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The four laws of ecology, by barry draycott.

Way back in 1979, while I was earning my degree in Environmental Studies, one of the required reading books was The Closing Circle, Nature, Man & Technology , written by the ecologist Barry Commoner. 

Commoner addressed the environmental crisis and humans and nature’s interaction on many different aspects: including population growth, consumer demand, politics, capitalism, greed, and other factors. He sums it up with this quote: 

In the book, he formulated the Four Laws of Ecology.

The first of these informal laws,  Everything is connected to everything else , indicates how ecosystems are complex and interconnected. This complexity and interconnectedness are not like that of the individual organism whose various organs have evolved and have been selected based on their contribution to the survival and fecundity of the whole. Nature is far more complex, variable, and considerably more resilient than the metaphor of the evolution of an individual organism suggests. An ecosystem can lose species and undergo significant transformations without collapsing. Yet, the interconnectedness of nature also means that ecological systems can experience sudden, startling catastrophes if placed under extreme stress. “The system,” Commoner writes, “is stabilized by its dynamic self-compensating properties; these same properties, if overstressed, can lead to a dramatic collapse.” Further, “the ecological system is an amplifier, so that a small perturbation in one place may have large, distant, long-delayed effects elsewhere.”

The second law of ecology,  Everything must go somewhere , restates a basic law of thermodynamics: in nature, there is no final waste, matter and energy are preserved, and the waste produced in one ecological process is recycled in another. For instance, a downed tree or log in an old-growth forest is a life source for numerous species and an essential part of the ecosystem. Likewise, animals excrete carbon dioxide into the air and organic compounds into the soil, which helps sustain plants upon which animals will feed.

Nature knows best , t he third informal law of ecology, Commoner writes, “holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.” During 5 billion years of evolution, living things developed an array of substances and reactions that together constitute the living biosphere. However, the modern petrochemical industry suddenly created thousands of new substances that did not exist in nature. Based on the same basic carbon chemistry patterns as natural compounds, these new substances enter readily into existing biochemical processes. But they do so in ways that are frequently destructive to life, leading to mutations, cancer, and many different forms of death and disease. “The absence of a particular substance from nature,” Commoner writes, “is often a sign that it is incompatible with the chemistry of life.”

There is no such thing as a free lunch. The fourth informal law of ecology expresses that the exploitation of nature always carries an ecological cost. From a strict ecological standpoint, human beings are consumers more than they are producers.  The second law of thermodynamics tells us that in the very process of using energy, human beings “use up” (but do not destroy) energy, in the sense that they transform it into unworkable forms. 

For example, in the case of an automobile, the high-grade chemical energy stored in the gasoline that fuels the car is available for useful work while the lower grade thermal energy in the automobile exhaust is not. In any transformation of energy, some of it is always degraded in this way. The ecological costs of production are, therefore, significant.

I found these laws to be very interesting in general. However, Commoner went into a very detailed analysis of these laws’ impact, so I put it away after reading it and continued with my education. But the seed was planted.

After graduation, I chose a career in the landscape industry because I loved being outside and doing physical work. Over time I was promoted to manage the pesticide and fertilizer division for a few tree care companies. Over the years, I saw our industry slowly evolve from blanket treatments to spot treatments and plant health care programs.

Eventually, I founded my own company about 15 years ago, which specialized in organic treatments, after becoming a NOFA Accredited Organic Land Care Professional and attending several of Elaine Ingham’s, who is a leader in soil microbiology,  classes. The company gradually morphed into a supply company.

During this time, I began to use the phrase “Everything is connected to everything else” at the end of presentations and emails. I had forgotten where I had heard the phrase, so I Googled it and was reintroduced to Commoner’s book. 

The seed was watered . Last year I found a copy of The Closing Circle, Nature, Man & Technology and started reading it again. I was stunned to find in the first chapter even before he states the Four Laws, Commoner discusses the fundamental interaction of nutrients, humus, soil microbes, plant health, and climate! Remember, the book was published in 1971!!

The seed sprouted! People have known about the negative impacts we have on land for quite some time, yet we are only now beginning to grasp the adverse effects it will have on all our lives if we continue to ignore ecosystems. The good news? Our industry has come a long way since then. More consumers are asking for fewer and less harmful pesticide treatments. Our industry is learning how important it is to improve soil health and, even more importantly, how to achieve healthy soil.

Last year was a challenging year for many reasons. But let’s look towards the future and continue to learn how to improve and implement actions that provide positive results. I’ve learned that the only things we have complete control over are our own attitudes and determination.

Remember: “Everything Is Connected To Everything Else”

 About the Author

Barry Draycott is the owner of Tech Terra Environmental (TTE), founded in 2005. Techterra Environmental provides ecological solutions for landscape professionals with organic soil amendments and pollinator-friendly insect control products. They can customize your application program to meet your specific requirements. Barry’s career in the green industry began in 1977 as a pesticide applicator for a New Jersey tree care company. For decades Barry looked for ways to improve plant vigor and reduce pesticide usage. This led him to scientific research, which demonstrated the positive impact improving soil health has on plant vigor. Barry made 2021 his “ Year of Renewal.” This means that he has recommitted to the company’s #1 goal : pro viding landscapers, schools, and now the agricultural industry with the knowledge and products that will help grow business while protecting our environment and our health.

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Mention of products is not intended to constitute an endorsement. Opinions expressed in this newsletter article do not necessarily represent those of ELA’s directors, staff, or members.  

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Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

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Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

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Essay on Nature our Best Friend

Students are often asked to write an essay on Nature our Best Friend in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Nature our Best Friend

Introduction.

Nature is our best friend. It provides us with all the essentials of life: air, water, food, and shelter.

Gifts from Nature

Nature is generous. It gives us fruits, vegetables, and grains for food. It offers us water to drink and clean air to breathe.

Beauty of Nature

Nature is beautiful. It treats us with spectacular views of mountains, rivers, forests, and the sky.

In return, we should respect nature and protect it. After all, nature is not just our friend, but our life-giver and sustainer.

250 Words Essay on Nature our Best Friend

The unparalleled companion: nature.

Nature, the most profound and reliable companion of humans, has been a source of inspiration, solace, and guidance since time immemorial. Its vast expanse, diverse forms, and ceaseless metamorphosis render it a friend unlike any other, always available to teach, comfort, and rejuvenate.

Nature as Our Guide

Nature, in its infinite wisdom, offers lessons of resilience and adaptability. The change of seasons, the ebb and flow of tides, and the cycle of life and death all exemplify the inevitability of change. As young adults, we can learn from this, understanding that change is the only constant, and adapting to it is a pathway to growth.

The Therapeutic Ally

Nature also acts as a therapist, providing an escape from the hustle and bustle of modern life. The serene beauty of a sunset, the soothing rhythm of rain, or the tranquil silence of a forest can all help alleviate stress and anxiety. They remind us to slow down, appreciate the present, and find joy in simplicity.

The Silent Mentor

Furthermore, nature is a silent mentor, subtly teaching us values of coexistence and interdependence. The symbiotic relationships in ecosystems demonstrate the importance of cooperation and mutual respect, essential principles for human societies to thrive.

Preserving Our Friend

However, this friend is under threat due to our reckless actions. We must remember that preserving nature is not just about saving the environment; it’s about safeguarding our friend. As responsible stewards, we should strive to protect and nurture it, ensuring its survival for future generations.

In conclusion, nature, our best friend, is a guide, a therapist, and a mentor. Embracing this friendship can enlighten us, bring peace, and inspire us to live in harmony with our surroundings.

500 Words Essay on Nature our Best Friend

Introduction: the inseparable bond.

Nature, in its broadest sense, is an embodiment of beauty, tranquility, and generosity. It is the ultimate friend, offering us everything we need to survive and thrive, asking for nothing in return. Our relationship with nature is deeply rooted in our biology and culture. As we’ve evolved, we’ve learned to appreciate nature not just for its resources, but also for its profound beauty and inspiration.

Benefactor and Healer

Nature is a bountiful provider, offering us resources that sustain life. Food, water, air, and even the materials we use to build our homes are gifts from nature. But beyond the physical, nature also offers intangible benefits. The calming effect of a walk in the woods, the inspiration derived from a stunning sunset, or the sense of awe at a towering mountain range – these are all therapeutic experiences that nature generously provides.

Nature as a Teacher

Nature is also an exceptional teacher. It teaches us about the cycle of life, the importance of resilience, and the interconnectedness of all things. The changing seasons, the growth of a seed into a mighty tree, the symbiotic relationships between different species – all these lessons from nature highlight the importance of adaptation, cooperation, and respect for the intricate balance of life.

The Threat to Our Friend

However, our best friend is under threat. Human activities are causing unprecedented damage to the environment. Pollution, deforestation, and climate change are altering natural ecosystems, leading to loss of biodiversity and threatening our own survival. This is akin to harming our best friend, and the consequences are dire.

Our Responsibility

As friends of nature, we have a responsibility to protect it. This requires a shift in our attitudes and actions towards the environment. We need to practice sustainable living, reduce our carbon footprint, and advocate for policies that protect the environment. Moreover, we need to educate others about the importance of nature and our role in preserving it.

Conclusion: Embracing the Friendship

In conclusion, nature is indeed our best friend. It nurtures us, heals us, and teaches us valuable lessons about life. However, this friendship is not a one-way street. We must reciprocate by protecting and preserving nature. By doing so, we not only ensure our own survival, but also enrich our lives with the profound beauty and wisdom that nature offers. This friendship with nature, if nurtured, can lead to a more sustainable, harmonious, and fulfilling existence.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Book News & Features

The workings of nature: naturalist writing and making sense of the world.

Genevieve Valentine

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"In every generation and among every nation, there are a few individuals with the desire to study the workings of nature; if they did not exist, those nations would perish."

-- Al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova. Among more detached details of its appearance, there is this: "It was like a large bamboo mat. It displayed the five colors, both pleasing and otherwise."

The attempt to ground the unknown within the familiar — and the editorial aside of "otherwise" — cuts to the heart of naturalist writing. Nearly 2000 years later, Carl Sagan did the same in Cosmos , condensing astronomy to its component parts: facts and wonder.

We've been curious about the natural world since before recorded time; the history of naturalism is human history. By the ninth century, al-Jahiz's multi-volume History of Animals combined zoological folklore with scientific observation, including theories of natural selection. In the early 20th century, Sioux author Zitkala-Ša wrote landscapes intertwined with the personal, which became a model for the form. In 1962, Rachel Carson's ecological manifesto Silent Spring was a deciding factor in banning DDT.

