nature and us essay

Introduction

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From Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature , in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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The idea of nature in America

Leo Marx, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1972, is Senior Lecturer and William R. Kenan Professor of American Cultural History Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Machine in the Garden  (1964), The Pilot and the Passenger  (1988), and coeditor of Does Technology Drive History?  (with Merritt Roe Smith, 1994).

The idea of nature is – or, rather, was – one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served – as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs – to define the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white settlers with what they perceived as wilderness – unaltered nature – was the defining American experience.

By the end of that era, however, the wilderness had come to seem a thing of the past, and the land of farms and villages was rapidly becoming a land of factories and cities. By 1920, half the population lived in cities, and as the natural world became a less immediate presence, images of the pristine landscape – chief icon of American nature – lost their power to express the nation’s vision of itself.

Then, in the 1970s, with the onset of the ecological ‘crisis,’ the refurbished, matter-of-fact word environment took over a large part of the niche in public discourse hitherto occupied by the word nature. Before the end of the century, the marked loss of status and currency suffered by the idea of nature had become a hot subject in academic and intellectual circles. Reputable scholars and journalists published essays and books about the ‘death’ – or the ‘end’ – of nature; the University of California recruited a dozen humanities professors to participate in a semester-long research seminar designed to “reinvent nature”; 1 and the association of European specialists in American studies chose, as the aim of its turn-of-the-century conference, to reassess the changing role played by the idea of nature in America. 2

What are we to make of the purported demise of nature? Can it be that the venerable idea is no longer meaningful? If that seems improbable on its face, it is because nature is our oldest, most nearly universal name for the material world, and despite the alarming extent of the transformation – and devastation – we humans have visited on it, that world is still very much with us. But why, then, is the general idea of nature – nature in all its meanings – falling into disuse? What other reasons might there be for the seeming end of nature? With these questions in mind, I want to reconsider the idea’s changing role in American thought.

But, first, these preliminary caveats. I do not mean to suggest that the imminent disappearance of nature – if that is what we are witnessing – is a peculiarly American development. But in view of the crucial role played by the idea over the course of American history, a reassessment of critical stages of that history may prove to be revealing. I say ‘stages’ because limitations of space – the subject calls for a long treatise rather than an essay – make it necessary to focus on a few significant points along the historical trajectory traced by the idea of nature in American thought.

But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap. As used in ordinary discourse nowadays, it is an inherently ambiguous word. We cannot always tell whether references to nature are meant to include or exclude people. Besides, the word also carries the sense of essence: of the ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something, as for example, ‘the nature of femininity’ or, for that matter, ‘the nature of nature.’ When this meaning is in play, the word tacitly imputes an idealist or essentialist – hence ahistorical – character to the particular subject at hand, whether it be femaleness or nature itself. The word’s multiple meanings testify to its age: its roots go back (by way of Latin and Old French) to the concept of origination – of being born. As Raymond Williams famously noted, nature is probably the most complex word in the English language. 3 And when, moreover, the idea of nature is yoked with the ideologically freighted concept of American nationhood, as in the historian Perry Miller’s sly allusion to America as Nature’s Nation, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism. 4

Contemplating the nature of nature in America has led many scholars, of whom the historian Frederick Jackson Turner is the exemplar, to adopt the contested idiom of ‘American exceptionalism.’ 5 And not without good reason. However wary of chauvinism one might be, it would be foolish to deny that when Europeans first encountered American nature, it truly was, and to some extent still is, exceptional – perhaps not unique but, like Australia, a continent even less developed at the time of contact, surely exceptional. It was exceptional in its immensity, its spectacular beauty, its variety of habitats, its promise of wealth, its accessibility to settlers from overseas, and, above all, in the scarcity of its indigenous population. Hence the remarkable extent of its underdevelopment – its wildness – as depicted in myriad representations of the initial landfall of European explorers on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. In that stock image, the newly discovered terrain appears to be untouched by civilization, a cultural void populated by godless savages, and not easy to distinguish from a state of nature.

In the beginning, then, Europeans formed their impressions of American nature in a geographical context: it was a place, a terrain, a landscape. But they invariably accommodated their immediate impressions of American places to their imported – typically religious – preconceptions about the nature of nature and the character of indigenous peoples. Thus all of the significant American ideas of nature are hybrids, conceived in Europe and inflected by New World experience. And each ideology that served as a rationale for one or another colonial system of power contained such a hybrid Euro-American conception of nature and of the colonists’ relations with it.

A revealing example is the Pilgrim leader William Bradford’s well-known description of the forbidding Cape Cod shoreline as seen from the deck of the Mayflower in 1620. He depicts it as “a hidious and desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Here the bias inherent in the Christian idea of nature as fallen – as Satan’s domain – effectively erases the humanity of the indigenous Americans. To Bradford they are more like wild beasts than white men.

The concept of satanic nature provided a useful foil for the sacred mission of the Puritan colonists. 6 In 1645, for example, John Winthrop, lieutenant governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used it as an ideological weapon to defend his theocratic authority. His enemies had charged him with infringing on their liberty, and in his uncompromising response in the General Court he develops the distinction between two kinds of liberty: natural and civil. Natural liberty, “common to man with beasts and other creatures,” is the liberty, he argues, we enjoy in a state of nature, namely, to do evil as well as good; civil liberty, on the other hand, is moral, hence available only to the truly regenerate, only to Christians redeemed from sin by the reception of divine grace. 7 According to Calvinist doctrine, only those rescued from the state of nature may enjoy the God-given liberty to do what is good, just, and honest. Here, on the coast of a vast, unexplored continent, the idea of an ostensibly separate realm of wild nature – a separateness underscored by the contrast with the tamed state of nature in Europe – was a valuable rhetorical asset for the colony’s leaders. Allusions to wild nature served to reinforce the doctrinal barrier between themselves, the elect, and the unregenerate, whom they consigned to the realm of natural lawlessness.

In the lexicon of Protestant Christianity in America, the essential character of primal nature was conveyed by epithets like ‘howling desert’ and ‘hideous wilderness,’ and by the malign names – savage, cannibal, slave – assigned to indigenous peoples. In Winthrop’s argument, accordingly, the unarguable existence of a separate (unredeemed) state of nature helps to justify his a priori condemnation of the unregenerate, who constitute a potential threat of lawlessness, anarchy, and misrule. Their geographical location underscored the theological argument: the only escape from natural unregeneracy open to them was the reception of divine grace.

By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote his draft of the Declaration of Independence, the theological notion of a dual nature – part profane, part sacred – was being supplanted by the unitary character of Newtonian science and Deism. Here, the initial identification of American nature with the landscape expanded to embrace the natural processes, or laws, operating behind its visible surface. Because the newly discovered celestial machinery obeys physical laws accessible to human reason, Newtonian physics had the effect of bringing humanity and nature closer together. Besides, the mathematical clarity and precision of the new physics made the old images of a dark, disorderly nature repugnant. Alexander Pope summed up the change in the prevailing worldview in the couplet engraved on Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

By 1776 it made sense for a rhetorician as gifted as Jefferson to extend the hypothetical reach of nature’s laws – or, to be more precise, of principles analogous to them – to the unruly sphere of politics. To justify the colonists’ acts of treason and armed rebellion, he had merely to describe them as the means – indeed, the only possible means - of claiming the independent status to which they were entitled by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Nature, as our free-thinking president conceived of it, was not so much the work of God as God was a constituent feature of Nature. By invoking a secularized idea of nature on behalf of a quintessentially political cause, Jefferson helped to narrow the gulf separating humanity and nature. But for that purpose, the idiom of the natural sublime was even more effective. Nine years later, in Notes on Virginia, Jefferson invoked the sublime to account for the unsurpassed beauty of one of American nature’s most cherished creations – Virginia’s Natural Bridge. An ardent practitioner of the neoclassical aesthetic, Jefferson credits the beauty of the Bridge to its symmetrical form, or, as it were, to the strikingly close approximation of its form to ostensibly natural principles of order and proportion. He begins his description of the bridge with a detailed analysis of its exact dimensions, as if reported by a detached observer writing in the third person. But then, partway through, he abruptly puts himself into the scene, climbs the parapet, and, shifting to the second person, describes how “you” inescapably would react if you too found yourself standing on the narrow ledge looking “over into the abyss”:

You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it . . . . If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme. It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here; so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven! The rapture of the spectator is really indescribable! 8

As this passionate Wordsworthian apostrophe suggests – it was written about fifteen years before the preface to the Lyrical Ballads – Jefferson already was prepared to enlist in the Romantic movement. But even after the triumph of Romanticism, the separateness of nature remained a largely unchallenged if unstated premise of public discourse. Since no authoritative biological counterpart to the Newtonian laws of nature had yet been formulated, supernatural explanations of the origin of life were not yet vulnerable to the challenge of scientific materialism. By the same token, pantheism retained its status as a Christian heresy, and dutiful communicants were advised to be wary of the feeling of oneness with nature.

In 1836, four years after resigning his pastorate in the Second (Unitarian) Church of Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson anonymously published the essay Nature, which came to be known as the manifesto of Transcendentalism, a New England variant of European Romanticism. The essay begins as a lament for the loss of humanity’s direct relations with nature. “Why,” Emerson asks, “should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”

Like his title, the question rests on the assumption that nature was – and should once again become–a primary locus of meaning and value for Americans. What followed was Emerson’s first and only attempt to formulate a systematic theory of nature, and in it he probably came as close as he ever would to repudiating the orthodox theological assumption that humanity and nature belong to separate realms of being. To illustrate the potential effect of being in “the presence of nature,” Emerson describes an epiphany that is patently irreconcilable with the idea of nature’s separateness. One gloomy afternoon, while crossing the town common, he was suddenly – unaccountably – overwhelmed by a sense of immanence, or, as he puts it, of “being part or parcel of God.” It was a largely secularized variant of the Protestant conversion experience, and it suggests the possibility, as Emerson puts it, of an “occult relation” – or state of oneness – with nonhuman nature. The balance of Nature may be read as an effort to devise a reasoned explanation, or justification, for this transformative experience.

Emerson’s account of the epiphany reveals his ambivalence about the relative validity of religious and scientific conceptions of nature. On the one hand it expresses his growing skepticism, on both theological and scientific grounds, about the received idea of a separate nature. As a Unitarian, to be sure, he already had repudiated most supernatural aspects of Christian doctrine, including the divinity of Jesus. A few years before writing Nature, he had resigned his pastorate on the grounds that he no longer could in good conscience perform the – to him, excessively literal – sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. At that time, moreover, he was studiously keeping abreast of the latest advances in geology and zoology, which provided empirical evidence in support of various emerging theories of evolution. When Nature was reissued in 1849, in fact, he appended a new verse epigraph depicting humanity’s origin:

A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. 9

But though Emerson, like many of his contemporaries, was receptive to evolutionary thinking long before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, he was not prepared – for reasons he never quite made explicit – to abandon the idea of nature’s separateness. That traditional assumption is built into the conceptual structure of Nature. In defining his key terms, he postulates a universe made up of all that exists except for one thing: the human soul. All being, he asserts, “is composed of Nature and the Soul,” and he goes on to specify that “all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, nature.” 10 Though he tacitly repudiated the major tenets of the Christian faith, and though he was prepared to embrace the theory of evolution, he continued to define NATURE as a discrete entity, eternally separated from human beings and their immortal souls.

