciers and ice sheets. This hypothesis has been termed the «Snowball Earth», and it is of particular interest as it precedes the Cambrian explosion in which multicellular life forms began to proliferate about 530–540 million years ago.^[17]

Since the Cambrian explosion there have been five distinctly identifiable mass extinctions.^[18] The last mass extinction occurred some 66 million years ago, when a meteorite collision probably triggered the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and other large reptiles, but spared small animals such as mammals. Over the past 66 million years, mammalian life diversified.^[19]

Several million years ago, a species of small African ape gained the ability to stand upright.^[15] The subsequent advent of human life, and the development of agriculture and further civilization allowed humans to affect the Earth more rapidly than any previous life form, affecting both the nature and quantity of other organisms as well as global climate. By comparison, the Great Oxygenation Event, produced by the proliferation of algae during the Siderian period, required about 300 million years to culminate.

The present era is classified as part of a mass extinction event, the Holocene extinction event, the fastest ever to have occurred.^[20][21] Some, such as E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, predict that human destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of one-half of all species in the next 100 years.^[22] The extent of the current extinction event is still being researched, debated and calculated by biologists.^[23][24][25]

Atmosphere, climate, and weather

The Earth’s atmosphere is a key factor in sustaining the ecosystem. The thin layer of gases that envelops the Earth is held in place by gravity. Air is mostly nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, with much smaller amounts of carbon dioxide, argon, etc. The atmospheric pressure declines steadily with altitude. The ozone layer plays an important role in depleting the amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation that reaches the surface. As DNA is readily damaged by UV light, this serves to protect life at the surface. The atmosphere also retains heat during the night, thereby reducing the daily temperature extremes.

Terrestrial weather occurs almost exclusively in the lower part of the atmosphere, and serves as a convective system for redistributing heat.^[26] Ocean currents are another important factor in determining climate, particularly the major underwater thermohaline circulation which distributes heat energy from the equatorial oceans to the polar regions. These currents help to moderate the differences in temperature between winter and summer in the temperate zones. Also, without the redistributions of heat energy by the ocean currents and atmosphere, the tropics would be much hotter, and the polar regions much colder.

Weather can have both beneficial and harmful effects. Extremes in weather, such as tornadoes or hurricanes and cyclones, can expend large amounts of energy along their paths, and produce devastation. Surface vegetation has evolved a dependence on the seasonal variation of the weather, and sudden changes lasting only a few years can have a dramatic effect, both on the vegetation and on the animals which depend on its growth for their food.

Climate is a measure of the long-term trends in the weather. Various factors are known to influence the climate, including ocean currents, surface albedo, greenhouse gases, variations in the solar luminosity, and changes to the Earth’s orbit. Based on historical records, the Earth is known to have undergone drastic climate changes in the past, including ice ages.

The climate of a region depends on a number of factors, especially latitude. A latitudinal band of the surface with similar climatic attributes forms a climate region. There are a number of such regions, ranging from the tropical climate at the equator to the polar climate in the northern and southern extremes. Weather is also influenced by the seasons, which result from the Earth’s axis being tilted relative to its orbital plane. Thus, at any given time during the summer or winter, one part of the Earth is more directly exposed to the rays of the sun. This exposure alternates as the Earth revolves in its orbit. At any given time, regardless of season, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres experience opposite seasons.

Weather is a chaotic system that is readily modified by small changes to the environment, so accurate weather forecasting is limited to only a few days.^[27] Overall, two things are happening worldwide: (1) temperature is increasing on the average; and (2) regional climates have been undergoing noticeable changes.^[28]

Water on the Earth

Water is a chemical substance that is composed of hydrogen and oxygen (H2O) and is vital for all known forms of life.^[29] In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor, or steam. Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface.^[30] On Earth, it is found mostly in oceans and other large bodies of water, with 1.6% of water below ground in aquifers and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds, and precipitation.^[31][32] Oceans hold 97% of surface water, glaciers, and polar ice caps 2.4%, and other land surface water such as rivers, lakes, and ponds 0.6%. Additionally, a minute amount of the Earth’s water is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products.

