Nature

Nature is a broad concept that encompasses the physical universe in general, but especially the world of Earth’s living things and their ecosystems, including the inorganic features thereof and natural phenomena such as the weather. The word "nature" comes from the Latin word natura, which literally means "birth" but was also used to mean "quality or characteristic," "universe," and "the course of things"—a plethora of usages that are retained in the English word today.

Most discussions of nature implicitly address it as distinct from human activity and artifacts—the natural environment set in opposition to the built environment, for example—even though humanity is part of the natural world, and the artifacts of other species, such as the lodges of beavers, are not similarly excepted. The purpose of this exclusion is generally to acknowledge the unique impact of human activity on the natural world, as well as humans’ seemingly unique ability to discuss their role in that world.

In some contexts, "nature" refers even more specifically to a real or hypothetical state of the environment in which it is virtually untouched by the influence of human activity. In philosophy, for instance, the "state of nature" refers to the condition of human existence before humanity organized into societies. In reference to the environment, "nature" in this sense refers to a so-called unspoiled area, such as virgin forest or the heart of a vast desert. Some observers have challenged such interpretations, however, and argued that humans can and should be explicitly included as part of nature.

Background

The phrase "natural phenomena" refers to events and processes observed in nature that are not human-made. Although a sufficiently granular list of such phenomena could include hundreds of entries, broad categories include meteorological phenomena; geological processes, including volcanic activities such as earthquakes and geysers as well as smaller-scale phenomena such as erosion, sedimentation, and cementation; chemical processes, such as rusting and wildfires; atmospheric optical phenomena, such as rainbows, green flashes, and sun dogs; oceanographic phenomena, such as ocean currents, tides, and wave action; and the biological processes of organic substances, including decomposition, fermentation, and the processes that transpire within or among living organisms.

Another idea that interlinks closely with the understanding of nature is the concept of ecosystems. An ecosystem consists of both living (biotic) and nonliving (abiotic) components that interact together as a system. For instance, solar energy and soil minerals that enter an ecosystem through plant life are abiotic components, as is the water that most plants and animals depend on. The key to identifying an ecosystem is the interdependence of the components. An ecosystem is not simply where plants and animals live; it is also defined by the balance that has developed among its different components. Plants use photosynthesis to convert solar energy and captured atmospheric carbon into usable plant energy. Animals then consume these plants, taking in the energy they contain. When plants and animals die, they decompose, releasing nutrients back into the soil and carbon back into the atmosphere, in part through the work of classes of organisms called decomposers and detritivores, which include fungi, worms, millipedes, slugs, fiddler crabs, and sea cucumbers.

Relatively unspoiled natural environments are often also called "wilderness" or "wildland." They are important for biodiversity and the overall health of the planet, as well as for the work of ecologists, naturalists, and biologists. Though many associate the word "wilderness" with forested areas, any type of ecosystem can be classified as wilderness, including tundra, desert, and shrubland. Since ancient times, many civilizations have sought to protect wilderness areas, though the motives have changed over time. Medieval English kings were concerned primarily with protecting their private hunting reserves, for example. Over the following centuries, prevailing trends in Western philosophy helped reinforce the idea of nature as something separate from humans, which in turn contributed to efforts to preserve nature. Naturalists in the nineteenth century began the conservation movement, and the United States pioneered the concept of establishing national parks—that is, park areas set aside for conservation purposes—beginning with Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

The conservation movement and the subsequent modern environmental movement significantly shaped public perceptions of nature, particularly as a phenomenon considered apart from human activity. However, later critics have increasingly disputed the popular view of "nature" as limited to a romanticized, "pristine" wilderness, arguing that such a belief grossly oversimplifies the complexity of the natural world and humans' place within it. For example, as historians have pointed out, many early national parks and other "natural areas" were long inhabited by Indigenous peoples, who may not have practiced Western-style development but impacted the landscape in many ways nonetheless. While it has been common for observers to label Indigenous peoples as more "attuned to nature," some scholars and activists have questioned this stereotype. In the twenty-first century, many ecologists have encouraged a broader definition of nature that explicitly recognizes all humans as part of the natural world.

Fields of Study

In the study of nature, there are several overlapping areas of inquiry. Geology is the study of Earth’s crust, also called the lithosphere, and includes the study of volcanic and seismic activity, plate tectonics, and the rocks and unconsolidated material found in the crust. While geologists primarily study inorganic materials such as rocks and solid earth, their studies are not irrelevant to the study of life, since their findings are key to shedding light on evolutionary history, understanding the impact organisms have on their environment, and learning about the history of an ecosystem.