The best naturalist writing delivers both a secondhand thrill of obsession and a jolt of protectiveness for what's been discovered. Some of it reveals as much about the author as the surroundings. (Carl Linnaeus' 1811 Tour of Lapland manuscript cuts off a paragraph about wedding customs mid-sentence, picking up again with a breathless catalog of marsh plants.) And naturalists themselves are shaped by the lure of landscapes on the page. Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks explores the British countryside using others' writing as an interior map that challenges him to approach familiar places in new ways.

We love reading about nature for the same reason naturalists love being ankle-deep in marshes: Nature provides enough order to soothe and enough entropy to surprise. It's also why so many involve a person in the landscape; understanding our place in the world is as important as understanding the world itself. We read the work of naturalists to capture that sense of discovery made familiar. They present worlds we've never seen, and make us care as if they were our own backyards.

Not every naturalist sets out to be an activist; this is a literary tradition as much as a scientific one. But there are threads that connect naturalist literature, across continents and centuries. It's driven by an environmental curiosity that integrates the scientific and the spiritual; facts inspire wonder, rather than quench it. And every piece of naturalist literature, from al-Jahiz to today, makes a case for preserving the world it sees.

The Invention of Nature

Some naturalists actually do try to encompass the world entire. In The Invention of Nature , Andrea Wulf follows Alexander Humboldt's expeditions in Latin America and European royal courts, painting a portrait of a man whose hunger for knowledge — and constant pontificating about it — bordered on caricature. Humboldt's legacy is the 'web of life' his work conveyed to a lay audience. That interconnectedness made him an early conservationist; by 1800 he was noting adverse effects "when forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by European planters, with an imprudent precipitation."

But he wasn't the first to catalog the systems of life. A century before Humboldt, German-born naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian was in Surinam, recording her life's passion: butterflies, moths, and insects. Chrysalis , Kim Todd's biography of this amateur scientist who established the idea of a life cycle, aims for a sly impression of Merian, down to the subject matter: "Insects," Todd explains, "generally gave off a whiff of vice." Merian's engravings made life cycles palpable for a public who still believed rotten meat spontaneously transformed into flies; it was impressive enough to change assumptions about the natural world (though Merian's credit waned as male scientists began absorbing her work into their own).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. This is the dynamic at the heart of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , which carries a touch of the hymnal (and a grim streak that has a grandmother in Merian's engraving of a tarantula devouring a bird), and Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud , a love letter swamps, bogs, and "the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." And few naturalists write themselves into their landscapes quite so drily as M. Krishnan. The essays in Of Birds and Birdsong carry a sense of magical realism; always scientifically rigorous (his bird descriptions are those of a man looking for a particular friend in a crowd of thousands), Krishnan writes himself as a resigned meddler in avian affairs; he could try to be invisible among nature's bounty, but then who'd train his pigeons?

Of course, some writers have to fight to be seen on the landscape at all. Enter The Colors of Nature , an anthology of nature writing by people of color edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, providing deeply personal connections to — or disconnects from — nature. Jamaica Kincaid's "In History" considers naturalism in the aftermath of colonialism, asking a crucial question for naturalism in a global context: "What should history mean to someone who looks like me?" And Joseph Bruchac's travel diary is pragmatism shot through with hope; "Our old words keep returning to the land."

The Colors of Nature

For others, the internal landscape and that hope for the natural world must be rediscovered in tandem. In Braiding Sweetgrass , botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship "which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land." That sense of connection, or the loss of it, is the spine of the book: mucking out a pond is a microcosm, agriculture becomes rumination on symbiosis, and mast fruiting of pecan trees parallels human and plant communities.

It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes — that sense of discovery that draws us in. Happily for armchair naturalists, mysteries of the natural world never stop unfolding; but increasingly, a sense of impending doom accompanies the delight of knowledge. Kimmerer mentions a language between trees as something awaiting more specific study; it arrives later this year in Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees . A no-nonsense writing style — he came, he studied, here's how to date a forest via its weevil population — frames a deeply conservationist argument: Trees harbor not only ecosystems, but feelings, vocabulary, and etiquette. Hidden Life is designed to be an arboreal Silent Spring .

For some places, however, no revelations are yet possible; the world being studied is simply too mysterious to be yet wholly understood. With meditative prose, 1986's Arctic Dreams chronicled Barry Lopez's expeditions in an ecosystem so punishing half an animal population can die every winter, and so otherworldly animal fat is preserved on bones after a century. "Something eerie ties us to the world of animals," he says, and it's both a warning and a promise. In The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Deep, Philip Hoare's marine obsession is similarly dreamlike; for him, what we know about whales and how they make us feel is deeply linked. After all, our 'discovery' of them is still in its first blush. Sperm whales were first filmed in 1984; "We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like." The only absolute conclusion in his book is a stern one: Humanity's damaging effects on nature and its fascination with the unknown has been devastating; if we're going to keep whales long enough to know them, that fascination will have to take a more protective turn.

To write about the world around us is to write about people, whether cataloging the unknown or coming to terms with one's backyard. These narratives are crucial, especially now — stories of the worth of nature, even just as a mirror of ourselves, build a narrative in which nature's something worth saving. It's imperfect; making nature an object rather than a subject prevents us from seeing ourselves as part of natural patterns of cause and effect. But in The Colors of Nature, Aileen Suzara pins it down: "The landscape is a narrative, not a narrator, because it has no human voice." The human voice that looked at the dark and saw a dying star is heard 2000 years later. If we're going to have another 2000 years, there's no time like the present to start listening.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

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The Tuppers Lake area in western Montana. Steven Gnam

Natural Debate: Do Forests Grow Better With Our Help or Without?

By Fred Pearce • September 24, 2020

Nations around the world are pledging to plant billions of trees to grow new forests. But a new study shows that the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change is far greater than has previously been estimated.

When Susan Cook-Patton was doing a post-doc in forest restoration at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland seven years ago, she says she helped plant 20,000 trees along Chesapeake Bay. It was a salutary lesson. “The ones that grew best were mostly ones we didn’t plant,” she remembers. “They just grew naturally on the ground we had set aside for planting. Lots popped up all around. It was a good reminder that nature knows what it is doing.”

What is true for Chesapeake Bay is probably true in many other places, says Cook-Patton, now at The Nature Conservancy. Sometimes, we just need to give nature room to grow back naturally. Her conclusion follows a new global study that finds the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb atmospheric carbon and fight climate change has been seriously underestimated.

Tree planting is all the rage right now. This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, called for the world to plant a trillion trees. In one of its few actions to address climate concerns, the U.S. administration — with support from businesses and nonprofits such as American Forests — last month promised to contribute close to a billion of them — 855 million, to be precise — across an estimated 2.8 million acres.

The European Union this year promised 3 billion more trees as part of a Green Deal; and existing worldwide pledges under the 2011 Bonn Challenge and the 2015 Paris Climate Accord set targets to restore more than 850 million acres of forests, mostly through planting. That is an area slightly larger than India, and provides room for roughly a quarter-trillion trees.

The study found that natural regeneration can capture more carbon more quickly and securely than tree plantations.

Planting is widely seen as a vital “nature-based solution” to climate change — a way of moderating climate change in the next three decades as the world works to achieve a zero-carbon economy. But there is pushback.

Nobody condemns trees. But some critics argue that an aggressive drive to achieve planting targets will provide environmental cover for land grabs to blanket hundreds of millions of acres with monoculture plantations of a handful of fast-growing and often non-native commercial species such as acacia, eucalyptus, and pine . Others ask: Why plant at all, when we can often simply leave the land for nearby forests to seed and recolonize? Nature knows what to grow, and does it best.

Cook-Patton’s new study, published in Nature and co-authored by researchers from 17 academic and environmental organizations, says estimates of the rate of carbon accumulation by natural forest regrowth, endorsed last year by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are on average 32 percent too low, a figures that rises to 53 percent for tropical forests.

The study is the most detailed attempt yet to map where forests could grow back naturally, and to assess the potential of those forests to accumulate carbon. “We looked at almost 11,000 measurements of carbon uptake from regrowing forests, measured in around 250 studies around the world,” Cook-Patton told Yale Environment 360 .

New vegetation grows amid burnt trees in the Amazon in the state of Para, Brazil. ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP via Getty Images

She found that current carbon accumulation rates vary by a factor of a hundred, depending on climate, soils, altitude, and terrain. This is much greater than previously assessed. “Even within countries there were huge differences.” But overall, besides being better for biodiversity, the study showed, natural regeneration can capture more carbon more quickly and more securely than plantations.

Cook-Patton agrees that as climate change gathers pace in the coming decades, rates of carbon accumulation will change. But while some forests will grow more slowly or even die, others will probably grow faster due to the fertilization effect of more carbon dioxide in the air, an existing phenomenon sometimes called global greening.

The study identified up to 1.67 billion acres that could be set aside to allow trees to regrow. This excludes land under cultivation or built on, along with existing valuable ecosystems such as grasslands and boreal regions, where the warming effects of dark forest canopy outweigh the cooling benefits of carbon take-up.

Combining the mapping and carbon accumulation data, Cook-Patton estimates that natural forest regrowth could capture in biomass and soils 73 billion tons of carbon between now and 2050. That is equal to around seven years of current industrial emissions, making it “the single largest natural climate solution.”

Cook-Patton said the study’s local estimates of carbon accumulation fill an important data gap. Many countries intent on growing forests to store carbon have data for what can be achieved by planting, but lack equivalent data for natural regeneration. “I kept getting emails from people asking me what carbon they would get from [natural] reforesting projects,” she says. “I had to keep saying: ‘It depends.’ Now we have data that allow people to estimate what happens if you put up a fence and let forest regrow.”

Aboveground carbon accumulation rates, in metric tons of carbon per hectare per year, in naturally regrowing forests in forest and savanna biomes. Cook-Patton et al., Nature 2020

The new local estimates also allow comparisons between the potential of natural regrowth and planting. “I think planting has its place, for instance where soils are degraded and trees won’t grow,” she said. “But I do think natural regrowth is hugely under-appreciated.”

The great thing about natural restoration of forests is that it often requires nothing more than human inaction. Nature is constantly at work restoring forests piecemeal and often unseen on the edges of fields, on abandoned pastures, in scrubby bush, and wherever forests lie degraded or former forest land is abandoned.