Oceans

An ocean is a major body of saline water, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface (an area of some 361 million square kilometers) is covered by ocean, a continuous body of water that is customarily divided into several principal oceans and smaller seas. More than half of this area is over 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) deep. Average oceanic salinity is around 35 parts per thousand (ppt) (3.5%), and nearly all seawater has a salinity in the range of 30 to 38 ppt. Though generally recognized as several ‘separate’ oceans, these waters comprise one global, interconnected body of salt water often referred to as the World Ocean or global ocean.^[33][34] This concept of a global ocean as a continuous body of water with relatively free interchange among its parts is of fundamental importance to oceanography.^[35]

The major oceanic divisions are defined in part by the continents, various archipelagos, and other criteria: these divisions are (in descending order of size) the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean. Smaller regions of the oceans are called seas, gulfs, bays and other names. There are also salt lakes, which are smaller bodies of landlocked saltwater that are not interconnected with the World Ocean. Two notable examples of salt lakes are the Aral Sea and the Great Salt Lake.

Lakes

Main article: Lake

A lake (from Latin word lacus) is a terrain feature (or physical feature), a body of liquid on the surface of a world that is localized to the bottom of basin (another type of landform or terrain feature; that is, it is not global) and moves slowly if it moves at all. On Earth, a body of water is considered a lake when it is inland, not part of the ocean, is larger and deeper than a pond, and is fed by a river.^[36][37] The only world other than Earth known to harbor lakes is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, which has lakes of ethane, most likely mixed with methane. It is not known if Titan’s lakes are fed by rivers, though Titan’s surface is carved by numerous river beds. Natural lakes on Earth are generally found in mountainous areas, rift zones, and areas with ongoing or recent glaciation. Other lakes are found in endorheic basins or along the courses of mature rivers. In some parts of the world, there are many lakes because of chaotic drainage patterns left over from the last ice age. All lakes are temporary over geologic time scales, as they will slowly fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them.

Ponds

Main article: Pond

A pond is a body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is usually smaller than a lake. A wide variety of man-made bodies of water are classified as ponds, including water gardens designed for aesthetic ornamentation, fish ponds designed for commercial fish breeding, and solar ponds designed to store thermal energy. Ponds and lakes are distinguished from streams via current speed. While currents in streams are easily observed, ponds and lakes possess thermally driven micro-currents and moderate wind driven currents. These features distinguish a pond from many other aquatic terrain features, such as stream pools and tide pools.

Rivers

A river is a natural watercourse,^[38] usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including stream, creek, brook, rivulet, and rill; there is no general rule that defines what can be called a river. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location; one example is Burn in Scotland and North-east England. Sometimes a river is said to be larger than a creek, but this is not always the case, due to vagueness in the language.^[39] A river is part of the hydrological cycle. Water within a river is generally collected from precipitation through surface runoff, groundwater recharge, springs, and the release of stored water in natural ice and snowpacks (i.e., from glaciers).

Streams

A stream is a flowing body of water with a current, confined within a bed and stream banks. In the United States, a stream is classified as a watercourse less than 60 feet (18 metres) wide. Streams are important as conduits in the water cycle, instruments in groundwater recharge, and they serve as corridors for fish and wildlife migration. The biological habitat in the immediate vicinity of a stream is called a riparian zone. Given the status of the ongoing Holocene extinction, streams play an important corridor role in connecting fragmented habitats and thus in conserving biodiversity. The study of streams and waterways in general involves many branches of inter-disciplinary natural science and engineering, including hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, aquatic ecology, fish biology, riparian ecology, and others.

Ecosystems

Ecosystems are composed of a variety of biotic and abiotic components that function in an interrelated way.^[41] The structure and composition is determined by various environmental factors that are interrelated. Variations of these factors will initiate dynamic modifications to the ecosystem. Some of the more important components are soil, atmosphere, radiation from the sun, water, and living organisms.

Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms interact with every other element in their local environment. Eugene Odum, a founder of ecology, stated: «Any unit that includes all of the organisms (ie: the «community») in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (i.e.: exchange of materials between living and nonliving parts) within the system is an ecosystem.»^[42] Within the ecosystem, species are connected and dependent upon one another in the food chain, and exchange energy and matter between themselves as well as with their environment.^[43] The human ecosystem concept is based on the human/nature dichotomy and the idea that all species are ecologically dependent on each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope.^[44]

A smaller unit of size is called a microecosystem. For example, a microsystem can be a stone and all the life under it. A macroecosystem might involve a whole ecoregion, with its drainage basin.^[45]

Wilderness

Wilderness is generally defined as areas that have not been significantly modified by human activity. Wilderness areas can be found in preserves, estates, farms, conservation preserves, ranches, national forests, national parks, and even in urban areas along rivers, gulches, or otherwise undeveloped areas. Wilderness areas and protected parks are considered important for the survival of certain species, ecological studies, conservation, and solitude. Some nature writers believe wilderness areas are vital for the human spirit and creativity,^[46] and some ecologists consider wilderness areas to be an integral part of the Earth’s self-sustaining natural ecosystem (the biosphere). They may also preserve historic genetic traits and that they provide habitat for wild flora and fauna that may be difficult or impossible to recreate in zoos, arboretums, or laboratories.