But the theory of evolution, as definitively set forth by Darwin in 1859, made the age-old belief in nature’s separateness scientifically untenable once and for all. 11 On that score the logical import of evolutionary biology is clear and conclusive. If Homo sapiens evolved through a process of natural selection, if our species is inextricably embedded in a global web of biophysical processes, then there can be no such thing – on the planet Earth at least – as a separate domain of nature.

But the logic of science is one thing, and ancient habits of mind are another. Despite the passage of some 145 years since Darwin’s theory first caught the world’s attention, and despite the confirmation it has received, first and last, from an international consensus of scientists, its import has yet to be incorporated in prevailing assumptions about the nature of nature. To this day, the ‘nature’ commonly invoked in our public and private discourse – even by those of us who claim to ‘believe in’ evolution seems to be a discrete, almost wholly independent entity ‘out there’ somewhere. In ordinary usage the word rarely conveys a sense of humanity’s ties with other living things. As the historian of science, Lynn White, Jr., noted in his influential 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” “Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process.” 12

But that is putting it mildly. As everyone knows, the publication of the Origin of Species aroused intense public hostility, especially among churchmen and religious believers. There was no way, after all, to disguise the simple truth: Darwin’s theory flatly contradicts the Biblical account of the creation. Besides, people of all persuasions, many nonbelievers among them, were – still are – revolted by the notion that we are kin to the higher primates. It makes them feel, as the saying goes, ‘tainted by bestiality.’ So does the idea that humanity reached the pinnacle of the food chain by winning a long, murderous struggle, “red” – in the poet Tennyson’s phrase – “in tooth and claw.” 13 But the repugnance aroused by evolutionary theory did not surprise its wisest proponents. Years before he published the Origin, for example, Darwin had begun to fear that it would raise the specter of atheism. He clearly understood – and empathized with – the widespread impulse to deny, or gloss over, the disturbing implications of his theory. But he urged readers of the Origin to resist the impulse. “Nothing is easier,” he warned,

than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult atleast I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature . . . will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. 14

But the perceived antireligious import of Darwinism was not the only reason for its failure to win acceptance in America. Equally if not more important was the largely unremarked yet fundamental conflict between the evolutionary view of humanity’s embeddedness in natural processes and the nation’s chief geopolitical project: the settlement and economic development of the continental landmass. As Tocqueville observed, most European settlers were “insensible” to the beauty and wonder of the wilderness. “Their eyes,” he wrote, “are fixed on another sight: [their] . . . own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.” 15 That westward march, aimed at transforming the continent’s natural resources into marketable wealth as rapidly as possible, was executed under the aegis of such slogans as ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the ‘Conquest of Nature,’ and, above all, ‘Progress.’

The belief in ‘progress,’ a shorthand label for a grand narrative of history, was post–Civil War America’s most popular secular creed. It held that our history is, or is rapidly becoming, a record of the steady, cumulative, continuous expansion of knowledge of – and power over – nature, a power destined to effect an overall improvement in the conditions of life. On this view, nature has a critical role in the unfolding of material progress – but a role largely defined by human purposes. Because it is an indispensable source of our knowledge and our raw materials, nature is most productively conceived as wholly Other – an unequivocally independent, separate, hence exploitable entity. The combined authority of the progressive ethos and the Christian faith accounts for much of nineteenth-century America’s aversion to the Darwinian view of nature and, by the same token, the popularity of Social Darwinism. Though seemingly an offshoot of evolutionary biology, Social Darwinism was in fact a perversion of the new science. It turned on the idea of “the survival of the fittest,” a catchphrase given worldwide currency by Herbert Spencer, the most influential popularizer of evolutionary theory. It was Spencer who did most to transform the idea of biological evolution into a full-fledged rationale – Social Darwinism – for the ruthless practices of ‘free market’ capitalism, as exemplified by the robber baron generation of American businessmen. 16

The massive incursion of white settlers into the Western wilderness enacted the American belief in nation-building progress. In the popular culture, the successive stages of that great migration were represented by an imaginary boundary – a moving boundary–separating the built environment of the East from the expanse of undeveloped, ostensibly unowned – or, as it was called, ‘free’–land of the West. Never mind that the land already was inhabited; the westward movement of the boundary represented the serial imposition of a beneficent Civilization on an unruly Nature, including its ‘savage’ inhabitants. The boundary’s westward movement was a gauge of national progress, and in tacit recognition of its ideological significance, it was given a proper name – the frontier – and accorded iconic status as an actual line – usually a broken or dotted line – imprinted on maps and documented by demographic data regularly collected, revised, and published in official reports of the United States Census. Eventually the word and the icon were compressed into a single term, ‘the frontier line,’ visual marker of the ‘conquest of nature.’ Conquest was an accurate name for it. After comparing America’s treatment of nature with that of other nations over the ages, one historian concluded that “the story of . . . [the United States] as regards the use of forests, grasslands, wildlife and water sources is the most violent and most destructive in the long history of civilization.” 17

It is not surprising that a people busily plundering that Western cornucopia had little use for Darwinism. The ravaging of the West was not easily reconciled with the view that human life is inextricably enmeshed in natural processes. What made the conventional idea of a separate nature especially popular, under the circumstances, was its hospitality to either of the reigning – and contradictory – conceptions of the national terrain. Most Americans, it would seem, regarded that terrain as a hostile wilderness, a state of nature tolerable only insofar as it could be subjected to human domination. At the same time, however, a vocal minority took the opposite view. A cohort of gifted artists and intellectuals, many of them adherents of European Romanticism, regarded Nature as the embodiment of ultimate meaning and value. Landscapes embodying that Romantic conviction were represented in the paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and the other members of the Hudson River School; in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and a host of other poets, essayists, novelists, and philosophers; and in the work of conservation activists like John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Teddy Roosevelt. In the press and the popular arts of mid-century America, a sentimental, quasi-religious cult of Nature helped to vent the pathos aroused by the spectacle of ravaged forests, slaughtered bison, and ‘vanishing Americans.’

The ambiguity inherent in the idea of nature is central to the apocalyptic outcome of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s epical account of America’s violent assault on the natural world. Melville was so impressed by the irrational ferocity of the assault, in fact, that he instructs his narrator, Ishmael, to seek out its origin and its consequences. The inquiry rests on two assumptions: first, that the relations between American society and nonhuman nature are typified by whaling, a technologically sophisticated, for-profit industry devoted to killing whales; and, second, that the psychic roots of the enterprise are exemplified by Captain Ahab’s obsession with wreaking revenge on a particular sperm whale whose distinguishing feature is his preternatural whiteness. (The sperm whale, not coincidentally, is the largest living embodiment of nature on the face of the earth.) What is it about the whiteness of this whale, Ishmael asks, that provokes Ahab’s ungovernable hatred? Melville devotes an entire chapter to the inquiry – a chapter without which, Ishmael insists, the whole story would be pointless.

After an exhaustive analysis of every meaning of whiteness he can think of, it occurs to Ishmael that the uncanny effect of the color – or is it the absence of color? – is not attributable to any one of its meanings, but rather to its affinity, like that of material nature itself, with myriad, often antithetical meanings – or, in a word, to its ambiguity. At times, he observes, whiteness evokes disease, terror, death; and at others, “the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls.” But then, Ishmael recalls, the beauty of natural objects is no more inherent in their physical properties than their color is; actually, he realizes that their seeming beauty is the product of “subtle deceits” of light and color, and that in fact “all deified nature paints like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.” All of which leads him to conclude that Ahab’s obsession is in large measure attributable to the maddening blankness – the essential illusoriness – of nature, its capacity to provoke yet endlessly resist his rage for meaning. In the end, the mad captain’s anger overwhelms his reason, and the tragic outcome, as Ishmael interprets it, reveals the incalculable cost – and futility – of the human effort to grasp the ultimate meaning of nature.

The year 1970 is when the ecological ‘crisis’ caught up with the idea of nature. Public anxiety about the devastation of the natural world had grown steadily in the aftermath of Hiroshima and the onset of the nuclear arms race. But it was not until 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, that the threat to the human habitat attracted nationwide attention. And it was in 1970 that the emerging environmental movement first displayed its political power. In was then that President Nixon proposed, and Congress enacted, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the act establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. A large cohort of scientists and engineers was recruited to work on the problems involved in the accelerating rate of air and water pollution, climate change, and species extinction. At about that time, it became evident that the word environment was supplanting the word nature in American public discourse.

This was no coincidence. Natural scientists had long recognized the ambiguity and instability inherent in ordinary language, especially in words, like nature, used to describe the biophysical world. For centuries, after all, ‘Nature’ conceived as a separate entity had served as an all-purpose metaphysical Other. It had been depicted as the creation of God and the habitation of Satan, as harmonious and chaotic, beneficent and hostile, as something to be revered and something to be conquered. Over its history, indeed, the word nature had been encrusted with a rich deposit of meaning and metaphor, and practicing scientists often found themselves looking for ways to avoid, or circumvent, the imprecision and ambiguity.

In a revealing passage of the Origin, for example, Darwin feels compelled to defend himself for having alluded to natural selection as “a ruling power or Deity.” It is difficult, he explains,” to avoid personifying the word Nature,” and besides, “everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphoric expressions.” But Darwin is not apologizing. An accomplished writer of English prose, he appreciates the beauty and power of figurative language, and he is not about to dispense with it. Nonetheless, as if to prove that he knows what the word nature actually means in scientific practice, he grudgingly offers this stripped-down, or positivist, definition: “I mean by Nature,” he writes, “only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.” 18

Darwin’s recourse to this bloodless, ungraspable, if scientifically unobjectionable definition of nature was prophetic. It prefigured the partial eclipse of nature by environment in our time. The signal merits of environment , as compared with nature, are its unequivocal materiality, and what might be called its ideological neutrality or objectivity. It refers to the entire biophysical surround – or environ – we inhabit; it implies no distinction between human and other forms of life; it encompasses all that is built and (so to speak) unbuilt, the artificial and the natural, within the terrain we inhabit. Besides, as the related verb, to environ, indicates, most environments palpably are products of human effort. It is not difficult to understand, then, why this matter-of-fact word proved to be more acceptable than nature to people coping with the practical problems created by the degradation of ‘nature.’ But there is a troubling irony here. What recently has proven to be a serious shortcoming of the idea of a separate nature – its hospitality to a virtually limitless range of moral, religious, and metaphysical meaning – had for centuries been the reason for its immense appeal as a subject of art and literature, theology and philosophy, or, indeed, virtually all modes of thought and expression.