But because it requires no policy initiatives, investments, or oversight, data on its extent is badly lacking. Satellites such as Landsat are good at identifying deforestation, which is sudden and visible; but the extent of subsequent recovery is slower, harder to spot, and rarely assessed. Headline grabbing statistics on the loss of the world’s forests generally ignore it.

In a rare study , Philip Curtis of the University of Arkansas recently attempted to get around the problem by devising a model that could predict from satellite imagery what had caused the deforestation, and hence the potential for forest recovery. He found that only about a quarter of lost forests are permanently taken over for human activities such as buildings, infrastructure, or farming. The remaining three-quarters suffered from forest fires, shifting cultivation, temporary grazing, or logging, and at least had the potential for natural recovery.

Another study published this year found that such recovery was widespread and rapid even in an epicenter of deforestation such as the Amazon. When Yunxia Wang of the University of Leeds in England analyzed recently-released Brazilian data from the Amazon, she found that 72 percent of the forest being burned by ranchers to create new cattle pasture is not pristine forest, as widely assumed, but is actually recent regrowth. The forest had been cleared, converted to cattle pasture and then abandoned, whereupon the forest returned so fast that it was typically only six years before it was cleared again. Such was the confusion caused by this rapid forest turnover that regular land-use assessments frequently wrongly categorized this new growth as degraded old-growth forest.

“Actively reintroducing native plants will still be a better option in highly degraded sites,” says one scientist.

Wang noted that if Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, wanted to fulfill a promise made by his predecessor Dilma Rousseff at the 2015 Paris climate summit to restore 30 million acres of forest by 2030, then he need not plant at all. He could just allow regrowth to proceed in the Amazon without further clearing.

Brazil’s other great forest, the Atlantic forest, is already on that path, recovering slowly after more than a century of clearance for coffee and cattle. The government has an Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact that subsidizes landowners to replant, often with trees intended to supply the paper industry. Yet Camila Rezende of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro says most of the forest regrowth is not from planting but from “spontaneous” regrowth , as forest remnants colonize neighboring abandoned farmland. She estimates that some 6.7 million acres of Atlantic Forest has naturally regenerated in this way since 1996. It now makes up about a tenth of the forest.

Much the same has been happening in Europe, where forest cover is now up to 43 percent , often from naturally recolonizing farmland rather than planting. Italy, for instance, has grown its forest cover by a 2.5 million acres . In the former Communist nations of central Europe, 16 percent of farmland in the Carpathian Mountains was abandoned in the 1990s , much of it reclaimed by the region’s famed beech forests. Across Russia, an area of former farmland about twice the size of Spain has been recolonized by forests. Irina Kurganova of the Russian Academy of Sciences calls this retreat of the plow “the most widespread and abrupt land-use change in the 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The United States has also seen natural forests regenerate as arable farmland has declined by almost a fifth in the past 30 years. “The entire eastern United States was deforested 200 years ago,” says Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Much of that has come back without actively planting trees.” According to the U.S. Forest Service, over the past three decades the country’s regrowing forests have soaked up about 11 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions .

A worker plants Sitka spruce saplings at a reforestation project in Doddington, England in 2018. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

With nature on the march, a major concern is whether a push for planting might grab land for plantations that natural forests might otherwise recolonize. The result would be less wildlife, less amenity for humans, and often less carbon stored.

Ecologists have traditionally dismissed the ecological gains from natural restoration of what is often called “secondary” forest. Such regrowth is often regarded as ephemeral, rarely sought out by wildlife, and prone to being cleared again. This has led many to regard planting to mimic natural forests as preferable.

Thomas Crowther, co-author of a widely-publicized study last year calling for a “global restoration” of a trillion trees to soak up carbon dioxide, emphasizes that, while nature could do the job in places, “people need to help out by spreading seeds and planting saplings.”

But a reappraisal is going on. J. Leighton Reid, director of Restoration Ecology at Virginia Tech, who recently warned against bias in studies comparing natural regeneration with planting, nonetheless told e360 , “Natural regeneration is an excellent restoration strategy for many landscapes, but actively reintroducing native plants will still be a better option in highly degraded sites and in places where invasive species dominate.”

Others make the case that most of the time, natural restoration of secondary forests is a better option than planting. In her book, Second Growth , Robin Chazdon, a forest ecologist formerly at the University of Connecticut, says that secondary forests “continue to be misunderstood, understudied, and unappreciated for what they really are — young self-organizing forest ecosystems that are undergoing construction.”

Yes, she agrees, they are work in progress. But they generally recover “remarkably fast.” Recent research shows that regrowing tropical forests recover 80 percent of their species richness within 20 years, and frequently 100 percent within 50 years. That seems to be better than what human foresters achieve when trying to replant forest ecosystems.

Tree planting can worsen outcomes for everything from the number of bird and insect species to canopy cover.

A review of more than 100 tropical forest restoration projects by Renato Crouzeilles of the International Institute for Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, with Chazdon as a co-author, found that success rates were higher for secondary forests allowed to regenerate naturally than for those subjected to the “active restoration” techniques of foresters. In other words, planting can often worsen outcomes for everything from the number of bird, insect, and plant species, to measures of canopy cover, tree density, and forest structure. Nature knows best.

Now, Cook-Patton has extended the reappraisal to the carbon-accumulating potential of natural forest regeneration. It too may often be superior.

This scientific rethink requires a policy rethink, says Holl . “Business leaders and politicians have jumped on the tree-planting bandwagon, and numerous nonprofit organizations and governments worldwide have started initiatives to plant billions or even trillions of trees for a host of social, ecological, and aesthetic reasons”.

She concedes that on some damaged lands , “we will need to plant trees, but that should be the last option, since it is the most expensive and often is not successful.”

Planting a trillion trees over the next three decades would be a huge logistical challenge. A trillion is a big number. That target would require a thousand new trees in the ground every second, and then for all of them to survive and grow. Once the cost of nurseries, soil preparation, seeding, and thinning are accounted for, says Crouzeilles, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. If natural forest growth is cheaper and better, does that make sense?

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13 Essays About Nature: Use These For Your Next Assignment

Essays about nature can look at the impact of human behavior on the environment, or on the impact of nature on human beings. Check out these suggestions.

Nature is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It provides food, shelter, and even medication to help us live healthier, happier lives. It also inspires artists, poets, writers, and photographers because of its beauty.

Essays about nature can take many different paths. Descriptive essays about the beauty of nature can inspire readers. They give the writer the chance to explore some creativity in their essay writing. You can also write a persuasive essay arguing about an environmental topic and how humans harm the natural environment. You can also write an informative essay to discuss a particular impact or aspect of the natural world and how it impacts the human beings who live within it.

If you need to write a nature essay, read on to discover 13 topics that can work well. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

1. How Happiness Is Related to Nature Connectedness

2. why protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility, 3. how technological advancements can help the environment, 4. why global warming is a danger for future generations, 5. how deforestation impacts the beauty of nature, 6. the relationship between plants and human beings, 7. the health benefits of spending time in nature, 8. what are the gifts of nature, 9. the importance of nature to sustain human life, 10. the beauty of non-living things in nature, 11. does eco-tourism help or hurt the natural world, 12. how sustainability benefits the natural environment, 13. does agriculture hurt or help nature.

Exposure to nature has a significant positive impact on mood and overall mental health. In other words, happiness and nature connectedness have a close link. Your nature essay can explore the research behind this and then build on that research to show why nature conservation is so important.

This essay on nature is important because it shows why people need the natural environment. Nature provides more than just the natural resources we need for life. Spending time in the fresh air and sunshine actually makes us happier, so behaviors that harm nature harm your potential happiness.

Planet earth is a precious gift that is often damaged by the selfish activities of human beings. All human beings have the potential to hurt the natural environment and the living creatures in that environment, and thus protecting nature is everyone’s responsibility. You can build this into an essay and explore what that responsibility may look like to different groups.

For the child, for example, protecting nature may be as simple as picking up trash in the park, but for the CEO of a manufacturing company, it may look like eco-friendly company policies. For an adult, it may look like shopping for a car with lower emissions. Take a look at the different ways people can protect nature and why it is essential.

Technology is often viewed as the enemy of nature, but you can find technological advancements helping rather than harming nature. For example, light bulbs that use less energy or residential solar panel development have reduced the average home’s amount of energy. Your essay could explore some inventions that have helped nature.

After looking at these technologies, dive into the idea that technology, when used well, has a significant positive impact on the environment, rather than a negative one. The key is developing technology that works with conservation efforts, rather than against them.

Global warming is a hot topic in today’s society, but the term gets used so often, that many people have tuned it out. You can explore the dangers of global warming and how it potentially impacts future generations. You can also touch on whether or not this problem has been over-blown in education and media.

This essay should be full of facts and data to back up your opinions. It could also touch on initiatives that could reduce the risks of global warming to make the future brighter for the next generation.

Much has been written about the dangers of deforestation on the overall ecosystem, but what about its effect on nature’s beauty? This essay topic adds an additional reason why countries should fight deforestation to protect green spaces and the beauty of nature.

In your essay, strike a balance between limiting deforestation and the need to harvest trees as natural resources. Look at ways companies can use these natural resources without destroying entire forests and ecosystems. You might also be interested in these essays about nature .

People need plants, and this need can give you your essay topic. Plants provide food for people and for animals that people also eat. Many pharmaceutical products come from plants originally, meaning they are vital to the medical field as well.

Plants also contribute to the fresh air that people breathe. They filter the air, removing toxins and purifying the air to make it cleaner. They also add beauty to nature with their foliage and flowers. These facts make plants a vital part of nature, and you can delve into that connection in your nature essay.

Spending time in nature not only improves your mental health, but it also improves your physical health . When people spend time in nature, they have lower blood pressure and heart rates. They also produce fewer damaging stress hormones and reduced muscle tension. Shockingly, spending time in nature may actually reduce mortality rates.

Take some time to research these health benefits, and then weave them into your essay. By showing the health benefits of nature exposure, you can build an appreciation for nature in your audience. You may inspire people to do more to protect the natural environment.

Nature has given people many gifts. Our food all comes from nature in its most basic form, from fruits and vegetables to milk and meats. It provides the foundation for many medicines and remedies. These gifts alone make it worth protecting.

Yet nature does much more. It also gives the gift of better mental health. It can inspire feelings of wonder in people of all ages. Finally, it provides beauty and tranquility that you cannot reproduce anywhere else. This essay is more descriptive and reflective than factual, but it can be an exciting topic to explore.