Life

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition of life, scientists generally accept that the biological manifestation of life is characterized by organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction.^[47] Life may also be said to be simply the characteristic state of organisms.

Properties common to terrestrial organisms (plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria) are that they are cellular, carbon-and-water-based with complex organization, having a metabolism, a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. An entity with these properties is generally considered life. However, not every definition of life considers all of these properties to be essential. Human-made analogs of life may also be considered to be life.

The biosphere is the part of Earth’s outer shell—including land, surface rocks, water, air and the atmosphere—within which life occurs, and which biotic processes in turn alter or transform. From the broadest geophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere (rocks), hydrosphere (water), and atmosphere (air). The entire Earth contains over 75 billion tons (150 trillion pounds or about 6.8×10¹³ kilograms) of biomass (life), which lives within various environments within the biosphere.^[48]

Over nine-tenths of the total biomass on Earth is plant life, on which animal life depends very heavily for its existence.^[49] More than 2 million species of plant and animal life have been identified to date,^[50] and estimates of the actual number of existing species range from several million to well over 50 million.^[51][52][53] The number of individual species of life is constantly in some degree of flux, with new species appearing and others ceasing to exist on a continual basis.^[54][55] The total number of species is in rapid decline.^[56][57][58]

Evolution

The origin of life on Earth is not well understood, but it is known to have occurred at least 3.5 billion years ago,^[61][62][63] during the hadean or archean eons on a primordial Earth that had a substantially different environment than is found at present.^[64] These life forms possessed the basic traits of self-replication and inheritable traits. Once life had appeared, the process of evolution by natural selection resulted in the development of ever-more diverse life forms.

Species that were unable to adapt to the changing environment and competition from other life forms became extinct. However, the fossil record retains evidence of many of these older species. Current fossil and DNA evidence shows that all existing species can trace a continual ancestry back to the first primitive life forms.^[64]

When basic forms of plant life developed the process of photosynthesis the sun’s energy could be harvested to create conditions which allowed for more complex life forms.^[65] The resultant oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and gave rise to the ozone layer. The incorporation of smaller cells within larger ones resulted in the development of yet more complex cells called eukaryotes.^[66] Cells within colonies became increasingly specialized, resulting in true multicellular organisms. With the ozone layer absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation, life colonized the surface of Earth.

Microbes

The first form of life to develop on the Earth were microbes, and they remained the only form of life until about a billion years ago when multi-cellular organisms began to appear.^[67] Microorganisms are single-celled organisms that are generally microscopic, and smaller than the human eye can see. They include Bacteria, Fungi, Archaea, and Protista.

These life forms are found in almost every location on the Earth where there is liquid water, including in the Earth’s interior.^[68]
Their reproduction is both rapid and profuse. The combination of a high mutation rate and a horizontal gene transfer^[69] ability makes them highly adaptable, and able to survive in new environments, including outer space.^[70] They form an essential part of the planetary ecosystem. However, some microorganisms are pathogenic and can post health risk to other organisms.

Plants and animals

Originally Aristotle divided all living things between plants, which generally do not move fast enough for humans to notice, and animals. In Linnaeus’ system, these became the kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Plantae) and Animalia. Since then, it has become clear that the Plantae as originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the fungi and several groups of algae were removed to new kingdoms. However, these are still often considered plants in many contexts. Bacterial life is sometimes included in flora,^[71][72] and some classifications use the term bacterial flora separately from plant flora.

Among the many ways of classifying plants are by regional floras, which, depending on the purpose of study, can also include fossil flora, remnants
of plant life from a previous era. People in many regions and countries take great pride in their individual arrays of characteristic flora, which can vary widely across the globe due to differences in climate and terrain.

Regional floras commonly are divided into categories such as native flora and agricultural and garden flora, the lastly mentioned of which are intentionally grown and cultivated. Some types of «native flora» actually have been introduced centuries ago by people migrating from one region or continent to another, and become an integral part of the native, or natural flora of the place to which they were introduced. This is an example of how human interaction with nature can blur the boundary of what is considered nature.