But to return to the final decades of the twentieth century when, as I noted at the outset, the loss of status and currency suffered by the idea of nature became obvious. In those years the work of avant-garde artists and intellectuals was filled with predictions of nature’s imminent demise. In an influential 1984 essay, Fredric Jameson, a prominent theorist of postmodernism, argued that the disappearance of nature was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the postmodern mentality. “Postmodernism is what you have,” he asserted, “when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” 19 With characteristic postmodern tendentiousness, Jameson assumes that nature is a cultural construction – a mere product of ‘discourse’ – and emphatically not an actual topographical or biophysical entity. From his idealist perspective, the dominant American idea of nature – nature primarily conceived as a terrain or other biophysical actuality – is meaningless. In Jameson’s view, that usage, with its implicit claim to unmediated knowledge of the material world, is epistemologically naive. Nature in that sense, he is saying, is gone for good because it epitomizes the age-old illusion that it is possible to arrive at a direct, wholly reliable relation with material reality.

In The Death of Nature (1989), Carolyn Merchant laments the demise of a widely accepted idea of nature, but in her view it died some four centuries ago. The authentic, biologically grounded concept of an organic nature actually was supplanted – though perhaps only temporarily – by the mechanistic, male-oriented Newtonian-Cartesian philosophy that accompanied the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. The basic model for that philosophy was the machine, and it has

permeated and reconstructed human consciousness so totally that today we scarcely question its validity. Nature, society, and the human body are composed of interchangeable atomized parts that can be repaired or replaced from outside. The ‘technological fix’ mends an ecological malfunction . . . . The mechanical view of nature now taught in most Western schools is accepted without question as our everyday, commonsense reality . . . . The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature. 20

But Merchant, a committed environmentalist, leaves open the possibility of resurrecting and refining the premodern, organic idea of nature. Perhaps, she implies, the desperation induced by the accelerating ecological crisis will lead mankind to repudiate the mechanical view of nature and reaffirm a humane organicism. 21

Among the prominent obituaries for the idea of nature, however, the most pertinent to my argument is Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989). He contends that nature came to an end, both as a discrete biophysical entity and as a meaningful concept, when the Earth’s atmospheric envelope was penetrated – and its filtering capacities damaged – by greenhouse gases and other manufactured chemicals. 22 By encompassing all of Earth’s space, the expanding technological power of modern industrial societies has rid the planet of unaltered nature. The last remaining patches of pristine wilderness are now wrapped in a layer of man-made atmosphere.

In McKibben’s view, however, the most serious consequences of the degradation of material nature are conceptual. They are at once psychological, moral, and spiritual. What chiefly concerns him is the impoverishment of human thought. “We have killed off nature,” he writes, “that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircles and supported our human society.” It is as if the real meaning and value of the ancient concept of nature only became apparent after technological ‘progress’ had made it obsolete. We “have ended the thing that has defined . . . nature for us,” he writes, “–its separation from human society.” 23

The importance McKibben assigns to the erasure of nature’s separateness distinguishes The End of Nature from other laments about the disappearance of nature. 24 To my knowledge, he is the only writer who attaches vital significance to this seldom noted, seemingly banal attribute of the received idea of nature. But exactly why is the independence of nature so important? Although McKibben does not adequately answer this hovering question, he provides a telling clue to its profound significance for him. “We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning,” he writes. And why is that? Because, he asserts, “nature’s independence is its meaning, without it there is nothing but us.” 25 It is an astute observation and a poignant confession: without nature there is nothing but us. For McKibben, like many ardent environmentalists, nature is at bottom a theological or metaphysical concept. In his vocabulary, nature refers to the foundational character – the ultimate meaning – of the cosmos. But if the idea of nature is to continue serving as an effective repository of that belief, he is saying, it must not be deprived of its traditional status as a separate, discrete entity. To compromise its independence, as Darwinism inescapably does, and as McKibben movingly testifies, is to expose its devotees to the skeptical influence of cosmic loneliness or – in a word – atheism.

The tenability of the idea of wilderness, the oldest and most popular American variant of the idea of nature, also was called into question at the end of the century. In a provocative 1995 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon, a prominent environmental historian, precipitated a heated controversy by asserting that the popular notion of a pristine American wilderness, or ‘virgin land,’ embodies a racist or colonialist falsification of the historical record. 26 Cronon had established the empirical basis for this judgment in Changes in the Land, his seminal 1983 study of the transformation of the New England terrain, long before the arrival of Europeans, by the indigenous peoples of North America. But now, with his 1995 essay, he shocked many environmentalists, for whom the idea of the unsullied American wilderness is sacrosanct, with plain talk about its covert meaning. By the time of the alleged European “discovery” of the “new world,” he argues, there no longer was anything “natural” about it. Far from “being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity,” he writes, the American wilderness is “entirely the creation of the culture that holds it dear.” Actually, the mythic image of a “virgin, uninhabited land” was an ideological weapon in the service of the white European conquest of the Americas, and it was “especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home.”

And yet Cronon, an ardent environmentalist and outdoorsman, cannot bring himself to repudiate the idea of wilderness. To be sure, he clearly explains what makes it objectionable. “Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe that we are separate from nature – as wilderness tends to do – is likely,” he concedes, “to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior.” But he also acknowledges that respect for wilderness entails respect for nonhuman forms of life. Like many environmentalists, in fact, he had responded to the prevalence of arrogant anthropocentrism – especially the unfeeling disregard for the well-being of animals – by embracing an ecocentric version of species egalitarianism. Now, seemingly contradicting himself, he concedes that the idea of the “autonomy of nonhuman nature . . . [may be] an indispensable corrective to human arrogance.” He admits that he is torn between his viewpoint as a disinterested scholar and as an environmental activist, or, put differently, between historically informed skepticism about – and reverence for – the contested idea of wilderness. In the end, Cronon fails to resolve his ambivalence. But his failure strongly suggests that the idea of wilderness, like the pre-Darwinian idea of nature as a separate, largely independent entity, is incoherent and irremediably unstable.

In the event, however, Cronon proposes a way to rescue the notion of pristine, unaltered nature. He urges American environmentalists to follow the lead of their patron saints, Henry Thoreau and John Muir, and replace the idea of wilderness with the simpler, less problematic idea of wildness. (After founding the Sierra Club in 1892, Muir had chosen Thoreau’s famous epigram “In Wildness is the preservation of the World” as its official motto.) The chief merit of wildness as a locus of value and meaning, he notes, is that, unlike wilderness, it “can be found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk, even in the cells of our own body.” Whereas wilderness is a particular kind of place (one that exhibits no signs of human intervention), wildness is an attribute of living organisms that may turn up anywhere; a blue jay or a daisy in a Manhattan park, he contends, is no less wild than its counterpart in the Rocky Mountains. As might be expected, Cronon’s critics were quick to note that there is something tenuous, even quixotic, about his notion that a change of vocabulary could resolve the debate about the value of wilderness. Still, his proposal does call attention to the critical shortcomings that the idea of wilderness shares with the idea of a separate nature. As he warns, and as the devastation of the American wilderness attests, the belief that we humans occupy a realm of being separate from the rest of nature encourages what he all-too politely refers to as “environmentally irresponsible behavior.”

In recent years several ecologically oriented writers, including Cronon, have endorsed a promising way to salvage the venerable idea of nature. 27 They propose to rehabilitate the compelling distinction, favored by Hegel and Marx, between two fundamentally distinct, historically grounded states of nature, to be called first nature and second nature. In this usage, first nature is the biophysical world as it existed before the evolution of Homo sapiens, and second nature is the artificial – material and cultural – environment that humanity has superimposed upon first nature. On this view, manifestly, nature is all. Unlike the traditional idea of a separate nature, the first nature/second nature distinction is consonant with the received history of nature, and especially with the primacy, in that history, of the process of biological evolution by natural selection and the emergence of life on Earth. During all but the final minutes, as it were, of this historical narrative, first nature was all that existed.

But then, beginning with the emergence of life and – eventually – Homo sapiens, second nature took over, and gradually transformed, an increasingly large area of the planet’s surface. Biologists have taught us that every organism modifies its habitat in some degree, but the extent of humanity’s modification of Earth exceeds that of other species by orders of magnitude. Second nature is in large measure a human artifact, and in recent centuries the rapidly accelerating expansion of humanity’s power – and its territorial reach – has had a devastating impact on global ecosystems. The result is a grave crisis in the relations, or putative ‘balance,’ between first and second nature. One of the singular merits of the first nature/second nature distinction is the clarity it affords us in characterizing the uniqueness – for good and ill – of humanity and its role in the overall history of nature. By dividing the concept of nature along an historical, or evolutionary, fault line, the first nature/second nature concept enables us to do full justice to humanity’s unmatched power to create a unique material and cultural environment. At the same time, however, it has the inestimable merit of validating the idea of a single, subdivided yet fundamentally unified realm of nature.

1 The essays they produced are reprinted in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (W. W. Norton: New York, 1995).

2 This essay derives from a paper presented at the conference of the European Association for American Studies, in Graz, Austria, April 14–17, 2000. See Hans Bak and Walter W. Holbling, eds., “Nature’s Nation” Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis (Amsterdam: VU Press, 2003).

3 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 219.

4 Miller first used the phrase in his 1953 essay, “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 209. Elizabeth W. Miller and Kenneth Murdock later used it as the title of a posthumous collection of Miller’s essays, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

5 In his seminal 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that American nature, in the form of free land, in effect determined the “peculiarity of American institutions. ”

6 William Bradford, History of Plimoth Plantation, in Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, eds., The Puritans (New York: American Book Company, 1938), 100–101 .

7 John Winthrop, “Speech to the General Court, July 3, 1625,” in Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans, 206.

8 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 55.

9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), I, 8.

10 Ibid., 10–11. Emphasis added.

11 In Origin of Species, though Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection remained incomplete until the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871.

12 Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” in Paul Shepherd, ed., The Subversive Science; Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 369. See also Leo Marx, “American Institutions and Ecological Ideals,” Science 170 (November 27, 1970): 945–952.

13 “In Memoriam” (1850), which he had begun writing in 1833.

14 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Mentor, 1958), 74.,

15 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), II, 74.

16 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1800–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Leo Marx, “The Domination of Nature and the Redefinition of Progress,” in Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 201–218.

17 Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 175.

18 Darwin, Origin of Species, 88.

19 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), ix.

20 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 193.

21 Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992).

22 Subsequent observations of ‘global warming’ are widely accepted in the scientific community as evidence of the man-made transformation of Earth’s atmospheric envelope.

23 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 96, 64.

24 Raymond Williams calls attention to the idea of nature’s separateness in “The Idea of Nature,” Problems of Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 67–85.

25 McKibben, The End of Nature, 58.

26 Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, 69–90. For a comprehensive collection of the arguments, pro and con, including Cronon’s essay, see J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

27 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xviiff; Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 117–118.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Nature: Introduction

Nature: plot summary, nature: detailed summary & analysis, nature: themes, nature: quotes, nature: characters, nature: terms, nature: symbols, nature: literary devices, nature: theme wheel, brief biography of ralph waldo emerson.

Historical Context of Nature

Other books related to nature.

• Full Title: Nature
• When Written: Mid-1830s (in November 1833, he gave a lecture called “The Uses of Natural History” in Boston, which contained many of the ideas that he’d later flesh out in his essay “Nature”).
• Where Written: Concord, Massachusetts
• When Published: September 1836 (Emerson also has a later essay called “Nature,” published in 1844, which is a separate work from his better-known 1836 “Nature” essay).
• Literary Period: Transcendentalism
• Genre: Essay
• Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for Nature

Dear Diary. Emerson was a prolific diarist, with his personal journals spanning from his junior year at Harvard College up through his elderly years. His journals served as a major source of inspiration for fellow Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau and were eventually published in 16 volumes.