Can humans live without nature? Based on the topics already discussed, the answer is no. You can use this fact to create an essay that connects nature to the sustenance of human life. Without nature, we cannot survive.

One way to look at this importance is to consider the honey bee . The honey bee seems like a simple part of the natural world, yet it is one of the most essential. Without bees, fruits and vegetables will not get pollinated as easily, if at all. If bees disappear, the entire food system will struggle. Thus, bees, and many other parts of nature, are vital to human life.

Have you ever felt fully inspired by a glorious sunset or sunrise? Have you spent time gazing at a mountain peak or the ocean water crashing on the shoreline and found your soul refreshed? Write about one of these experiences in your essay.

Use descriptive words to show how the non-living parts of nature are beautiful, just like the living creatures and plants that are part of nature. Draw from personal experiences of things you have seen in nature to make this essay rich and engaging. If you love nature, you might also be interested in these essays about camping .

Ecotourism is tourism designed to expose people to nature. Nature tours, safaris, and even jungle or rainforest experiences are all examples of ecotourism. It seems like ecotourism would help the environment by making people more aware, but does it really?

For your essay, research if ecotourism helps or hurts the environment. If you find it does both, consider arguing which is more impactful, the positive side or the negative side. On the positive side, ecotourism emphasizes sustainability in travel and highlights the plight of endangered species, leading to initiatives that protect local ecosystems. On the negative side, ecotourism can hurt the ecosystems at the same time by bringing humans into the environment, which automatically changes it. Weigh these pros and cons to see which side you fall on.

For more help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing ?

Sustainability is the practice of taking care of human needs and economic needs while also protecting the natural environment for future generations. But do sustainable practices work? This essay topic lets you look at popular eco-friendly practices and determine if they are helpful to the environment, or not.

Sustainability is a hot topic, but unfortunately, some practices labeled as sustainable , aren’t helpful to the environment. For example, many people think they are doing something good when tossing a plastic bottle in the recycling bin, but most recycling centers simply throw away the bottle if that little plastic ring is present, so your effort is wasted. A better practice is using a reusable water bottle. Consider different examples like this to show how sustainability can help the environment, but only when done well.

Agriculture is one way that humans interact with and change the natural environment. Planting crops or raising non-native animals impacts the nature around the farm. Does this impact hurt or help the local natural ecosystem?

Explore this topic in your essay. Consider the impact of things like irrigation, fertilization, pesticides, and the introduction of non-native plants and animals to the local environment. Consider ways that agriculture can benefit the environment and come to a conclusion in your essay about the overall impact.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Nicole Harms has been writing professionally since 2006. She specializes in education content and real estate writing but enjoys a wide gamut of topics. Her goal is to connect with the reader in an engaging, but informative way. Her work has been featured on USA Today, and she ghostwrites for many high-profile companies. As a former teacher, she is passionate about both research and grammar, giving her clients the quality they demand in today's online marketing world.

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Barry Commoner: Radical father of modern environmentalism

“The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production—in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation—essential as they are, make people sick and die.”

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Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame.  This article is reposted, with his kind permission, from HuffPost , May 28, 2017.

Barry Commoner

by Peter Dreier

Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the “Paul Revere of ecology,” Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America’s most prominent modern environmentalist. But unlike Carson, Commoner viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities and the misuse of technology accounted for the undermining of “the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings.” Today’s environmental activists and thinkers — including radicals like Van Jones, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Robert Bullard, and Beverly Wright — stand on Commoner’s shoulders.

Commoner — who was born 100 years ago, on May 28, 1917, and died in 2012 — insisted that scientists had an obligation to make scientific information accessible to the general public, so that citizens could participate in public debates that involved scientific questions. Citizens, he said, have a right to know the health hazards of the consumer products and technologies used in everyday life. Those were radical ideas in the 1950s and ’60s, when most Americans were still mesmerized by the cult of scientific expertise and such new technologies as cars, plastics, chemical sprays and atomic energy.

Commoner linked environmental issues to a broader vision of social and economic justice. He called attention to the parallels among the environmental, civil rights, labor and peace movements. He connected the environmental crisis to the problems of poverty, injustice, racism, public health, national security and war.

Commoner first came to public attention in the late 1950s when he warned about the hazards of fallout caused by the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. He later used his scientific platform to raise awareness about the dangers posed by the petrochemical industry, nuclear power and toxic substances such as dioxins. He was one of the first scientists to point out that although environmental hazards hurt everyone, they disproportionately hurt the poor and racial minorities because of the location of dangerous chemicals and because of the hazardous conditions in blue-collar workplaces. Commoner thus laid the groundwork for what later become known as the environmental justice movement.

Commoner grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied zoology at Columbia University and received a doctorate in biology from Harvard University in 1941. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Commoner was an associate editor for Science Illustrated and then became a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, a position he held for thirty-four years. There he founded, in 1966, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to promote research on ecological systems. He later moved the center to Queens College in New York.

While serving in the Navy, Commoner discovered a disturbing unintended consequences of technology. He was put in charge of a project to devise an apparatus to allow bombers to spray DDT on beachheads to kill insects that caused disease among soldiers. The military wanted to remove the insects before troops landed. Commoner’s crew discovered that the DDT sprayed from bombers effectively eliminated hordes of flies on the beach, but also that more flies soon came to feast on the tons of fish that the DDT had also killed. This lesson became a central theme for Commoner throughout his career: humans cannot take action on one part of the ecosystem without triggering a reaction elsewhere.

After the war, many scientists, including Albert Einstein, alarmed by America’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, began to rethink their role in society. They questioned whether dropping the bomb had been necessary for the United States to win the war. They were shocked by the scale of the damage in terms of both immediate deaths and long-term human suffering. And they worried about the potential for a prolonged arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which, they feared, could end in a nuclear war in which all humanity would be the losers.

As Commoner told Scientific American in a 1997 interview:

“The Atomic Energy Commission had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists. Although they knew how to design and build nuclear bombs, it somehow escaped their notice that rainfall washes suspended material out of the air, or that children drink milk and concentrate iodine in their growing thyroids. I believe that the main reason for the AEC’s failure is less complex than a cover-up but equally devastating. The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts—even widely known ones—that were outside their limited field of vision.”

Commoner and other scientists—including chemist Linus Pauling (a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize winner)—believed they had a responsibility to sound the alarm about the potentially devastating effects of nuclear fallout. In 1956, when Adlai Stevenson ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee, he sought Commoner’s advice and then called for the United States to take the lead in ending nuclear testing.

In 1958 Commoner and other scientists and activists formed the Committee for Nuclear Information with the goal of educating the public to understand how, in Commoner’s words, “splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison.” Their new publication, Nuclear Information (later renamed Scientist and Citizen ), was founded to discuss the responsibility of scientists to the larger society. They drafted a petition, signed by 11,021 scientists worldwide, urging that “an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear bombs be made now.” These activities created a groundswell of public opinion that eventually helped persuade President John F. Kennedy to propose the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Commoner’s early experience with DDT led him to espouse what scientists call the “precautionary principle” — that new chemicals and technologies should not be introduced into society if there is reason to believe that they pose a significant public health risk. They should be approved only after it can be demonstrated that they are safe. Commoner warned about the risks to human health posed by detergents, pesticides, herbicides, radioisotopes and smog. He argued that polluting products (such as detergents and synthetic textiles) should be replaced with natural products (such as soap, cotton and wool). He alerted the public to the negative effects of nuclear power plants, toxic chemicals and pollution on the economy; birth defects; and diseases like asthma.

In the 1970s Commoner spoke out against the view that overpopulation, particularly in the Third World, was responsible for the increasing depletion of the word’s natural resources and the deepening ecological problems. The thesis was popularized by Paul Ehrlich (in his book The Population Bomb ) and other scientists, but Commoner challenged those who echoed the ideas of the nineteenth-century British thinker Thomas Robert Malthus.

As Commoner argued, it is rich nations that consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. And it was their systems of colonialism and imperialism that led to the exploitation of the Third World’s natural resources for consumption in the wealthy nations, making the poor even poorer. Without the financial resources to improve their living conditions, people in developing countries relied more heavily upon increased birthrates as a form of social security than did people in wealthier nations.

As Commoner wrote, “The poor countries have high birthrates because they are extremely poor, and they are extremely poor because other countries are extremely rich.” His solution to the population problem was to increase the standard of living of the world’s poor, which would result in a voluntary reduction of fertility, as has occurred in the rich countries.

In The Closing Circle (1971), Commoner argued that our economy—including corporations, government, and consumers—needs to be in sync with what he called the “four laws of ecology”:

• Everything is connected to everything else.
• Everything must go somewhere.
• Nature knows best.
• There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The Closing Circle helped introduce the idea of sustainability, a notion that is now widely accepted but was controversial at the time. As Commoner pointed out, there is only one ecosphere for all living things. What affects one, affects all. He also noted that in nature there is no waste. We can’t throw things away. Therefore, we need to design and manufacture products that do not upset the delicate balance between humans and nature. We need to utilize alternative forms of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal power. And we need to change our consumption habits accordingly—to use fewer products with plastics (which are based on oil), aerosol cans (which harm the atmosphere) and industrial-grown food (which is produced with harmful chemicals).

In his best-selling book The Poverty of Power (1976), Commoner introduced what he called the “Three Es” — the threat to environmental survival, the shortage of energy and the problems (such as inequality and unemployment) of the economy—and explained their interconnectedness: industries that use the most energy have the most negative impact on the environment. Our dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy inevitably leads to those resources becoming scarcer, raising the cost of energy and hurting the economy.

Commoner was neither a back-to-the-land utopian or a Luddite opposed to modern industrial civilization. He did not place the burden of blame on the consumers who buy these products or the workers who produce them. He believed that big business and their political allies dominate society’s decision making, often leading to misguided priorities, a theme that paralleled the ideas of economist John Kenneth Galbraith and, later, Ralph Nader.

Commoner believed that the corporate imperative for wasteful growth is the root cause of the environmental crisis and must be corralled by responsible public policies demanded by a well-educated public. As he told Scientific American : “The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production—in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation—essential as they are, make people sick and die.”