Another category of plant has historically been carved out for weeds. Though the term has fallen into disfavor among botanists as a formal way to categorize «useless» plants, the informal use of the word «weeds» to describe those plants that are deemed worthy of elimination is illustrative of the general tendency of people and societies to seek to alter or shape the course of nature. Similarly, animals are often categorized in ways such as domestic, farm animals, wild animals, pests, etc. according to their relationship to human life.

Animals as a category have several characteristics that generally set them apart from other living things. Animals are eukaryotic and usually multicellular (although see Myxozoa), which separates them from bacteria, archaea, and most protists. They are heterotrophic, generally digesting food in an internal chamber, which separates them from plants and algae. They are also distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls.

With a few exceptions—most notably the two phyla consisting of sponges and placozoans—animals have bodies that are differentiated into tissues. These include muscles, which are able to contract and control locomotion, and a nervous system, which sends and processes signals. There is also typically an internal digestive chamber. The eukaryotic cells possessed by all animals are surrounded by a characteristic extracellular matrix composed of collagen and elastic glycoproteins. This may be calcified to form structures like shells, bones, and spicules, a framework upon which cells can move about and be reorganized during development and maturation, and which supports the complex anatomy required for mobility.

Human interrelationship

Human impact

Although humans comprise only a minuscule proportion of the total living biomass on Earth, the human effect on nature is disproportionately large. Because of the extent of human influence, the boundaries between what humans regard as nature and «made environments» is not clear cut except at the extremes. Even at the extremes, the amount of natural environment that is free of discernible human influence is diminishing at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2020 study published in Nature found that anthropogenic mass (human-made materials) outweighs all living biomass on earth, with plastic alone exceeding the mass of all land and marine animals combined.^[73] And according to a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, only about 3% of the planet’s terrestrial surface is ecologically and faunally intact, with a low human footprint and healthy populations of native animal species.^[74][75]

The development of technology by the human race has allowed the greater exploitation of natural resources and has helped to alleviate some of the risk from natural hazards. In spite of this progress, however, the fate of human civilization remains closely linked to changes in the environment. There exists a highly complex feedback loop between the use of advanced technology and changes to the environment that are only slowly becoming understood.^[76] Man-made threats to the Earth’s natural environment include pollution, deforestation, and disasters such as oil spills. Humans have contributed to the extinction of many plants and animals,^[77] with roughly 1 million species threatened with extinction within decades.^[78] The loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions over the last half century have impacted the extent that nature can contribute to human quality of life,^[79] and continued declines could pose a major threat to the continued existence of human civilization, unless a rapid course correction is made.^[80] The value of natural resources to human society is not reflected in market prices because mostly natural resources are available free of charge. This distorts market pricing of natural resources and at the same time leads to underinvestment in our natural assets. The annual global cost of public subsidies that damage nature is conservatively estimated at $4–$6 trillion (million million). Institutional protections of these natural goods, such as the oceans and rainforests, are lacking. Governments have not prevented these economic externalities.^[81][82]

Humans employ nature for both leisure and economic activities. The acquisition of natural resources for industrial use remains a sizable component of the world’s economic system.^[83][84] Some activities, such as hunting and fishing, are used for both sustenance and leisure, often by different people. Agriculture was first adopted around the 9th millennium BCE. Ranging from food production to energy, nature influences economic wealth.

Although early humans gathered uncultivated plant materials for food and employed the medicinal properties of vegetation for healing,^[85] most modern human use of plants is through agriculture. The clearance of large tracts of land for crop growth has led to a significant reduction in the amount available of forestation and wetlands, resulting in the loss of habitat for many plant and animal species as well as increased erosion.^[86]

Aesthetics and beauty

Beauty in nature has historically been a prevalent theme in art and books, filling large sections of libraries and bookstores. That nature has been depicted and celebrated by so much art, photography, poetry, and other literature shows the strength with which many people associate nature and beauty. Reasons why this association exists, and what the association consists of, are studied by the branch of philosophy called aesthetics. Beyond certain basic characteristics that many philosophers agree about to explain what is seen as beautiful, the opinions are virtually endless.^[87] Nature and wildness have been important subjects in various eras of world history. An early tradition of landscape art began in China during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The tradition of representing nature as it is became one of the aims of Chinese painting and was a significant influence in Asian art.