Oceanography is the study of the major water bodies of Earth—the oceans and the seas—and includes the study of the geology and plate tectonics of the sea floor, as well as the study of waves and ocean currents, hydrology and meteorology, fluid dynamics, and climatology. Marine biology is a separate discipline, but marine biologists need to have some understanding of oceanography.

The various disciplines that study the layers of air surrounding Earth, known as the atmosphere, include climatology, which focuses on the atmospheric changes that define climate; atmospheric chemistry; atmospheric physics; aeronomy, which focuses on the upper layers of the atmosphere; and meteorology, which incorporates atmospheric chemistry and physics in an effort to construct short- and long-term predictive models of the weather. All of these disciplines can include study of climate change and global warming.

The life sciences include the scientific studies of living organisms: biology and its subfields (notably zoology, botany, and genetics), which are experimental sciences; natural history, a principally observational scientific study; ecology, which studies how organisms interact together and with the nonliving components of their ecosystem; and medicine and its many subfields, which are applied sciences dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of disease and injury.

Reintroduction and Rewilding

The term "rewilding" refers to an effort, embraced by parts of the conservation movement, to restore the "naturalness" of wilderness areas, particularly in the form of reintroducing specific species. Rewilding preserves biodiversity and the basic functionality and health of ecosystems by restoring a balance that has been disrupted, in most cases by human activity. Often these efforts focus on alpha (or apex) predators, who are the carnivores at the top of their food chain. The presence of alpha predators is now understood to be important in preserving stable population dynamics in the food chain, and, thus, by extension, is important to the functioning and stability of the ecosystem as a whole, because of the effect that herbivores lower on the food chain have on the plant life in the ecosystem and the effects that plant ecology can have on erosion and waterways.

The textbook example of successful rewilding is the reintroduction of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, a success that was due largely to the size of the park and the efforts to conserve it. The renewed presence of wolves reduced the number of elks, which in turn reduced the amount of plant life the elks grazed on. Trees flourished in the riparian strips along the rivers, benefiting moose and smaller mammal species like beavers. Meanwhile, numerous species scavenged wolf kills and saw their own numbers increase, including grizzly and black bears, coyotes, and ravens.

The alpha predator is an example of a keystone species, which is a species whose impact on its environment is disproportionate to the size of its population. Much of the theoretical work underpinning rewilding involves correctly identifying keystone species. They are not always predators. A certain kind of plant may provide both habitat and food for certain species that are in turn important to the food chain, while in marine environments especially, a single species may be the primary source of food for multiple species of predator.

In the United States, other major reintroduction programs have included the reintroduction of the musk ox in Alaska and the ongoing reintroduction of the California condor in California, the fisher in Washington, and whooping cranes throughout the eastern United States. There have also been proposals for so-called Pleistocene rewilding: the introduction of various species acting as proxies of extinct megafauna of the Pleistocene era to the regions where those megafauna lived, with the aim of restoring the Pleistocene-era ecological balance. The advent of genetic engineering even raised the possibility of resurrecting extinct species and reintroducing them to their former habitats. Such ideas have been controversial, however, and raised complex ethical debate about human environmental impact.

The Gaia Hypothesis

There is a long tradition of using "Nature" or "Mother Nature" as a personification of nature, even independent of traditions of a nature goddess. The phrase "Mother Nature" has been in usage in English since the thirteenth century, and she was a popular figure across medieval Europe in art and rhetoric. Often used as a metaphor for the physical world— Mother Nature nourishes as the physical world provides—she took on an aspect that was almost angelic for some theologians who believed that God personally created the earth.

In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis revived the idea of a personification of nature, but in a different sense. Their work, called the "Gaia hypothesis" (named for the primordial Greek goddess Gaia, who was the personification of Earth and gave birth to the gods), proposed that Earth is a single ecosystem in which organisms and their environment evolve together in a self-regulating system, with the ultimate goal of sustaining life. There are various formulations of the Gaia hypothesis, ranging from the simple claim that biotic elements influence abiotic elements in support of the evolution of life to the more spiritual claim that Earth is a single living being of which every organism is a component; the latter claim is in essence untestable.

Variations on the basic Gaia hypothesis continue to be explored in the twenty-first century, and even those who reject its claims point out that the work of its proponents raises important questions about the interdependence of ecosystems not only in the present but on an evolutionary timescale. The related yet diametrically opposed "Medea hypothesis," proposed by paleontologist Peter Ward, posits that several microbe-induced mass extinction events in Earth’s past were triggered as attempts to end multicellular life and return life on Earth to one of microbe dominance.

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