Commoner’s proposals for addressing these problems reflect his lifetime of promoting a progressive agenda. He told Scientific American :

“What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post–World War II changes in production technology. Restoring environmental quality means substituting solar sources of energy for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting electric motors for the internal-combustion engine; substituting organic farming for chemical agriculture; expanding the use of durable, renewable and recyclable materials—metals, glass, wood, paper—in place of the petrochemical products that have massively displaced them.”

Commoner acknowledged some of the environmental movement’s victories, including bans on DTT and on lead in gasoline. Commoner saw this as a evidence that society can prevent environmental hazards by changing the way we produce and consume. But in a 2007 interview with The New York Times , he warned that these measures did not go far enough.

“Environmental pollution is an incurable disease,” he said. “It can only be prevented. And prevention can only take place at the point of production. If you insist on using DDT, the only thing you can do is stop. The rest has really been sort of forgotten about.”

Many Americans embraced Commoner’s ideas about workplace hazards, nuclear power plants, and recycling. But he grew frustrated by the influence of corporate America over both political parties and by the failure of the mainstream environmental movement to join forces with other progressive movements to heed his warnings and challenge the basic tenets of the free-market system.

In 1979 Commoner helped form the Citizens Party, hoping it would gain influence similar to that of the Green Party in Europe. The next year Commoner ran as the party’s presidential candidate. He got on the ballot in twenty-nine states but received less than one-third of 1 percent of the national vote. Like most third parties in the American system, the Citizens Party wound up being a minor fringe force. Commoner did not run again for office, but he advised Jesse Jackson’s Democratic Party presidential campaigns in the 1980s.

In the 2007 interview with the New York Times , the 90-year-old Commoner remained the relentless radical: “I think that most of the ‘greening’ that we see so much of now has failed to look back on arguments such as my own—that action has to be taken on what’s produced and how it’s produced. That’s unfortunate, but I’m an eternal optimist, and I think eventually people will come around.”

• Barry Commoner’s Science for the People
• Barry Commoner and the Great Acceleration
• Barry Commoner: scientist, activist, radical ecologist
• Barry Commoner: 'Pollution begins in the boardroom, not the bedroom'

Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism?

• First Online: 06 December 2017

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• Freya Mathews 4  

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Two of our most seminal philosophies of Nature, deep ecology and ecofeminism, offer alternative accounts of our relationship with the natural world. Deep ecology tends to take a basically holistic view of Nature—its image of the natural world is that of a field-like whole of which we and other ‘individuals’ are parts. Ecofeminists, in contrast, tend to portray the natural world as a community of beings, related, in the manner of a family, but nevertheless distinct. Although the tension between these two theories cannot be resolved by merely cutting and pasting them together, I think that a dialectical reconciliation of their respective views of Nature can be achieved, though this may result in an irreducibly ambivalent ecological ethic. Such ambivalence may in fact be precisely what an adequate understanding of the ecological structure of reality requires.

Originally published as: Mathews, Freya. 1994. Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism? The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy 11 (4) (Fall): 159–166.

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Jim Cheney brought this point out very clearly in his 1987 article ‘Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology’. Environmental Ethics 9(2). It is also explored extensively in Val Plumwoo d. Spring 1991. Nature, Self and Gender. Hypatia 6(1). However, as ecofeminism is not typically expounded systematically as a philosophy, other views of nature are also represented in ecofeminist works. Conversely, the view of nature that I have here identified as ecofeminist is also espoused by writers who make no reference to feminist theory at all. See for instance J. Baird Callicott’s account of American Indian views of nature in ‘Traditional American Indian and Western European Attitudes Toward nature: an Overview’. 1989. In Defense of the Land Ethic . Albany: SUNY Press. See also Callicott’s book on multicultural environmental ethics. 1994. Earth’s Insights . Berkeley: University of California Press. Both Callicott and Aldo Leopold, the architect of the land ethic Callicott is concerned to defend, tend to view nature as a community of natural elements and beings, but both also seem to adopt a holistic interpretation of community for ethical purposes, where this would run counter to the ecofeminist tendency. I am not really concerned to discuss deep ecology and ecofeminism per se here, but rather a certain complex of issues which are central but not exclusive to these two positions. The issues in question concern the relative merits of the individualistic and holistic views of our relationship to nature. An author who has recently addressed these issues without reference to either deep ecology or ecofeminism is Robert W. Gardiner. 1990. ‘Between Two Worlds: Humans in nature and Culture’. Environmental Ethics 12 (4).

Evelyn Fox Keller develops a sophisticated argument along these lines in 1985. Reflections on Gender and Science . New Haven: Yale University Press.

In his later work, Fox has made more room for a relative form of individuality in his ecological metaphysic. See 1990. Towards a Transpersonal Ecology . Boston: Shambhala.

Val Plu mwood identifies three versions of the deep ecological account of the relationship of self to nature. She calls them the ‘indistinguishability account’, the ‘expanded self’ account and the ‘transcended or transpersonal self’ account. Although there are indeed certain distinctions to be made among these three positions, it seems to me that they all involve basically holistic interpretations of interconnectedness, since they all point to the substitution of a greater Self for the normal self understood as ego or individual. See Val Plumwood. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of nature . New York: Routledge.

This argument that the relational nature of systems entails both individuality and holism is developed in my book: 1991. The Ecologica l Self . London: Routledge.

This is evident in the web imagery which is so central to ecofeminism, and which appears in a number of ecofeminist titles, for example, J. Plaskow and C. Christ, eds. 1989. Weaving the Visions . New York: Harper and Row, and I. Diamond and G. F. Orenstein. 1990. Reweaving the World: the Emergence of Ecofeminism . San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. In the latter work, the editors, in their Introduction, characterize the early ecofeminists as those feminists who ‘affirmed and celebrated the embeddedness of all the earth’s peoples in the multiple webs and cycles of life’.

The comparatively easygoing attitude of certain native peoples in this respect, unfettered as they are by hard-and-fast (dualistic) distinctions between what qualifies as natural (and hence sacred) and what does not, is illustrated by a point made by my colleague at La Trobe, Raj Bessarib, concerning a ‘dreamer’ of the Sardi people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This story-teller of the dreamtime, Billy Ahchoo, includes a ‘dance of the motorboat’ in his repertoire of dreaming dances.

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Mathews, F. (2018). Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism?. In: Stevens, L., Tait, P., Varney, D. (eds) Feminist Ecologies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64385-4_3

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Everlasting Light

Scientists use biomimicry to research the different ways bioluminescent technology can be used for human purposes.

Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Engineering

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As the old saying goes, mother knows best. Many scientists, however, would argue that Mother Nature knows best.

Increasingly, researchers are turning to nature for inspiration and innovative solutions to human problems. From “green” cement to sustainable architecture to self-cleaning paint products, scientists and inventors are tapping into the power of this new field— biomimicry —to help them design more effective products.

Although there are many ways in which nature has inspired innovation, a hot topic among scientists studying biomimicry is bioluminescence , or the production of light by living organisms. Studying species ranging from deep-ocean dwellers—including fish, bacteria , and jellies—to fireflies, researchers are examining bioluminescent properties with an eye toward their potential human uses. While researchers are confident they understand the science of bioluminescence in nature, taking that property out of its biological environment and repurposing it for the human world has proven tricky.

“Evolution does a very good job of designing things to do what it wants them to do,” says Theo Sanderson, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom.

The difficulty is in adapting these properties for new uses. “We have a light- emitting system that is very good at functioning in the context of a bacterium and to emit the amount of light a bacterium needs to emit. When you transfer that over to other systems, there will be quite different biochemistry .”

Sanderson’s experience with bioluminescence and biomimicry dates to 2010, when he and his colleagues at Cambridge University entered the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.

"We imagined that perhaps in the future, rather than erecting streetlights, people might be able to plant glowing trees," he says.

To explore this idea, the team did some genetic modification . They took part of the DNA sequence of Aliivibrio fischeri , a bioluminescent bacterium that lives in symbiosis with squid, and inserted it into Escherichia coli , allowing E.coli to give off light. The project was cleverly dubbed “E. glowli.”

Though the Cambridge team ultimately wasn’t able to produce bioluminescent trees, the “BioBrick” they did produce was later used by researchers at Peking University as part of the 2011 iGEM. The Peking researchers used the BioBrick to allow bacteria in different flasks to communicate by sending light signals. 

Other researchers are exploring different potential applications for bioluminescence. Mathew Maye, a chemist at Syracuse University, works with an interdisciplinary team to explore bioluminescent properties at the nanoscale . Simply put, Maye’s team wants to “use biology for non-biological purposes.”

Maye and his team use luciferase —an enzyme first identified in fireflies—to carry out their experiments. When luciferase interacts with luciferin , a related compound, the chemical reaction produces light. Maye’s team is exploring applications that include identifying the presence of certain toxins within a system and lighting extremely small spaces. Currently, the team is trying to “completely understand the process and to judge the complete brightness of the system.”

Recyclable Luminescence

One issue that both Maye and Sanderson have confronted is how to make the light system self-sustaining. As Sanderson says, “We don’t know how to make the fuel that the luciferase runs on [luciferin], and that means that it’s expensive to work with because you have to add that fuel.” 

Until researchers find a way to make the system “recyclable,” we may not see bioluminescent technology used to light our streets.

Serious breakthroughs, however, may be around the corner. “We’re continually finding new, interesting scientific discoveries . . . that will help us to design the next generation,” Maye says. "I would say that there will be some type of bioluminescent lighting within the next five to ten years. Especially if you can make it somehow replenishable or recyclable.”

The iGEM competition, which launched Sanderson into the field of biomimicry, is held annually and supported by partners like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and software giant Autodesk. Maye’s research is funded in part by the Air Force and the Department of Defense. With the wide variety of potential applications for this technology, it’s no wonder both public and private industry are lining up to find out how they can take advantage of this emerging knowledge.

Beyond the many practical applications of bioluminescent technology, biomimicry has captured researchers’ attention based on something far more fundamental: human curiosity. 

As Sanderson says, “When you see what nature can achieve and the amazing diversity of things it can do—emitting light, producing incredibly strong substances—if you imagine what mankind could do if it could harness that power, it’s an exciting area to work in.”

Bioluminescent Camouflage The bioluminescent Aliivibrio fischeri bacterium lives in a symbiotic relationship with the bobtail squid. The bacteria live in organs inside the squid’s body and emit a soft blue light that prevents the squid from casting a shadow. This helps to camouflage it from predators.