Although natural wonders are celebrated in the Psalms and the Book of Job, wilderness portrayals in art became more prevalent in the 1800s, especially in the works of the Romantic movement. British artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. Before that, paintings had been primarily of religious scenes or of human beings. William Wordsworth’s poetry described the wonder of the natural world, which had formerly been viewed as a threatening place. Increasingly the valuing of nature became an aspect of Western culture.^[88] This artistic movement also coincided with the Transcendentalist movement in the Western world. A common classical idea of beautiful art involves the word mimesis, the imitation of nature. Also in the realm of ideas about beauty in nature is that the perfect is implied through perfect mathematical forms and more generally by patterns in nature. As David Rothenburg writes, «The beautiful is the root of science and the goal of art, the highest possibility that humanity can ever hope to see».^[89]: 281

Matter and energy

Some fields of science see nature as matter in motion, obeying certain laws of nature which science seeks to understand. For this reason the most fundamental science is generally understood to be «physics»—the name for which is still recognizable as meaning that it is the «study of nature«.

Matter is commonly defined as the substance of which physical objects are composed. It constitutes the observable universe. The visible components of the universe are now believed to compose only 4.9 percent of the total mass. The remainder is believed to consist of 26.8 percent cold dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy.^[90] The exact arrangement of these components is still unknown and is under intensive investigation by physicists.

The behaviour of matter and energy throughout the observable universe appears to follow well-defined physical laws. These laws have been employed to produce cosmological models that successfully explain the structure and the evolution of the universe we can observe. The mathematical expressions of the laws of physics employ a set of twenty physical constants^[91] that appear to be static across the observable universe.^[92] The values of these constants have been carefully measured, but the reason for their specific values remains a mystery.

Beyond Earth

Outer space, also simply called space, refers to the relatively empty regions of the Universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. Outer space is used to distinguish it from airspace (and terrestrial locations). There is no discrete boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, as the atmosphere gradually attenuates with increasing altitude. Outer space within the Solar System is called interplanetary space, which passes over into interstellar space at what is known as the heliopause.

Outer space is sparsely filled with several dozen types of organic molecules discovered to date by microwave spectroscopy, blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang and the origin of the universe, and cosmic rays, which include ionized atomic nuclei and various subatomic particles. There is also some gas, plasma and dust, and small meteors. Additionally, there are signs of human life in outer space today, such as material left over from previous crewed and uncrewed launches which are a potential hazard to spacecraft. Some of this debris re-enters the atmosphere periodically.

Although Earth is the only body within the Solar System known to support life, evidence suggests that in the distant past the planet Mars possessed bodies of liquid water on the surface.^[93] For a brief period in Mars’ history, it may have also been capable of forming life. At present though, most of the water remaining on Mars is frozen.
If life exists at all on Mars, it is most likely to be located underground where liquid water can still exist.^[94]

Conditions on the other terrestrial planets, Mercury and Venus, appear to be too harsh to support life as we know it. But it has been conjectured that Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter, may possess a sub-surface ocean of liquid water and could potentially host life.^[95]

Astronomers have started to discover extrasolar Earth analogs – planets that lie in the habitable zone of space surrounding a star, and therefore could possibly host life as we know it.^[96]

See also

Media:

• National Wildlife, a publication of the National Wildlife Federation
• Natural History, by Pliny the Elder
• Natural World (TV series)
• Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nature, a prominent scientific journal
• Nature (TV series)
• The World We Live In (Life magazine)

Organizations:

• Nature Detectives
• The Nature Conservancy

Philosophy:

• Balance of nature (biological fallacy), a discredited concept of natural equilibrium in predator–prey dynamics
• Mother Nature
• Naturalism, any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism that do not distinguish the supernatural from nature;^[97] this includes the methodological naturalism of natural science, which makes the methodological assumption that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes, without assuming either the existence or non-existence of the supernatural
• Nature (philosophy)

Notes and references

Further reading

• Droz, Layna; et al. (May 31, 2022). «Exploring the diversity of conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia». Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 9 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1057/s41599-022-01186-5. ISSN 2662-9992.
• Ducarme, Frédéric; Couvet, Denis (2020). «What does ‘nature’ mean?». Palgrave Communications. Springer Nature. 6 (14). doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0390-y.
• Emerson, Ralph W. (1836). Nature. Boston: James Munroe & Co.
• Farber, Paul Lawrence (2000), Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
• Naddaf, Gerard (2006). The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY Press.
• Piccolo, John J.; Taylor, Bron; Washington, Haydn; Kopnina, Helen; Gray, Joe; Alberro, Heather; Orlikowska, Ewa (2022). ««Nature’s contributions to people» and peoples’ moral obligations to nature». Biological Conservation. 270: 109572. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109572. S2CID 248769087.
• Worster, D. (1994). Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (iucnredlist.org)
• Ducarme, Frédéric (January 3, 2021). «What is nature?». Encyclopedia of the Environment.