The Buddha of the West. Emerson was revered as an orator as well as an author, giving as many as 80 philosophical lectures in a year throughout the United States. (He gave his first lecture, “The Uses of Natural History,” in 1833, outlining some of the points that he would later refine and build on in “Nature.)  Many of his contemporaries regarded him as a brilliant and wise thinker whose lectures inspired people to see the world’s underlying beauty and mysticism.

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Essay: 'I Feel Like a Speck'

Spending time in nature can be a powerful antidote to the complexity and uncertainty of our times.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith.” Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner’s new book,  Awe , demonstrates, through research and storytelling, this restorative power of nature. For as little as a few minutes, experiences in the outdoors can heighten our senses, evoke positive emotions like joy, wonder, and awe, and help us gain much-needed perspectives that quiet our egos and orient us toward being part of things larger than ourselves.

In this spirit, I recently invited MBA students in my course, “At Your Best,” to join me on April 8 to  observe the solar eclipse  in the Darden School’s new  Arboretum and LaCross Botanical Garden . The outing paired our course’s focus on developing personal resilience skills that support communicating and leading well with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cultivate mindfulness, perspective, and joy. Through the Compassionate Care Initiative, which I direct at the School of Nursing, we routinely take nursing students and others on retreats at  Morven  where we walk through the Japanese Garden. I wanted to share the benefits of the outdoors with my Darden students, too. 

In “At Your Best”, we develop inner and outer awareness through contemplative practices and other training. This afternoon, specifically, we practiced mindfulness exercises that I introduced in class the week before called “mindful walking” and “See Hear Feel.” Outwardly, we gathered to explore the newly designed open-air spaces and to observe a rare solar eclipse. Inwardly, we practiced mindfully tapping into the senses, emotions, thoughts, and stories that arise when encountering nature. 

Without prompting, the See Hear Feel exercise started immediately. As the moon had already started to block the sun, we witnessed the slim orange crescent through our glasses. A chorus of wows and “That’s so cool!” welled up. We felt the air getting cooler and the breeze starting to kick up. The delight and laughter were palpable, like a playground. Lili Powell, associate professor, CCI director, and Darden professor

Although we focused on the present moment during the outing, I shared some history for added perspective and to help students appreciate the magnitude of the transformation that is underway in the Arboretum and LaCross Botanical Garden. Once home to the Monacan people, the land had been known as Sunnyside Farm, beginning in 1788 until the University bought it in 1963.[3] In recent years, a large gully channeled stormwater through the center of what became a manicured pond in the Upper Gardens. It is all the more astonishing now that this once forgotten and neglected space has become the realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a botanical garden at the University. Yet the leadership of Dean Scott Beardsley and the support of generous alumni donors such as David and Kathleen LaCross have created new physical contours and learning possibilities. While still in its early days, I imagine this space growing into a living museum of plants, trees, and landscape design on par with The Lawn’s homage to classical architecture and ideals of an Academical Village. 

When I arrived that afternoon, a dozen and a half of my students were already gathered at our meeting spot: The Class of 1987 Amphitheater. Quickly, I distributed special eclipse glasses to everyone. Then, all of us turned our gaze to the sky, fully absorbed in the here and now. 

Without prompting, the See Hear Feel exercise started immediately. As the moon had already started to block the sun, we witnessed the slim orange crescent through our glasses. A chorus of wows and “That’s so cool!” welled up. We felt the air getting cooler and the breeze starting to kick up. The delight and laughter were palpable, like a playground. 

When clouds rolled in, a small group of students and I passed the time by taking a mindful walk through the lower gardens and the arboretum. While the hardscapes were in place, plant life at this early time in April was only just beginning to show signs of growth. Along the trail, patches of Virginia Bluebells and Lenten Rose were in bloom. At other points, we could see white circular shapes spray painted on the ground, waiting for more plantings. Newer trees and shrubs were interspersed with mature trees, one perhaps as many as 200 years old—a stunning mix of history, nature, and potential.

As we walked, I asked the students how they felt. One said, “I feel like a speck.” We talked about how humbling it was to feel so small. I smiled to myself, knowing my intentions for the experience were getting through.  By the time we finished our loop and returned to our starting point, the clouds were beginning to clear. Now, the orange crescent was getting thicker, signaling that the moon was beginning to move out of the path of the sun. 

Our conversation shifted to when the next eclipse would occur. Although eclipses are expected in the U.S. in 2044 and 2045, they won’t be very visible in Charlottesville. The next total solar eclipse in Charlottesville is expected in 2099. It dawned on us that few, if any, of us would still be alive by then. We paused; our breath taken away by this realization.

Soon, we smiled and started to say goodbye. The remaining students thanked me and went happily about the rest of their day. I stayed behind to take it all in, appreciating the beauty of the moment and the benefactors who made an extraordinary afternoon with my students possible.

Lili Powell is the Julie Logan Sands Associate Professor at the Darden School of Business, an associate professor at the School of Nursing, and director of the Compassionate Care Initiative, which promotes well-being, collaboration, leadership, healthy work and learning environments, and compassionate care.

Her teaching and writing explore the intersection of mindfulness, communication, and leadership. Through Darden’s Executive Education and Lifelong Learning, she teaches “ Leading Mindfully .”

• Compassionate Care Initiative
• Lili Powell

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Mind & Body Articles & More

How nature can make you kinder, happier, and more creative, we are spending more time indoors and online. but recent studies suggest that nature can help our brains and bodies to stay healthy..

I’ve been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful.

But, even though I’ve always believed that hiking in nature had many psychological benefits, I’ve never had much science to back me up…until now, that is. Scientists are beginning to find evidence that being in nature has a profound impact on our brains and our behavior, helping us to reduce anxiety, brooding, and stress, and increase our attention capacity, creativity, and our ability to connect with other people.

“People have been discussing their profound experiences in nature for the last several 100 years—from Thoreau to John Muir to many other writers,” says researcher David Strayer, of the University of Utah. “Now we are seeing changes in the brain and changes in the body that suggest we are physically and mentally more healthy when we are interacting with nature.”

While he and other scientists may believe nature benefits our well-being, we live in a society where people spend more and more time indoors and online—especially children. Findings on how nature improves our brains brings added legitimacy to the call for preserving natural spaces—both urban and wild—and for spending more time in nature in order to lead healthier, happier, and more creative lives.

Here are some of the ways that science is showing how being in nature affects our brains and bodies.

1. Being in nature decreases stress

It’s clear that hiking—and any physical activity—can reduce stress and anxiety. But, there’s something about being in nature that may augment those impacts.

In one recent experiment conducted in Japan, participants were assigned to walk either in a forest or in an urban center (taking walks of equal length and difficulty) while having their heart rate variability, heart rate, and blood pressure measured. The participants also filled out questionnaires about their moods, stress levels, and other psychological measures.

Results showed that those who walked in forests had significantly lower heart rates and higher heart rate variability (indicating more relaxation and less stress), and reported better moods and less anxiety, than those who walked in urban settings. The researchers concluded that there’s something about being in nature that had a beneficial effect on stress reduction, above and beyond what exercise alone might have produced.

In another study , researchers in Finland found that urban dwellers who strolled for as little as 20 minutes through an urban park or woodland reported significantly more stress relief than those who strolled in a city center.

The reasons for this effect are unclear; but scientists believe that we evolved to be more relaxed in natural spaces. In a now-classic laboratory experiment by Roger Ulrich of Texas A&M University and colleagues, participants who first viewed a stress-inducing movie, and were then exposed to color/sound videotapes depicting natural scenes, showed much quicker, more complete recovery from stress than those who’d been exposed to videos of urban settings.

These studies and others provide evidence that being in natural spaces— or even just looking out of a window onto a natural scene—somehow soothes us and relieves stress.

2. Nature makes you happier and less brooding

I’ve always found that hiking in nature makes me feel happier, and of course decreased stress may be a big part of the reason why. But, Gregory Bratman, of Stanford University, has found evidence that nature may impact our mood in other ways, too.

In one 2015 study , he and his colleagues randomly assigned 60 participants to a 50-minute walk in either a natural setting (oak woodlands) or an urban setting (along a four-lane road). Before and after the walk, the participants were assessed on their emotional state and on cognitive measures, such as how well they could perform tasks requiring short-term memory. Results showed that those who walked in nature experienced less anxiety, rumination (focused attention on negative aspects of oneself), and negative affect, as well as more positive emotions, in comparison to the urban walkers. They also improved their performance on the memory tasks.

In another study, he and his colleagues extended these findings by zeroing in on how walking in nature affects rumination—which has been associated with the onset of depression and anxiety—while also using fMRI technology to look at brain activity. Participants who took a 90-minute walk in either a natural setting or an urban setting had their brains scanned before and after their walks and were surveyed on self-reported rumination levels (as well as other psychological markers). The researchers controlled for many potential factors that might influence rumination or brain activity—for example, physical exertion levels as measured by heart rates and pulmonary functions.

Even so, participants who walked in a natural setting versus an urban setting reported decreased rumination after the walk, and they showed increased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain whose deactivation is affiliated with depression and anxiety—a finding that suggests nature may have important impacts on mood.

Bratman believes results like these need to reach city planners and others whose policies impact our natural spaces. “Ecosystem services are being incorporated into decision making at all levels of public policy, land use planning, and urban design, and it’s very important to be sure to incorporate empirical findings from psychology into these decisions,” he says.

3. Nature relieves attention fatigue and increases creativity.

Today, we live with ubiquitous technology designed to constantly pull for our attention. But many scientists believe our brains were not made for this kind of information bombardment, and that it can lead to mental fatigue, overwhelm, and burnout, requiring “attention restoration” to get back to a normal, healthy state.

Strayer is one of those researchers. He believes that being in nature restores depleted attention circuits, which can then help us be more open to creativity and problem-solving.

“When you use your cell phone to talk, text, shoot photos, or whatever else you can do with your cell phone, you’re tapping the prefrontal cortex and causing reductions in cognitive resources,” he says.

More on the Power of Nature

Do we need God to feel awe?

How awe can make kids less self-absorbed .

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How awe makes us more generous .

How feeling awe can make you healthier .

In a 2012 study , he and his colleagues showed that hikers on a four-day backpacking trip could solve significantly more puzzles requiring creativity when compared to a control group of people waiting to take the same hike—in fact, 47 percent more. Although other factors may account for his results—for example, the exercise or the camaraderie of being out together—prior studies have suggested that nature itself may play an important role. One in Psychological Science found that the impact of nature on attention restoration is what accounted for improved scores on cognitive tests for the study participants.

This phenomenon may be due to differences in brain activation when viewing natural scenes versus more built-up scenes—even for those who normally live in an urban environment. In a recent study conducted by Peter Aspinall at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and colleagues, participants who had their brains monitored continuously using mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) while they walked through an urban green space had brain EEG readings indicating lower frustration, engagement, and arousal, and higher meditation levels while in the green area, and higher engagement levels when moving out of the green area. This lower engagement and arousal may be what allows for attention restoration, encouraging a more open, meditative mindset.