Sustainable Christmas Trees? "We imagined that perhaps in the future, rather than erecting streetlights, people might be able to plant glowing trees."—Theo Sanderson, geneticist

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“Mother Nature Knows Best”

• By Julia Dinmore

2 minutes of reading

It’s easy when I’m running to get lost among the sound Legs pumping, breath huffing Feet rhythmically pound the ground

It’s easy to be hypnotized by gravel down below Spraying rocks across the trail Down to where the river flows

It’s easy for my thoughts to consume my waking mind As I think of what to do Or reflect on humankind

It’s easy to forget about what’s going on around me Head down and dreaming far away Carefree, momentarily

Rhythm stutters Bubble bursts Reality floods everything  

Chipmunks dance and branches sway River gurgling while children play The clouds fly low in mottled gray And the sun shines shyly at the dusk of day

Look closer and perhaps you’ll see The poorly hidden gravity Masks on children’s faces Worry in their parents’ eyes 6-foot distance kept between each and every passerby 

Each one within their bubble as they swim amongst their thoughts Wondering what’s happened and what “gifts” the present’s brought… 

Two weeks more of isolation? More mandates by the state? Quarantine for the whole nation As the summer lays in waste? Mutation on mutation? An endless tide of death? Uncertainty yet certain this could be our final test 

It’s nature that allows us to live, love and survive And it’s nature that destroys us And it’s nature that provides Yet with greed feeding our actions It’s nature who deprives

It’s easiest to blame her Claim the virus as our killer But our own response is tainted Though we place it on a pillar 

A pillar crushing anyone too weak to climb on top A pillar built upon the spines of those who plant our crops A pillar dripping alcohol in wounds oozing with desperation As we hoard and keep and save ourselves With unearned indignation Entitled and indifferent We forget we are a nation

A nation… united? Under God? Indivisible? With liberty? And justice? For all?

These days it seems division defines us through and through Liberty and justice exist for just a few

Money-hungry and obsessed We take without regard Too concerned with filling pockets And swiping black bank cards To worry about people who are struggling and scarred 

But we have what we want So who’s to say we should reform? Lounging in luxury’s lap It’s all too easy to ignore

Ignore our fellow humans as they pray above for help Ignore them though we could be doing so much more to help Deny them our assistance though it’d be simple to help Deny them their existence though sometimes we all need help Deny them their existence Sometimes we all need help

Deny them their existence We All Need Help…

For now, I’ll just keep running In circles, I suppose Because though everything is changing We are happy to oppose

Embrace the new beginnings It’s time to start afresh Prosperity can persevere… Nature, she knows best.

• Published November 23, 2020

Julia Dinmore

Julia Dinmore is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, studying Biology and Society and Spanish. Hailing from the Sourland Mountain Region of New Jersey, she enjoys bike riding, playing tennis, reading, and writing. She hopes to use writing in her future career as a vessel for positive and productive change.

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• Nature Essay

Essay About Nature

Nature refers to the interaction between the physical surroundings around us and the life within it like atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna, and humans. Nature is indeed God’s precious gift to Earth. It is the primary source of all the necessities for the nourishment of all living beings on Earth. Right from the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the house we live in is provided by nature. Nature is called ‘Mother Nature’ because just like our mother, she is always nurturing us with all our needs. 

Whatever we see around us, right from the moment we step out of our house is part of nature. The trees, flowers, landscapes, insects, sunlight, breeze, everything that makes our environment so beautiful and mesmerizing are part of Nature. In short, our environment is nature. Nature has been there even before the evolution of human beings. 

Importance of Nature

If not for nature then we wouldn’t be alive. The health benefits of nature for humans are incredible. The most important thing for survival given by nature is oxygen. The entire cycle of respiration is regulated by nature. The oxygen that we inhale is given by trees and the carbon dioxide we exhale is getting absorbed by trees. 

The ecosystem of nature is a community in which producers (plants), consumers, and decomposers work together in their environment for survival. The natural fundamental processes like soil creation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, and water cycling, allow Earth to sustain life. We are dependent on these ecosystem services daily whether or not we are aware.

Nature provides us services round the clock: provisional services, regulating services, and non-material services. Provisional services include benefits extracted from nature such as food, water, natural fuels and fibres, and medicinal plants. Regulating services include regulation of natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion and flood control, and also, climate regulation. Non-material services are the non-material benefits that improve the cultural development of humans such as recreation, creative inspiration from interaction with nature like art, music, architecture, and the influence of ecosystems on local and global cultures. 

The interaction between humans and animals, which are a part of nature, alleviates stress, lessens pain and worries. Nature provides company and gives people a sense of purpose. 

Studies and research have shown that children especially have a natural affinity with nature. Regular interaction with nature has boosted health development in children. Nature supports their physical and mental health and instills abilities to access risks as they grow. 

Role and Importance of Nature

The natural cycle of our ecosystem is vital for the survival of organisms. We all should take care of all the components that make our nature complete. We should be sure not to pollute the water and air as they are gifts of Nature.

Mother nature fosters us and never harms us. Those who live close to nature are observed to be enjoying a healthy and peaceful life in comparison to those who live in urban areas. Nature gives the sound of running fresh air which revives us, sweet sounds of birds that touch our ears, and sounds of breezing waves in the ocean makes us move within.

All the great writers and poets have written about Mother Nature when they felt the exceptional beauty of nature or encountered any saddening scene of nature. Words Worth who was known as the poet of nature, has written many things in nature while being in close communion with nature and he has written many things about Nature. Nature is said to be the greatest teacher as it teaches the lessons of immortality and mortality. Staying in close contact with Nature makes our sight penetrative and broadens our vision to go through the mysteries of the planet earth. Those who are away from nature can’t understand the beauty that is held by Nature. The rise in population on planet earth is leading to a rise in consumption of natural resources.  Because of increasing demands for fuels like Coal, petroleum, etc., air pollution is increasing at a rapid pace.  The smoke discharged from factory units and exhaust tanks of cars is contaminating the air that we breathe. It is vital for us to plant more trees in order to reduce the effect of toxic air pollutants like Carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, etc. 

Save Our Nature

Earth’s natural resources are not infinite and they cannot be replenished in a short period. The rapid increase in urbanization has used most of the resources like trees, minerals, fossil fuels, and water. Humans in their quest for a comfortable living have been using the resources of nature mindlessly. As a result, massive deforestation, resultant environmental pollution, wildlife destruction, and global warming are posing great threats to the survival of living beings. 

Air that gives us oxygen to breathe is getting polluted by smoke, industrial emissions, automobile exhaust, burning of fossil fuels like coal, coke and furnace oil, and use of certain chemicals. The garbage and wastes thrown here and there cause pollution of air and land. 

Sewage, organic wastage, industrial wastage, oil spillage, and chemicals pollute water. It is causing several water-borne diseases like cholera, jaundice and typhoid. 

The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture adds to soil pollution. Due to the mindless cutting of trees and demolition of greeneries for industrialization and urbanization, the ecological balance is greatly hampered. Deforestation causes flood and soil erosion.

Earth has now become an ailing planet panting for care and nutrition for its rejuvenation. Unless mankind puts its best effort to save nature from these recurring situations, the Earth would turn into an unfit landmass for life and activity. 

We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will not only save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. Non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas and wind should be tapped to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming. 

Every drop of water is vital for our survival. We should conserve water by its rational use, rainwater harvesting, checking the surface outflow, etc. industrial and domestic wastes should be properly treated before they are dumped into water bodies. 

Every individual can do his or her bit of responsibility to help save the nature around us. To build a sustainable society, every human being should practice in heart and soul the three R’s of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. In this way, we can save our nature.  

Nature Conservation

Nature conservation is very essential for future generations, if we will damage nature our future generations will suffer.

Nowadays, technological advancement is adversely affecting our nature. Humans are in the quest and search for prosperity and success that they have forgotten the value and importance of beautiful Nature around. The ignorance of nature by humans is the biggest threat to nature. It is essential to make people aware and make them understand the importance of nature so that they do not destroy it in the search for prosperity and success.

On high priority, we should take care of nature so that nature can continue to take care of us. Saving nature is the crying need of our time and we should not ignore it. We should embrace simple living and high thinking as the adage of our lives.  

FAQs on Nature Essay

1. How Do You Define Nature?

Nature is defined as our environment. It is the interaction between the physical world around us and the life within it like the atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna and humans. Nature also includes non-living things such as water,  mountains, landscape, plants, trees and many other things. Nature adds life to mother earth. Nature is the treasure habitation of every essential element that sustains life on this planet earth. Human life on Earth would have been dull and meaningless without the amazing gifts of nature. 

2. How is Nature Important to Us?

Nature is the only provider of everything that we need for survival. Nature provides us with food, water, natural fuels, fibres, and medicinal plants. Nature regulates natural processes that include decomposition, water purification, pollution, erosion, and flood control. It also provides non-material benefits like improving the cultural development of humans like recreation, etc. 

An imbalance in nature can lead to earthquakes, global warming, floods, and drastic climate changes. It is our duty to understand the importance of nature and how it can negatively affect us all if this rapid consumption of natural resources, pollution, and urbanization takes place.

3. How Should We Save Our Nature?

We should check deforestation and take up the planting of trees at a massive rate. It will save the animals from being extinct but also help create regular rainfall and preserve soil fertility. We should avoid over-dependence on fossil fuels like coal, petroleum products, and firewood which release harmful pollutants to the atmosphere. We should start using non-conventional sources of energy like the sun, biogas, and wind to meet our growing need for energy. It will check and reduce global warming. Water is vital for our survival and we should rationalize our use of water. 

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The Seven Environmental Principles

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Suleiman Abdul

shivaprasad Hegde chapakhanda

Mengea Zerabruk

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) can broadly be defined as a study of the effects of a proposed project, plan or program on the environment. The legal, methodological and procedural foundations of EIA were established in 1970 by the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the USA. At the international level, lending banks and bilateral aid agencies have EIA procedures that apply to borrowing and recipient countries. Most developing counties have also embraced and are in the process of formalizing EIA through legislation. The paper highlights the evolution to current status, the legal framework, concepts, processes and principles of EIA and associated studies.

Abdullah Minhaj

Felipe Moreno

tertsea agber

The paper tries to looks at procedures and processes as a mechanism employed in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) review to judge the adequacy of the process and quality of the EIA. The review is conducted with reference to legal conformity and good practice. Key objectives of EIA review are to: assess quality of information contained in the EIA report; determine how stakeholder concerns have been addressed; determine if the information is adequate for decision-making; and identify information gaps and deficiencies. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) can broadly be defined as a study of the effects of a proposed project, plan or program on the environment. Most developing counties have also embraced it and are in the process of formalizing EIA through legislation. The paper highlights the evolution to current status, the legal framework, concepts, review processes and principles of EIA and associated studies.

Muhammad Umar Shahzad

The environmental impact assessment (EIA) process is an interdisciplinary and multistep procedure to ensure that environmental considerations are included in decisions regarding projects that may impact the environment. Simply defined, the EIA process helps identify the possible environmental effects of a proposed activity and how those impacts can be mitigated. EIA can be defined as " a systematic process to identify, predict and evaluate the environmental effects of proposed actions and projects. " The EIA process is applied prior to major decisions and commitments being made and ideally is integrated into the project design process. OR Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a tool that is used to consider the likely significant environmental effects of a proposed development. EIA as an environmental management tool is used around the world in developed and developing nations. The role of EIA is to inform the decision maker of the significant environmental impacts that are likely to occur if the development proposal is granted consent. The Guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessment identify a number of immediate and long term objectives of EIA. The purpose of the EIA process is to inform decision-makers and the public of the environmental consequences of implementing a proposed project. The EIA document itself is a technical tool that identifies, predicts, and analyzes impacts on the physical environment, as well as social, cultural, and health impacts. If the EIA process is successful, it identifies alternatives and mitigation measures to reduce the environmental impact of a proposed project. The EIA process also serves an important procedural role in the overall decision-making process by promoting transparency and public involvement. It is important to note that the EIA process does not guarantee that a project will be modified or rejected if the process reveals that there will be serious environmental impacts. In some countries, a decision-maker may, in fact, choose the most environmentally-harmful alternative, as long as the consequences are disclosed in the EIA. In other words, the EIA process ensures an informed decision, but not necessarily an environmentally beneficial decision. " Immediate objectives of EIA are to: • improve the environmental design of the proposal; • check the environmental acceptability of the proposals compared to the capacity of the site and the receiving environment; • ensure that resources are used appropriately and efficiently; identify appropriate measures for mitigating the potential impacts of the proposal; and facilitate informed decision making, including setting the environmental terms and conditions for implementing the proposal.

Ephraim Musa

ketan gaikwad

Environmental engineering has been defined as the Branch of engineering, that is concerned with protecting the environment from the potentially deleterious effects of human activity protecting human populations from the effects of adverse environmental factors and thus improving environmental quality for human health and well beings. Today the major problem in front of us is the pollution caused by various industries such as chemical industries, sugar factories, thermal power plants, and cement industries, etc. Their “ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT” can do economic evaluation of the health damages. In this report we have studied a case study on Pauk H.E. project in Arunachal Pradesh & has studied its impact on the environment. Thus we have studied the EIA plan & also problems related to it.

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Written in the wild: the best radical nature writing

From This Land Is Our Land to Why Rebel, the message is that if we take heed of the natural world, we can heal ourselves

E nglish nature writing can be a bit polite. Decorating nature with adjectives has become something of a fashion in the last decade, but there are some books whose verve is a wildflower seed bomb to the neat lawns of English prose.

Principal among these are any of the books written by the magus of human experience in the wild, Jay Griffiths. From Wild , to Kith , to Why Rebel , her latest collection of essays, there is an energy in her words that feels like being chased by wolves. Best of them all is Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression , which describes with hyperreal force the electrical storms of the mind, the eerie twilight of mania.

There are many books that shine a light on the otherwise unmentioned elephant in the room of writing about English nature: that we are allowed access to so little of it. Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth deals with the issue on a global level, and Guy Shrubsole’s excellent Who Owns England? focuses on this country. Ask any land rights campaigner, and the book that inspired them was Marion Shoard’s This Land Is Our Land . Shoard worked for several years for CPRE, the countryside charity, and was fully integrated into the system of land ownership in England and yet, or thus, wrote three excoriating books about its iniquities: The Theft of the Countryside , Right to Roam , and This Land Is Our Land . The last is a comprehensive history of how we lost our rights to land, from William the Conqueror to the modern day.

At long last, the gates to the English garden of nature writing are being prised open by a new generation of talent from communities previously marginalised from both the countryside and the publishing industry. Jini Reddy’s Wanderland deals with the sense of feeling unwelcome in a predominantly white landscape. It primarily seeks a connection of magic between the human and non-human, something deeper than our obsession with leisure and recreation.

The book that most informs the dynamic of race in the English countryside for me is Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. It is a detailed account of the horror at the heart of racism, how it was used to justify the profiteering of sugar barons. It hammers home the point that by objectifying and commodifying nature, we do the same to each other.

Rob Cowen’s recent collection of poems focuses on our recent year of lockdown, emphasising how desperately we need to connect with nature. Mixing the deeply personal with policy and propaganda, interweaving the callous coldness of the wild, from sparrowhawks to viruses, with the regenerative and ebullient effects of nature, The Heeding reminds us what, with a thousand years of exclusion, most of us had forgotten until lockdown: take heed of nature, and we can heal ourselves.

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• 01 May 2024
• Correction 07 May 2024

Why is exercise good for you? Scientists are finding answers in our cells

• Gemma Conroy

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Researchers are looking into the molecular basis of how exercise benefits health, to help treat diseases. Credit: Ozan Guzelce/dia images via Getty

You have full access to this article via your institution.

When Bente Klarlund Pedersen wakes up in the morning, the first thing she does is pull on her trainers and go for a 5-kilometre run — and it’s not just about staying fit. “It’s when I think and solve problems without knowing it,” says Klarlund Pedersen, who specializes in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Copenhagen. “It’s very important for my well-being.”

Whether it’s running or lifting weights, it’s no secret that exercise is good for your health. Research has found that briskly walking for 450 minutes each week is associated with living around 4.5 years longer than doing no leisure-time exercise 1 , and that engaging in regular physical activity can fortify the immune system and stave off chronic diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But, says Dafna Bar-Sagi, a cell biologist at New York University, the burning question is how does exercise deliver its health-boosting effects?

“We know that it is good, but there is still a huge gap in understanding what it is doing to cells,” says Bar-Sagi, who walks on a treadmill for 30 minutes, five days a week.

In the past decade, researchers have started to build a picture of the vast maze of cellular and molecular processes that are triggered throughout the body during — and even after — a workout. Some of these processes dial down inflammation, whereas others ramp up cellular repair and maintenance. Exercise also prompts cells to release signalling molecules that carry a frenzy of messages between organs and tissues: from muscle cells to the immune and cardiovascular systems, or from the liver to the brain.

But researchers are just beginning to work out the meaning of this cacophony of crosstalk, says Atul Shahaji Deshmukh, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen. “Any single molecule doesn’t work alone in the system,” says Deshmukh, who enjoys mountain biking during the summer. “It’s an entire network that functions together.”

Endurance exercise causes a multi-organ full-body molecular reaction

Exercise is also attracting attention from funders. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), for instance, has invested US$170 million into a six-year study of people and rats that aims to create a comprehensive map of the molecules behind the effects of exercise, and how they change during and after a workout. The consortium behind the study has already published its first tranche of data from studies in rats, which explores how exercise induces changes across organs, tissues and gene expression, and how those changes differ between sexes 2 – 4 .

Building a sharper view of the molecular world of exercise could reveal therapeutic targets for drugs that mimic its effects — potentially offering the benefits of exercise in a pill. However, whether such drugs can simulate all the advantages of the real thing is controversial.

The work could also offer clues about which types of physical activity can benefit people with chronic illnesses, says Klarlund Pedersen. “We think you can prescribe exercise as you can prescribe a medicine,” she says.

Hard-wired for exercise

Exercise is a fundamental thread in the human evolutionary story. Although other primates evolved as fairly sedentary species, humans switched to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that demanded walking long distances, carrying heavy loads of food and occasionally running from threats.

Those with better athletic prowess were better equipped to live longer lives, which made exercise a core part of human physiology, says Daniel Lieberman, a palaeoanthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The switch to a more active lifestyle led to changes in the human body: exercise burns up energy that would otherwise be stored as fat, which, in excess amounts, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. The stress induced by running or pumping iron has the potential to damage cells, but it also kick-starts a cascade of cellular processes that work to reverse those effects. This can leave the body in better shape than it would be without exercise, says Lieberman.

Researchers have been exploring some of the biological changes that occur during exercise for more than a century. In 1910, pharmacologist Fred Ransom at the University of Cambridge, UK, discovered that skeletal muscle cells secrete lactic acid, which is created when the body breaks down glucose and turns it into fuel 5 . And in 1961, researchers speculated that skeletal muscle releases a substance that helps to regulate glucose during exercise 6 .

More clues were in store. In 1999, Klarlund Pedersen and her colleagues collected blood samples from runners before and after they took part in a marathon and found that several cytokines — a type of immune molecule — spiked immediately after exercise and that many remained elevated for up to 4 hours afterwards 7 . Among these cytokines were interleukin-6 (IL-6), a multifaceted protein that is a key player in the body’s defence response. The following year, Klarlund Pedersen and her colleagues discovered 8 that IL-6 is secreted by contracting muscles during exercise, making it an ‘exerkine’ — the umbrella term for compounds produced in response to exercise.

Exercising regularly can strengthen the immune system and stave off disease. Credit: Mike Kemp/Getty

High levels of IL-6 can be beneficial or harmful, depending on how it is provoked. At rest, too much IL-6 has an inflammatory effect and is linked to obesity and insulin resistance, a hallmark of type 2 diabetes, says Klarlund Pedersen. But when exercising, the molecule activates its more calming family members, such as IL-10 and IL-1ra, which tone down inflammation and its harmful effects. “With each bout of exercise, you provoke an anti-inflammatory response,” says Klarlund Pedersen. Although some physical activity is better than none, high-intensity, long-duration exercise that engages large muscles — such as running or cycling — will crank up IL-6 production, adds Klarlund Pedersen.

Exercise is a balancing act in other ways, too. Physical activity produces cellular stress, and certain molecules counterbalance this damaging effect. When mitochondria — the powerhouses that supply energy in cells — ramp up production during exercise, they also produce more by-products called reactive oxygen species (ROS), which, in excessive amounts, can damage proteins, lipids and DNA. But these ROS also kick-start a horde of protective processes during exercise, offsetting their more toxic effects and fortifying cellular defences.