It’s this kind of brain activity—sometimes referred to as “the brain default network”—that is tied to creative thinking , says Strayer. He is currently repeating his earlier 2012 study with a new group of hikers and recording their EEG activity and salivary cortisol levels before, during, and after a three-day hike. Early analyses of EEG readings support the theory that hiking in nature seems to rest people’s attention networks and to engage their default networks.

Strayer and colleagues are also specifically looking at the effects of technology by monitoring people’s EEG readings while they walk in an arboretum, either while talking on their cell phone or not. So far, they’ve found that participants with cell phones appear to have EEG readings consistent with attention overload, and can recall only half as many details of the arboretum they just passed through, compared to those who were not on a cell phone.

Though Strayer’s findings are preliminary, they are consistent with other people’s findings on the importance of nature to attention restoration and creativity.

“If you’ve been using your brain to multitask—as most of us do most of the day—and then you set that aside and go on a walk, without all of the gadgets, you’ve let the prefrontal cortex recover,” says Strayer. “And that’s when we see these bursts in creativity, problem-solving, and feelings of well-being.”

4. Nature may help you to be kind and generous

Whenever I go to places like Yosemite or the Big Sur Coast of California, I seem to return to my home life ready to be more kind and generous to those around me—just ask my husband and kids! Now some new studies may shed light on why that is.

In a series of experiments published in 2014, Juyoung Lee, GGSC director Dacher Keltner, and other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the potential impact of nature on the willingness to be generous, trusting, and helpful toward others, while considering what factors might influence that relationship.

As part of their study, the researchers exposed participants to more or less subjectively beautiful nature scenes (whose beauty levels were rated independently) and then observed how participants behaved playing two economics games—the Dictator Game and the Trust Game—that measure generosity and trust, respectively. After being exposed to the more beautiful nature scenes, participants acted more generously and more trusting in the games than those who saw less beautiful scenes, and the effects appeared to be due to corresponding increases in positive emotion.

In another part of the study, the researchers asked people to fill out a survey about their emotions while sitting at a table where more or less beautiful plants were placed. Afterwards, the participants were told that the experiment was over and they could leave, but that if they wanted to they could volunteer to make paper cranes for a relief effort program in Japan. The number of cranes they made (or didn’t make) was used as a measure of their “prosociality” or willingness to help.

Results showed that the presence of more beautiful plants significantly increased the number of cranes made by participants, and that this increase was, again, mediated by positive emotion elicited by natural beauty. The researchers concluded that experiencing the beauty of nature increases positive emotion—perhaps by inspiring awe, a feeling akin to wonder, with the sense of being part of something bigger than oneself—which then leads to prosocial behaviors.

Support for this theory comes from an experiment conducted by Paul Piff of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues, in which participants staring up a grove of very tall trees for as little as one minute experienced measurable increases in awe, and demonstrated more helpful behavior and approached moral dilemmas more ethically, than participants who spent the same amount of time looking up at a high building.

5. Nature makes you “feel more alive”

With all of these benefits to being out in nature, it’s probably no surprise that something about nature makes us feel more alive and vital . Being outdoors gives us energy, makes us happier, helps us to relieve the everyday stresses of our overscheduled lives, opens the door to creativity, and helps us to be kind to others.

No one knows if there is an ideal amount of nature exposure, though Strayer says that longtime backpackers suggest a minimum of three days to really unplug from our everyday lives. Nor can anyone say for sure how nature compares to other forms of stress relief or attention restoration, such as sleep or meditation. Both Strayer and Bratman say we need a lot more careful research to tease out these effects before we come to any definitive conclusions.

Still, the research does suggest there’s something about nature that keeps us psychologically healthy, and that’s good to know…especially since nature is a resource that’s free and that many of us can access by just walking outside our door. Results like these should encourage us as a society to consider more carefully how we preserve our wilderness spaces and our urban parks.

And while the research may not be conclusive, Strayer is optimistic that science will eventually catch up to what people like me have intuited all along—that there’s something about nature that renews us, allowing us to feel better, to think better, and to deepen our understanding of ourselves and others.

“You can’t have centuries of people writing about this and not have something going on,” says Strayer. “If you are constantly on a device or in front of a screen, you’re missing out on something that’s pretty spectacular: the real world.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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Home » News » Essay: The Healing Power of Nature

Essay: The Healing Power of Nature

October 15, 2019 October 30, 2019

While waiting for a hike to begin during Earth Week last spring at Kehl Lake, I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. Glancing at the screen, I saw it was a close friend of mine, a college roommate, who dislikes talking on the phone, and almost never calls. I picked up.

My friend could hardly speak but managed to get the words out that her daughter, 28, had died that morning of a drug overdose. She had just heard the news. It was a call that I had somehow always expected I might get, and yet it nearly took me to my knees.

Her daughter had struggled with addiction mightily for 12 years. She was bright, beautiful, married and a mother to an adorable three-year-old. This was a girl who my own two sons thought of as a cousin. She loved Leelanau and came up every summer with her mom and younger brother, to stay with us for a week. I can still see her jumping off our raft, or surfing the waves at Van’s Beach, or toasting marshmallows by firelight, her long dark hair pulled back.

But tragically, as in so many cases across our nation, her drug addiction trumped everything. We went downstate to be with my friend and to attend the funeral.  In the days that followed, I felt alternately numb and perpetually on the verge of tears, sad for my friend and incredulous at her unimaginable loss.

I came back to work later that week and our staff carpooled out to tour the new Cedar River Preserve addition. Our Board had just taken the leap of faith to buy this incredible 80 acres that could have easily become a ridgetop development, with its sweeping views of Lake Leelanau.

It was a cool and overcast May afternoon as we trekked up and along the ridgeline. The trees were still stark and bare. But the bright green of spring ephemerals on the hillside took my breath away, contrasting beautifully against the darkness of a forest floor rich with leaf litter. Iridescent moss and patterned lichen fanned out on decaying logs. We heard a cacophony of birdsong and looked down on a kettle hole lake, formed by the glaciers.

For the first time in weeks, I felt something ease in me. Seeing all of the new life after such a long, brutal winter felt hopeful. The ancientness of the kettle hole, the girth of old-growth trees, even the skeleton of what appeared to be a deer gave me a kind of peace and perspective that only nature can provide.  Life and death are intertwined so beautifully and naturally in the out of doors. It gave me comfort to be reminded that each of us is just a small speck in time, whirling through a very big universe. Somehow, it felt easier to accept the death of my friend’s daughter.

I couldn’t be more grateful that the Leelanau Conservancy has protected places like the Cedar River Preserve to hike in, to heal in, and to offer peace and perspective. My friend plans to come up this fall. We won’t visit the new preserve as it is not yet open to the public. But we will go to Clay Cliffs, to the dunes, and to Lake Michigan, remembering the little girl who once played along those shores.—– Carolyn Faught, Senior Writer and Donor Loyalty Specialist for the Leelanau Conservanc y

email Carolyn: [email protected]

Cedar River Preserve, What’s Next?

Please Note: The new Cedar River Preserve 80-acre addition is not yet open to the public. As has been our practice with all natural areas, access is provided as soon as we can develop a management plan for the property that best preserves the land’s ecological resources and create safe, well-marked trails. Stay tuned for more information as plans unfold.

Become a steward of the land.

Help us preserve the wonders of Leelanau County by becoming a trail steward, volunteering at a workbee, or donating funds.

Essay on Conservation of Nature for Students and Children

500+ words essay on conservation of nature.

Nature has provided us numerous gifts such as air , water, land, sunlight , minerals, plants, and animals. All these gifts of nature make our earth a place worth living. Existence on Earth would not be possible without any of these. Now, while these natural resources are present on Earth in plenty. Unfortunately, the necessity of most of these has increased extremely over the centuries due to growth in the human population.

What is Conservation of Nature?

Conservation of nature means the preservation of forests, land, water bodies, and minerals, fuels, natural gases, etc. And to make sure that all these continue to be available in abundance. Thus all these natural resources make life worth living on Earth. Life would not be imaginable without air, water, sunlight as well as other natural resources present on the earth.

Thus, it is essential to conserve these resources in order to retain the environment integral. Here is a look at the types of natural resources existing on Earth and the ways to conserve these:

Types of Natural Resources:

• Renewable Resources : These are resources such as air, water, and sunlight that refill naturally.
• Non-Renewable Resources: These are resources like fossil fuels and minerals that do not restock reform very slowly.
• Biotic: These originate from living beings and organic material like plants and animals.
• Abiotic: These come from non-living things and non-organic material. These comprise air, water, and land as well as metals like iron, copper, and silver.

Natural resources are also categories such as actual resources, reserve resources, stock resources and potential resources based on their development stage.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Conserve Nature and Its Resources?

Many of the natural resources are being used at a faster rate as compared to their speed of production. There is so a necessity for conservation of nature and the natural resources it offers. Here are some of the ways in which these resources can be conserved:

Reduce Water Consumption

Water is available in abundance on Earth . This is one of the reasons people do not consider much before using it. However, if we keep using it at this speed. In the future, we may not be left with as much of it. Therefore, simple things such as turn off the tap while brushing or reuse the leftover water to water the plants can help in this direction.

Reduce Usage of Electricity

Use only as much energy as you require. It is thus advised to limit the usage of electricity. Simple habits such as turning off the lights before parting your room, turn off the electric appliances after use.  Switching to energy-saving fluorescent or LED bulbs can make a change.

Restrict Usage of Paper

Paper manufacturing depends only on trees. Increasing the use of paper means encouraging deforestation . This is one of the key reasons for concern is in today’s time Always ensure you use only as much paper as necessary. Stop taking print outs and use e-copies instead to do your bit.

Use Newer Agricultural Methods

The government must aware the methods such as mixed cropping, crop rotation. Also, the government should teach the minimum use of pesticides, insecticides. Appropriate use of manures , bio-fertilizers, and organic fertilizers to the farmers.

Spread Awareness

Spreading awareness about the conservation of nature is always a necessary step. It can be achieved only when more and more people understand its importance and the ways in which they can help. Besides this, it is essential to plant more and more tress. It is necessary to contribute towards lowering air pollution. We must use shared transport and employing rainwater harvesting systems to conserve nature.

Nature comprises of everything that surrounds us. The trees, forests, rivers, rivulets, soil, air all are the part of nature. Keeping nature and its resources integral. So, it is very important for the continuation of life on earth. It would be difficult to imagine life on earth, which has a spoiled natural environment.

Therefore, taking appropriate steps to conserve nature in its untouched form. It must be a priority for the human race. Only human beings with their power and ability can save nature in its purest forms.

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Essay About the Beauty of Nature: 4 Examples and 9 Prompts

Read this article for essay examples and prompts to use so you can start writing essay about the beauty of nature.

Nature is complex and beautiful. Our ecosystem covers every aspect of Mother Earth, including the evolution of the earth & life, the various cycles, all the living things, and more. Collectively, they create something so beautiful and perfect that it can be hard to believe it exists. 