Among the molecular stars in this maintenance and repair arsenal are the proteins PGC-1α, which regulates important skeletal muscle genes, and NRF2, which activates genes that encode protective antioxidant enzymes. During exercise, the body has learnt to benefit from a fundamentally stressful process. “If stress doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger,” says Ye Tian, a geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.

Exerkines everywhere

Since IL-6 ushered in the exerkine era, the explosion of multiomics — an approach that combines various biological data sets, such as the proteome and metabolome — has allowed researchers to go beyond chasing single molecules. They can now begin untangling the convoluted molecular web that lies behind exercise, and how it interacts with different systems across the body, says Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, who recently switched from running to weightlifting. “We need to understand how these all work together, because [humans] are a homeostatic machine that needs to be properly tuned,” he says.

In 2020, Snyder and his colleagues took blood samples from 36 people aged between 40 and 75 years old before, during and at various time intervals after the volunteers ran on a treadmill. The team used multiomic profiling to measure more than 17,000 molecules, more than half of which showed significant changes after exercise 9 . They also found that exercise triggered an elaborate ‘choreography’ of biological processes such as energy metabolism, oxidative stress and inflammation. Creating a catalogue of exercise molecules is an important first step in understanding their effects on the body, says Snyder.

How an exercise habit paves the way for injured muscles to heal

Other studies have probed how exercise affects cell types. A 2022 study in mice led by Jonathan Long, a pathologist at Stanford University, identified more than 200 types of protein that were expressed differently by 21 cell types in response to exercise 10 . The researchers were expecting to find that cells in the liver, muscle and bone would be most sensitive to exercise, but to their surprise, they found that a much more widespread type of cell, one that appears in many tissues and organs, showed the biggest changes in the proteins that it cranked out or turned down. The findings suggest that more cell types shift gears during a workout than was previously thought, although what these changes mean for the body is still an open question, says Long.

The findings also showed that after exercise, the mice’s liver cells squeezed out several types of carboxylesterase enzyme, which are known to ramp up metabolism. When Long and his colleagues genetically tweaked mice so that their livers expressed elevated levels of these metabolism-enhancing enzymes, and then fed them a diet of fatty foods, the mice didn’t gain weight. They also had increased endurance when they ran on a treadmill. “The improvement in exercise performance by these secreted carboxylesterases was not known before,” says Long, whose weekly exercise regime involves swimming and lifting weights. He adds that if the enzymes could be produced in the right quantities and purity, they could possibly be used as exercise-mimicking compounds.

During a workout, distant organs and tissues communicate with each other through molecular signals. Along with exerkines, extracellular vesicles (EVs) — nanosized, bubble-shaped structures that carry biological material — could be one of the mechanisms behind organ and tissue crosstalk, says Mark Febbraio, a former triathlete who is now an exercise physiologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In 2018, Febbraio and his team inserted tubes into the femoral arteries of 11 healthy men and drew blood before and after they rode an exercise bike at an increasing pace for an hour. During and after exercise, but not at rest, they found a spike in the levels of more than 300 types of protein that compose or are carried by EVs 11 .

When the team then collected EVs from mice that had run on a treadmill and injected them into another group of healthy mice, most of the EVs ended up in liver cells. In a separate mouse study that is yet to be published, Febbraio and his colleagues found hints that the contents of these liver-bound EVs can arrest a type of liver disease. A big question is whether EVs also deposit genetic material into different cells, and if so, what that means for the body. “We still don’t know a great deal,” he says.

Exercise as medicine

Larger efforts are under way to build a detailed molecular snapshot of how exercise exerts its health-boosting effects across tissues and organs. In 2016, the NIH established the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) , a six-year study on around 2,600 people and more than 800 rats that aims to generate a molecular map of exercise. The effort — one of the largest studies on physical activity — is teasing apart the effects of aerobic and endurance exercise on multiple tissue types across different ages and fitness levels.

The first data set is from rats that completed one to eight weeks of treadmill training, and had blood and tissue samples collected at the end. The researchers pinpointed thousands of molecular changes throughout the rats’ bodies, many of which could have a protective effect on health, such as dialling down inflammatory bowel disease and tissue injury 2 . A separate study 3 found that the effects of endurance training differed across sexes: markers associated with the breakdown of fat increased in male fat tissue, driving fat loss, whereas female fat tissue showed an increase in markers related to fat-cell maintenance and insulin signalling, which might protect against cardiometabolic diseases. A third study 4 found that exercise alters the expression of genes linked to diseases such as asthma, and could help to trigger similar adaptive responses.

Focus on exercise metabolism and health

A big goal is to uncover why exercise has such varied effects on people of different sexes, ages and ethnic backgrounds, says Snyder, who is a member of the MoTrPAC team. “It’s very obvious that some people benefit better than others,” he says.

Researchers hope that the reams of molecular data will eventually help clinicians to develop tailored exercise prescriptions for people with chronic diseases, says MoTrPAC team member Bret Goodpaster, an exercise physiologist at AdventHealth Research Institute in Orlando, Florida. Further down the track, such insights could be used to develop therapeutics that mimic some of the beneficial effects of exercise in people who are too ill to work out, he says. “That’s not to say that we will have exercise in a pill, but there are certain aspects of exercise that could be druggable,” says Goodpaster, who has taken part in triathlons, marathons and cycling races.

Several teams are already in the early stages of developing exercise-mimicking therapeutics. In March 2023, a team led by Thomas Burris, a pharmacologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, identified a compound that targets proteins called oestrogen-related receptors, which are known to trigger key metabolic pathways in energy-intensive tissues, such as heart and skeletal muscle, particularly during exercise 12 . When the researchers administered the compound — called SLU-PP-332 — to mice, they found that the treated rodents were able to run 70% longer and 45% farther than untreated mice. Six months later, a separate study, also led by Burris, found that obese mice treated with the drug lost weight and gained less fat than those that didn’t receive the treatment — even though their diet was the same and they didn’t exercise any more than usual 13 .

There is already evidence that exercise itself acts like medicine. In 2022, Bar-Sagi and her colleagues found that mice with pancreatic cancer had elevated levels of CD8 T cells — which destroy cancerous and virus-infected cells — when they did 30 minutes of aerobic exercise for 5 days a week 14 . These killer cells express a receptor for IL-15, another exerkine released by muscles during exercise. The researchers found that when CD8 T cells bind to IL-15, they unleash a more powerful immune response on tumours in the pancreas. This effect prolonged survival of mice with tumours by around 40%, compared with that of control mice. The findings held up when Bar-Sagi and her team analysed tumour tissue taken from people with pancreatic cancer. Those who did 60 minutes of aerobic and strength training each week had more CD8 T cells, and were twice as likely to survive for up to 5 years, than were people in the control group.

Although exercising more is a no-brainer for improving health, around 25% of adults globally do not meet the World Health Organization’s recommended levels of exercise each week: 150–300 minutes or more of moderate-intensity exercise, such as a brisk walk; or 75–150 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise, such as running. David James, an exercise physiologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, who rides his bike to work each day, says that understanding the inner workings of exercise could help to develop clearer public-health messages about why physical activity is important and how it can offset the risk of getting chronic diseases. “That’s a powerful message,” says James.

Nature 629 , 26-28 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01200-7

Updates & Corrections

Correction 07 May 2024 : An earlier version of this News feature gave an old affiliation for Bret Goodpaster. He is now at AdventHealth Research Institute in Orlando, Florida.

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Julie Chrisley Served New Legal Papers While In Jail

Julie Chrisley's legal issues haven't subsided since turning herself into federal prison.

The Big Picture

• Grayson Chrisley faces lawsuit for car accident while parents are in jail for tax fraud.
• A new lawsuit alleges Grayson was a distracted driver who crashed into another vehicle.
• The family is fighting back against the lawsuit, and requests for phone records.

As Julie Chrisley and Todd Chrisley are trying to appeal their tax fraud convictions (which they are both currently serving jail time for), their son, Grayson Chrisley , has a lawsuit all his own because. Grayson was involved in a car accident. As the reality star sits in jail fighting an appeal, she was named in a lawsuit after Patrick Rywalder filed a suit against the family related to the 2022 incident. Rywalder claims that he was injured after Grayson crashed into his car on the highway and his suit names Julie, Todd, and Savannah Chrisley as defendants.

Rywalder also went out of his way to make sure that Julie was handed the suit while in prison serving her 7-year prison sentence for fraud. Grayson, who is 17 years old, was 16 at the time of the crash, and Rywalder says that he was driving a 2020 Dodge Ram on the interstate when Grayson, driving his parents' 2020 Ford 5150 pickup truck, crashed into him. According to Radar Online , Rywalder accused Grayson of being a distracted driver and said that he was "not paying attention to the roadway in the moments immediately preceding the rear impact."

Rywalder went on to claim that Grayson "failed to act appropriately under the circumstances, which included at a minimum maintaining a safe operating distance from other motor vehicles, maintaining a safe operating speed, and avoiding being distracted by electronic devices within his motor vehicle.” Grayson was taken to the hospital after the crash and the Chrisleys are fighting back against Rywalder for the things he is requesting in the case.

Chrisley knows best

The case marches on despite julie chrisley's imprisonment.

Part of the case includes Rywalder requesting a subpoena for phone records that both Julie and Todd are fighting against. They also claim that Rywalder sustained no injuries during the crash and that the request of $750k along with the subpeona for their phone records was "unreasonable, oppressive, and a clear effort to harass them."

Julie Chrisley's Letters Reveal How Much She Misses Her Husband

The Chrisleys and Rywalder came to an agreement on the phone records, stating that he can have Grayson's records during the time period of November 12 to 15 and Rywalder will not receive Todd and Julie's messages until after their lawyer reviews them for that time period .

The Chrisley's Are Currently Appealing Their Fraud Case

According to The Associated Press , the couple, who are serving separate jail sentences, have challenged certain parts of their convictions and sentences in a federal appeals court . Prosecutors say they Todd and Julie are guilty of a $30 million bank fraud scheme that funded their lavish lifestyle. Their attorney wants their conviction thrown out and for them to be granted a new trial.

The Chrisleys’ lawyers believe the trial judge was wrong to allow certain evidence that was obtained during an alleged illegal search throughout the investigation. They also believe prosecutors in the case did not provide enough evidence to convict the couple of tax evasion and conspiracy, nor was there any evidence produced to determine that Julie participated in bank fraud.

Chrisley Knows Best can be streamed on Peacock.

Watch On Peacock