The beauty and power of nature can be pretty overwhelming. Whenever you want to feel these emotions, reading or writing essays about the beauty of nature can help you grasp those ideas. 

Below are examples of essays on nature and its beauty and prompts to help you get started on your next essay.

1. Essay on Beauty of Nature for Children and Students on Study Mentor

2. descriptive essay on beauty of nature on performdigi, 3. essay on beauties of nature by gk scientist, 4. descriptive essay on mother nature by neetu singh, 1. activities that appreciate nature, 2. the beauty of nature in renaissance art, 3. mindful methods of appreciating the beauty of nature, 4. literature pieces that define the beauty of nature well, 5. video games that captured the beauty of nature, 6. beautiful nature photo ideas and tips you can do with a phone, 7. difference between nature and science, 8. philosophical understanding of nature, 9. biomimicry: nature-inspired engineering.

“Each and everything in nature, including living or non-living organisms, play an important role in maintaining the balance to create a viable environment for all of us, which is called ecological balance. We need to make sure that the ecological balance should be maintained at all times to avoid a catastrophic situation in the future.”

The first essay discusses nature’s significance, the natural resources, and how to conserve them. It has an educational tone, encouraging the reader to care for nature and protect its beauty. The second essay focuses on the non-harmful ways of enjoying nature and protecting it from modern daily processes. You might also like these authors like Wendell Berry .

“Nature has many faces. They are everywhere. The human eye is always in contact with good things.”

This descriptive essay about the beauty of nature discusses the immortal, infinite, and eternal beauty of nature and nature as a reflection of the art of Allah. It covers the beauty of everything found in nature, including the changing seasons, birds, beasts, fish, reptiles, humans, the environment, and more.

“To enjoy these beauties of nature, one has to live in nature’s company. A countryman enjoys nature well. A town dweller cannot enjoy the beauties of nature.”

This essay on nature talks about nature and personifies it as a woman by using the pronouns she and her. The essay considers the various elements in nature, seasons, and unique environments. It also provides some wisdom to encourage the reader to care for nature.You might also be interested in these articles about the beauty of nature .

“As nature is the main life force of all living beings on earth. It is our duty to preserve and protect nature and all its creations alike. We must also love her in return as she loves us.”

In this essay, nature is God’s most tremendous boon to humanity. Thus, we must protect it from corruption, pollution, and other artificial and harmful manufactured things. The essay also gave examples of environmental problems that have impacted nature significantly. The end of the essay states that we must stand, preserve, and protect nature.

9 Prompts for Writing an Essay About the Beauty of Nature

Writing an essay about the beauty of nature can feel repetitive and overdone. You can avoid repeating the usual themes or ideas you saw above. Instead, use the essay prompts on nature below.

Here’s a tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

Do you want other people to enjoy and appreciate nature? With this essay, you can list the various methods of appreciating nature. The activities can be simple such as planting a tree, hugging a tree, and watching sunsets.

For help with this topic, read this guide explaining what persuasive writing is all about.

Renaissance art is rich with meanings and symbolism portrayed through nature. For example, although flowers universally stand for beauty, different flower types can have different meanings. Dark clouds and streaks of lightning in the skies can portray dark moods or omens. Many renaissance male artists saw nature as a mother, mistress, or bride. If you like interpreting renaissance art, you’ll enjoy this essay topic.

Mindfulness and nature share a very positive relationship. Being in nature can make you more mindful. Being mindful while in nature enhances your connectedness to it. This essay focuses on mindfulness in nature.

 Consider your connection to it, be aware of your surroundings, and actively appreciate its various parts. Connecting to nature will open you to change, the natural cycle of life and death, and more.

Literature is more flexible than visual art because it taps the imagination through ideas and concepts rather than images. For example, various poets, writers, and playwrights have likened the beauty of nature to love, characters, powerful forces, and intense emotions. 

Avid literature readers will enjoy writing about the beauty of nature through their favorite authors, themes, and stories.

No matter what their genre, more video games today feature realistic graphics. One of the best ways to show off these high-tech graphics is by showing nature’s beauty in a scene or environment. 

Some examples of the top video games that have captured the beauty of nature include Ghost of Tsushima, Red Dead Redemption II, and The Last of Us: Part Two. Write about how the beauty of nature can be captured in a video game and the methods used to create vivid digital worlds.

Are you an enthusiast of nature photography and amateur photography? Bring these two things together by writing an essay about taking nature photos with a phone. Write what you learned about taking nature photos. 

You can also provide sample nature photos you or others took with a smartphone. Remember, nature photography can cover many subjects, like animals, plants, landscapes, etc.

Have you ever stopped to think about the difference between nature and science? Science has many methodical and measurable aspects and is as young as humanity. The opposite is true for nature because it has existed far longer than humans have. Yet, we can use science to study nature. 

When you pick this essay idea, discuss the loose ideas mentioned above in more detail. Researching and reading about nature vs. science can also help. Discuss this in your next essay for an inspiring and intriguing essay topic.

Philosopher students will enjoy writing an essay about the beauty of nature. You can argue that nature does not exist because it is not measurable. It doesn’t exist outside of any solid examples we can give, like the environment, animals, weather, and plants. 

You write about the philosophical aspects of nature and use key research to back up your ideas and arguments made in the essay. Look for scientific research papers, books by philosophers, and opinion essays to create this essay.

Biomimicry is a sustainable solution to human challenges. It imitates the designs found in nature’s time-tested strategies and patterns and incorporates them into technology. 

This is a fascinating essay topic that can inspire your next written piece. Conduct research into biomimicry, and let the reader know your thoughts and opinions on this subject.

 Do you need more inspiration? Read these 13 essays about nature .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Essay on Beauty of Nature for Children and Students

May 18, 2020 by Study Mentor 5 Comments

Table of Contents

Beauty of Nature -ESSAY 1

Introduction.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the beauty of nature? Greenery, Right? But the beauty of nature is more than the greenery. Everything you feel and see around, including Mountains, Forests, Rivers, Birds, Plants, Animals, Air, etc. – all are a part of the beauty of nature.

Nature is the lifeblood of all living creatures in the world. Nature provides us with everything (like Food, Water, Shelter, etc.), which we need to sustain and survive in the long run.

We, humans, are also a part of nature, but we tend to distinguish ourselves from nature and do the things, which may harm the nature.

Respect nature and its resources, show some compassion towards it. It is the responsibility of a human being to protect nature. We, as humans, should refrain from doing any harm to nature if we need to provide a good natural environment to the future generations.  

To sum it up, in a nutshell, the below quote from Charles Darwin defines it well.  

“Everything, what is against nature, will not last for long.” – Charles Darwin

Significance of Nature

The significance of nature cannot be overemphasized because the things nature provides to us are not replaceable by modern technology in any way. 

For example, let us compare the effects of natural food and the food we eat in a modern lifestyle. The food we eat today (not all the food we eat is bad, but most of it anyway like junk and oil foods) is causing various serious health issues like obesity, heart diseases, etc. On the other hand, eating natural foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, etc. are scientifically proven health and can help you to live a long and beautiful life.

Each and everything in nature, including living or non-living organisms, play an important role in maintaining the balance to create a viable environment for all of us, which is called ecological balance. We need to make sure that the ecological balance should be maintained at all times to avoid a catastrophic situation in the future. 

Types of Natural Resources:

Natural resources can be classified into two types namely

• Renewable resources
• Non-Renewable resources

1. Renewable Resources:

Renewable Resources are the resources which are constantly available or easily replaced or reproduced.

For example, land, water are easily available.  Vegetables and fruits can be easily produced. 

Renewable Sources are of two types 

• Organic Renewable Resources: Which comes from living things like plants and animals.
• In-Organic Renewable Resources: Which comes from non-living things like water, light, wind, etc

2. Non-Renewable Resources

Non-renewable resources are the resources that cannot be available after they are depleted. They are limited in terms of availability.

Some examples include fossil fuels and minerals.

Conservation of nature

There are plenty of natural resources that are available on earth, and we should use them in an optimum manner. If we start to exploit and deplete the resources available, then the resources might become scarce.

So we must conserve nature and its resources in such a manner that the future generations can be benefited from them. Conservation of natural resources should also be done for environmental protection. 

One of the several reasons for the depletion of resources is an increase in the human population. Taking precautionary measures to control the population is essential for nature to retain its essence. Before we learn about how to conserve nature, let’s understand what is the conservation of nature.

How to Conserve Nature?

Nature can be conserved in many ways. Here are some ways how we can conserve nature.

1. Awareness

Creating awareness among people through programs and campaigns is one of the best methods to conserve nature.

If everyone is aware of the effects of non-conservation of nature, then it will help to understand the importance of conservation.

2. Protection of trees

Deforestation is one of the biggest reasons for global warming. Cutting down trees increases the CO2 and other greenhouse gases, thus contributing to the rise of temperature, which is not suitable for living conditions.

Restricting the usage of paper and adopting the latest technological advancements like writing and reading in the digital platforms can be an advantage to nature. Everyone can contribute to the environment by adopting their needs to digital platforms instead of using paper.

Planting more trees all around us can help to fight global warming.

3. Protecting the Ocean Life

 Life on earth contains not only humans or animals but also many creatures in ocean-like fishes, whales, etc. The ecological balance might be disturbed if we neglect the sea and its creatures.

Some companies and industries are dumping their toxic and waste materials in the sea. An initiative towards protecting sea life is mandatory in the current scenario.

4. Pollution Control:

In the day to day activities of our life, we are creating pollution even without knowing in many ways – air, water, land, etc.

Opting for pollution-free alternatives like an electric car and government intervention is a necessary step to curb pollution and increase the quality of life.  

5. Reduce, Re-Use, or Recycle:

Reduce: Do not use or buy unnecessary things. Reduce wastage.

Re-use: Re-use the things instead of throwing them away whenever possible.

Recycle: Recycling things like plastic and other non-degradable items can reduce the burden on the environment.  

Conclusion:

We all should understand the beauty of nature is of utmost importance if we will harm the beauty of nature, then it will imbalance the life cycle. We should understand that we are building by nature, and it is our sole responsibility to protect the beauty of nature. 

Humans can change or transform their behavior over time. Nature gives us plenty of opportunities to change our behavior of negative actions against it. We need to use those opportunities to use the resources efficiently and not to harm nature in any way possible. 

Nature is the only source for all living organisms. We need to follow the flow of nature whenever possible (Go with the flow) and conserve nature.

Beauty of Nature -ESSAY 2

Nature is a god gift to this world .Its beauty is not only seen, hear or smell by us, it’s a feeling that can’t be erased. No man made beauty replaces the natural beauty.

Nature give us many valuable and important things which are useful as well as healthy for us but the point is how we are using it ,not harming it .

Since the formation of earth there are many magical things happen on earth and the other planet become a part of it, we should be thankful that we get this beauty called nature.

Nature and its Beauty

Every early morning is with a beautiful sunrise with some small drop on plants and glass windows (specially in winters) , a beautiful sunset nearby oceans, seas, beautiful night with twinkling stars , a beautiful clear blue sky and how can I forget about rainbows .

These beautiful things belong to nature. We all eagerly wait for our vacation or holidays so that we can visit different places like mountains, beaches, etc. with our loved ones.

Mountains that we like to climb or do trekking with our friends and family, snowfall is a major love though,the water falling on the ground from heights and that cold or warm water touches or soul in totally different way .

Lets spend some time with our nature, and not just spending time is a benefit, let’s do something for nature. Let’s grow more trees, let’s make it happen, do something for nature.

Earth is the only planet which gets a great gift from nature, let’s protect it, make life more meaningful here, let’s invest some time on nature to make it more beautiful it will definitely give us more benefits in the future.

Scientific Call for Our Nature

We all someday thought that ‘how nature is created’? ‘how it is so much beautiful’? The answer is science.

Science knows everything except god. Science has all the answers why sky is blue? , why stars twinkle? , why sun is reddish orange during sunrise and sunset and all answers are so logical and meaningful.

Science knows everything about nature but on the other side it is using nature in its own way knowing the fact that it is harmful for our nature.

Harmful Effects of Science on Our Nature

Industrial pollution , garbage, cutting of trees ( deforestation ) to make homes and industry, harsh use of chemicals, water pollution etc.  They all harm our nature and yes if nature gets harm it will have some side-effects which results in some infections and diseases. Example: In June 2013 a flood attacks on Uttarakhand (Kedarnath) destroyed whole area of Uttarakhand.

In today’s life we all are ignoring our nature by using scientific devices, using chemical bound products; eat food which is full of chemicals or harmful elements. Here we our doing two wrong things firstly Harming our Nature in every possible way.

Secondly harming our self by making wrong use of science. Science is for study and for some useful things not for destroying it.

Every day we got the news that scientist are  working on moon to grow potatoes or they are going to search life there because there’s no life on earth soon due to these harmful things and the major part is we know that our earth, our nature is in danger so we have to work on earth to protect it . We have to protect our nature as soon as possible.

Ways to Protect the Nature

To protect the nature we should do the following things:

• Stop deforestation
• Minimize or neglect the use of CFC’s
• Don’t burn crackers on Diwali
• Don’t waste water (save as much as you can)
• Minimise industrial work
• The 3 R’s : Reuse, Recycle, Reduce
• Use of jute or paper bags instead of using polythene
• Plant more and more trees
• Use public transport
• Send used plastics for recycling or disposal
• Avoid using fossil fuels
• Appreciate the nature

Enjoy Nature in Your Own Way

Protection of nature is one way and enjoying it is another. Go for holidays and vacation. Enjoy the first snowfall of winter months, enjoy the first rainfall of rainy season, enjoy sunrise and sunsets once in lifetime, enjoy the winter winds, enjoy the rainbow after rainfall.

These are the easiest ways to enjoy nature. Every work is important but enjoying life with this nature is more amazing and necessary. Once every year go with your family, friends, to enjoy nature and its beauty. Make a meaningful life with nature and protect it too. Sit in the moonlight with your beloved one to make it memorable for a lifetime .

See the beauty of moon how every week it changes its shape and when the day is with full moon watch that scars on the moon but it still shines, there’s no beauty like moon which has gone through many phases but still shines one day and on that day nothing is beautiful than moon. ANIMALS – Big part of our nature, love them and don’t harm them for your use .

Reader Interactions

June 30, 2019 at 4:33 pm

January 15, 2020 at 8:02 pm

I thought how beautiful is nature ,by reading this essay

February 28, 2020 at 8:57 pm

I liked this essay 👌

May 14, 2020 at 4:18 pm

well written and very useful essay it is

May 24, 2020 at 8:55 pm

It is heart touching eassy 😀😀

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Essay on Nature And Environment

Students are often asked to write an essay on Nature And Environment 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 And Environment

What is nature.

Nature is everything around us that wasn’t made by humans. It includes the air we breathe, the parks where we play, and the animals we watch. Nature is the mountains, rivers, forests, and oceans that make our planet beautiful. It gives us food, water, and air.

Our Environment

The environment is like a big house where nature lives. It’s where all living things, including plants, animals, and humans, share space and resources. We all depend on the environment to survive. It is our responsibility to take care of it.

Why Nature Matters

Nature is important because it helps us live. Trees give us oxygen, and plants give us food. Without nature, we wouldn’t have clean water to drink or soil to grow our crops. Nature also makes us feel happy when we spend time in it.

Protecting Our Planet

To protect our planet, we must keep our environment clean and safe. This means not littering, recycling our waste, and using less plastic. We should also save water and energy by turning off lights and taps when we’re not using them.

250 Words Essay on Nature And Environment

Nature is everything that was not made by humans. It includes trees, rivers, animals, mountains, and all the other things we see outside that are not buildings or roads. Nature is very important because it gives us air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. It also makes our world beautiful.

The environment is like a big home where all living things, including humans, animals, and plants, live together. It has different parts like air, water, land, and all the living things. We all share this home, and we must take care of it so it remains a good place to live.

Why Nature and Environment Matter

Nature and our environment are important because they help us stay alive. They give us clean air, which we need to breathe. Without clean air, we can get sick. Water is also important because our bodies need it to work properly. Plus, plants and animals depend on each other and on us. If we hurt our environment, we also hurt ourselves.

Taking Care of Our Environment

Taking care of our environment means we use things wisely. We should not waste water, throw trash everywhere, or cut down too many trees. We can also help by planting more trees and cleaning up rivers and beaches. When we look after our environment, we make sure it stays healthy for us and for all the animals and plants.

Nature and our environment are gifts that we must protect. It’s up to us to make sure they are safe so that we, and all the living things we share the Earth with, can have a good life. Let’s promise to be good friends to nature and our environment.

500 Words Essay on Nature And Environment

Introduction to nature and environment.

Nature is all around us. It includes the trees, the mountains, the oceans, and even the air we breathe. When we talk about the environment, we mean everything that surrounds us, including living things like plants and animals, and non-living things like water, soil, and climate. Nature and the environment are important because they give us food to eat, water to drink, and air to breathe.

The Beauty of Nature

Nature is full of wonders. Think of the bright colors of flowers, the songs of birds, and the vastness of the sky. All these beautiful things are gifts from nature. They can make us feel happy and calm. When we take a walk in a park or go for a hike in the mountains, we can see how amazing nature is. It is not only nice to look at but also a home for many creatures.

Plants and Animals

Plants and animals are a big part of nature. They live in forests, deserts, oceans, and even in cities. Plants are very important because they make oxygen, which is the air we need to live. Animals, including insects, birds, and fish, each play a special role in nature. They help plants grow by spreading their seeds and keeping the soil healthy.

Our Role in Protecting the Environment

It is very important for us to take care of nature and the environment. Sometimes, people make the air dirty by using cars and factories that let out smoke. They also throw away trash that can hurt land and water. We need to keep our environment clean by recycling, using less plastic, and not wasting water.

Climate Change

The weather is changing in ways that can be bad for nature. This is called climate change. It makes it hotter in some places and colder in others. It can also cause big storms and make it hard for animals and plants to live. We can help stop climate change by using less energy from things that burn oil and coal, and by planting more trees.

Nature and the environment are very special. They give us a place to live, food to eat, and air to breathe. We should remember to look after them so they can stay beautiful and healthy. By doing simple things like recycling and saving water, we can make a big difference. Let’s promise to protect our nature and environment for ourselves and for the animals and plants that share this earth with us.

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

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Golf
• Essay on Good Nurse Qualities
• Essay on Gorilla

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Short Essay: Beauty Of Nature

A couple of short essay examples on beauty of nature.

Table of Contents

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example 1

Nature is a beautiful and awe-inspiring force that surrounds us every day. It is impossible to deny the stunning beauty of nature’s landscapes, the changing seasons, and the sounds and smells that evoke feelings of peace and tranquility. In this essay, I will explore the beauty of nature through its diverse landscapes, changing seasons, and sensory experiences.

The first aspect of nature’s beauty that I will explore is its diverse landscapes. From the vast forests of the Amazon to the towering mountains of the Himalayas, nature presents us with a breathtaking array of landscapes. The oceans and deserts, too, have their unique beauty, with the former offering an endless expanse of water, and the latter providing a stark and arid landscape that is both unforgiving and beautiful. Each of these landscapes offers its unique beauty, and it is impossible not to be amazed by the incredible diversity of nature.

The changing seasons provide another opportunity to witness the beauty of nature. With each season comes new colors and natural phenomena, such as blooming flowers in the spring or fall foliage in the autumn. In the winter, the snow and ice can transform even the most mundane landscapes into a winter wonderland. The summer sunsets and beach landscapes offer a warmth and beauty that is unparalleled. Each season has its unique beauty, and it is impossible not to be moved by the changing colors and natural wonders that each one presents.

Finally, nature’s sounds and smells offer a sensory experience that is unparalleled. The sound of birds singing, the rustling of leaves in the wind, and the roar of the ocean waves all evoke feelings of peace and tranquility. The scent of pine trees, the salty sea air, and the sweet fragrance of blooming flowers can transport us to another world, one that is filled with beauty and wonder. Even the sound of rain can be beautiful, with the pitter-patter of raindrops on leaves and the soft thunder in the distance offering a soothing and calming effect.

In conclusion, the beauty of nature is evident in its diverse landscapes, changing seasons, and sensory experiences. From the towering mountains to the vast oceans, from the blooming flowers to the winter snow, nature presents us with a breathtaking array of beauty. The sounds and smells of nature only add to this beauty, evoking feelings of peace and tranquility that are impossible to find elsewhere. It is no wonder that so many people find solace and inspiration in nature, for it is truly a wonder to behold.

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example 2

Nature is an endless source of inspiration for humanity. It is the beauty of nature that keeps us connected to the natural world, and its diversity is something that never fails to amaze us. From stunning sunsets to pristine forests, nature offers us a wealth of landscapes and ecosystems that are both awe-inspiring and calming. In this essay, we will explore the beauty of nature and how it has inspired countless artists, poets, and writers throughout history.

Nature offers us a diverse range of landscapes and ecosystems that are unlike anything else on earth. From towering mountains to vast oceans, the natural world is full of breathtaking scenery that has the power to inspire and awe us. Mountains, for example, are some of the most awe-inspiring natural wonders on earth. With their towering peaks and rugged terrain, they are a testament to the raw power and majesty of nature. The oceans, on the other hand, are vast and mysterious, with an almost infinite depth and complexity that we are only beginning to understand. The diversity of nature is what makes it so beautiful, and it is this diversity that has captured the hearts and minds of so many people throughout history.

The sights and sounds of nature are incredibly calming and soothing. The chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves, and the gentle sound of a babbling brook are all examples of the soothing sounds of nature. These sounds have the power to calm us and put us at ease, and they are often used in meditation and other relaxation techniques. The same can be said for the sights of nature. A beautiful sunset or a serene forest can have a calming effect on our minds and bodies, helping us to relax and unwind. The beauty of nature is a powerful antidote to the stresses and strains of modern life.

The beauty of nature has inspired countless artists, poets, and writers throughout history. From the romantic poets of the 19th century to the impressionist painters of the 20th century, nature has been a constant source of inspiration for creative minds. The beauty of nature has been captured in countless works of art, from paintings and sculptures to poetry and literature. The great naturalist John Muir once said, “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” This sentiment is echoed by countless artists and writers who have found solace and inspiration in the beauty of the natural world.

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example 3

Nature is an endless source of beauty that surrounds us, from the majestic mountains to the serene beaches. The natural world provides us with breathtaking landscapes, changing seasons, and intricate designs that leave us in awe. In this essay, we will explore the beauty of nature and the different ways it manifests itself in our world.

The first aspect of nature’s beauty is found in its natural landscapes. Mountains, forests, and beaches provide us with some of the most stunning views we can experience. The towering peaks of mountains, the vast expanse of forests, and the endless stretches of sand on beaches all offer unique sights that leave a lasting impression on us. Mountains have a way of making us feel small yet significant, while forests transport us to a different world, and beaches offer a sense of peace and tranquility. The natural landscapes of our world are a testament to the beauty and power of nature.

Another way nature showcases its beauty is through the changing seasons. Each season offers its unique charm and beauty, from the vibrant colors of autumn to the blooming flowers of spring. The crisp air of autumn, the first snowfall of winter, the lush greenery of spring, and the warm sun of summer all provide us with different experiences that make us appreciate the beauty of nature. The changing seasons remind us of the constant cycle of life and the beauty that can be found in every stage.

Finally, the intricate patterns and designs found in nature are a testament to the wonder and complexity of the natural world. The symmetry of a butterfly’s wings, the spiral of a seashell, and the intricate patterns of leaves all showcase the beauty of nature at its finest. These designs not only serve a purpose but also leave us in awe of the natural world. The intricate patterns and designs found in nature remind us that there is beauty in every detail, and we need to take the time to appreciate it.

Nature’s beauty is all around us, and it is up to us to take the time to appreciate it fully. The natural landscapes, changing seasons, and intricate designs of the natural world all showcase the wonder and complexity of nature. We need to take care of our world and preserve its beauty for generations to come. As John Muir said, “in every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”

About Mr. Greg

Mr. Greg is an English teacher from Edinburgh, Scotland, currently based in Hong Kong. He has over 5 years teaching experience and recently completed his PGCE at the University of Essex Online. In 2013, he graduated from Edinburgh Napier University with a BEng(Hons) in Computing, with a focus on social media.

Mr. Greg’s English Cloud was created in 2020 during the pandemic, aiming to provide students and parents with resources to help facilitate their learning at home.

Whatsapp: +85259609792

[email protected]

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Essay on Nature: In 100 Words, 200 Words, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 13, 2023

Nature is the intricate web of life that surrounds us, encompassing everything from the air we breathe to the majestic landscapes we admire. It includes the delicate balance of ecosystems, the diversity of flora and fauna, and the natural resources that sustain all living beings on Earth. Exploring the beauty and significance of nature is not only a pleasurable endeavour but also a crucial one, as it reminds us of our responsibility to protect and preserve our environment.

Table of Contents

• 1 Tips to Write the Best Essay
• 2 Essay on Nature in 100 Words
• 3 Essay on Nature in 200 Words
• 4 Essay on Nature in 300 Words

Tips to Write the Best Essay

Here are some tips to craft an exceptional essay:

• Understand the Topic: Grasp the essence of the topic and its different aspects before you start writing.
• Structure: Organize your essay coherently, with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Thesis Statement: Formulate a strong thesis statement that summarizes the main point you want to convey.
• Use Vivid Language: Employ descriptive language to bring the beauty of nature to life for your readers.
• Supporting Evidence: Back up your points with facts, statistics, and examples to make your essay more convincing.
• Variety of Ideas: Discuss different perspectives and dimensions of the topic to showcase a comprehensive understanding.
• Proofread: Edit your essay for grammar, punctuation, and clarity before submitting it.

Essay on Nature in 100 Words

Nature is a precious gift, encompassing all living and non-living entities. It provides us with air, water, food, and shelter. The beauty of nature soothes our souls and brings us closer to the marvels of creation. However, human activities are threatening the delicate balance of ecosystems, leading to pollution, deforestation, and climate change. It’s our responsibility to protect and preserve nature for future generations to enjoy its wonders.

Essay on Nature in 200 Words

Nature is the ultimate source of inspiration and sustenance for all life forms on Earth. From the smallest microorganisms to the tallest trees, every aspect of nature plays a crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance of our planet. The diversity of flora and fauna, the intricate ecosystems, and the natural resources provide us with food, shelter, and even the air we breathe.

Despite its undeniable importance, human activities are wreaking havoc on nature. Deforestation, pollution, and excessive use of natural resources are causing irreparable damage to our environment. Climate change, triggered by human-induced factors, is resulting in extreme weather events and rising sea levels, endangering both human and animal habitats.

Preserving nature is not a choice; it’s a necessity. The responsibility to conserve nature lies in the hands of every individual. Planting trees, reducing waste, using sustainable resources, and raising awareness about the importance of nature are steps we can take to mitigate the damage.

Nature has provided us with boundless beauty and resources, but it’s up to us to ensure its survival. By respecting and nurturing the natural world, we can secure a healthier and more vibrant planet for current and future generations.

Essay on Nature in 300 Words

Nature is a symphony of vibrant life forms and dynamic ecosystems that create a harmonious and intricate web of existence. The lush greenery of forests, the tranquil blue of oceans, the diverse habitats of animals, and the breathtaking landscapes remind us of the sheer magnificence of the world we inhabit. It’s a world that offers us both solace and sustenance, making our survival intertwined with its preservation.

The ecosystem services provided by nature are immeasurable. The forests act as the lungs of the Earth, producing oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide. Wetlands filter our water, providing us with clean and fresh sources of hydration. Bees and other pollinators enable the growth of crops, contributing to global food security.

However, the rampant disregard for nature’s delicate balance is leading to alarming consequences. The relentless deforestation for urbanization and agriculture is causing habitat loss, leading to the extinction of numerous species. The excessive emission of greenhouse gases is driving climate change, with rising temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns threatening vulnerable communities.

To ensure the well-being of our planet and future generations, conservation and sustainable practices are imperative. Afforestation and reforestation efforts must be intensified to restore lost ecosystems. Transitioning to renewable energy sources can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Moreover, raising awareness and fostering a deep connection with nature can instil a sense of responsibility and inspire positive action.

In conclusion, nature is not merely a resource for human exploitation; it’s a complex and interconnected system that sustains life in all its forms. We must recognize our role as custodians of the environment and act with diligence to protect and preserve it. By embracing sustainable practices and fostering a profound respect for nature, we can secure a future where the world’s natural wonders continue to thrive.

Nature encompasses the entirety of the physical world and its components, including landscapes, flora, fauna, air, water, and ecosystems. It encompasses the natural environment and all living and non-living elements that shape and sustain life on Earth.

Nature is vital for our survival, providing resources like air, water, and food. It maintains ecological balance, supports biodiversity, and offers inspiration and solace. However, human activities threaten its delicate equilibrium, necessitating conservation efforts.

Saving nature requires planting trees, reducing waste, using sustainable resources, and raising awareness about its importance. Adopting renewable energy sources, practising responsible consumption, and fostering a connection with nature are crucial steps in its preservation.

We hope that this essay blog on Nature helps. For more amazing daily reads related to essay writing , stay tuned with Leverage Edu .

Manasvi Kotwal

Manasvi's flair in writing abilities is derived from her past experience of working with bootstrap start-ups, Advertisement and PR agencies as well as freelancing. She's currently working as a Content Marketing Associate at Leverage Edu to be a part of its thriving ecosystem.

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Orion Magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

. . . WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down , tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands , and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how come we never hardly say that out loud?

The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.

And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.

Brian, Thank you for sharing. I moved with your words through each paragraph. And surprisingly at the end, I really felt as though I had been reading a truly great nature essay, almost simultaneously with your essay. I very much enjoyed the imagery.

Thank you for this, brilliantly done. I feel this way when I read Annie Dillard’s essays.

Who made the b/w photographic image at the head of your column? When you wrote “image” I thought you were referring to this epigraphic view, which is lovely but not forceful enough to do what your written image purported to accomplish.

In other words, the greatest nature essay ever moves like a poem? Imagery and metaphor, showing and not telling, all in as tight and concise a space as possible given the form and genre?

Ah yes, changed. What all us nature mystics aspire to do and how skillfully you worked the other side of the mirror, seeing us seeing you writing to us turning on a dime, change changing indeed . . . .

The Greatest Comment Ever on ‘The Greatest Nature Essay Ever’ would begin with a compliment on the author’s deft use of words, words like flowing water, organic sentences sprouting one from the other like vines climbing up and over a wall and into the sunlight. The compliment would be short, just a sentence or two, complimentary of course, ending with a quiet phrase such as, ‘nicely done Brian Doyle.’

Reminds me of Abbott’s Waste-land Wonderings. Though it must belong to conservatives, I see something fresh and new. Thanks.

Brian, congratulations on a finely constructed piece. I liked it to much I’m going to feature it in my December newsletter and will mention it on my blog (www.pagelambert.blogspot.com) With credits to Orion, of course, whose link is already on my blog. I lead outdoor writing adventures and look forward to sharing your piece with clients.

I nominate David Quammen’s “The Same River Twice”

Seth Zuckerman’s The Same River Twice should be in the running too.

I don’t know why I was led down the path that led to Portland Magazine Brian Doyle but I followed it today on the day that I needed to find it. Thank you.

Very, very beautiful and inspirational.

As what I expect is becoming usual, for me, when I read an essay of You: Yeah! When I read your Essays it feels like my grandmother has just offered me a magnificent bowl of fruit. There’s not a duplicate in the basket. I just heard you speak at In Praise of the Essay, and I was the one, with my daughter at my side, who was overcome with both laughter and tears, a shaken, not stirred mixture of the two. When you’d waltz our way with your emphatic delivery of your heart on that delicate platter, I got a real sense of you. And then, as soon as you were through, and not a moment later, I opened up the issue of your Portland review, and there, on the inside cover you delivered again that same heart on the same delicate platter, when you gave me “All Legs and Curiosity.” And I thought, this man has the power to make Women Burst into tears! And I did, right there at that table. And as I tried to compose myself, my daughter at my side, age 17 having visited Fordham in the Bronx not some 15 hours before, I hand the issue over to the woman at my side. She’s told me her daughter will soon be to school, but she has serious peanut allergies, and the delicacy of finding the right roommate for that situation has her beside herself, knowing there are things she can’t control.

I think to myself, I need to talk to this guy. What and how he says it and What he writes are delivered the Very same. But, I shy a way.

I go home and I find a Brevity Gem: the one you wrote about your children, and you being a stone. I’m filled up again, and I post it on My facebook, and one of my more sensitive man friends, who’s really a real friend, leaves a sensitive comment, and I realize then, This Man has the Power to Make Men cry too! And I decide there and then, He needs to be my mentor too. Will You?

What on earth is this all about? Was ist das?

A massive loss in natural disaster is afoot if you don’t stop writing essays so nobody will remember the images anyhow. So something helpful. Dreamers dream, ideas create ideologies.

brian ilove u very much for a beautiful poem . i delivered the ur nature essay & i got 1’st prize thank u a lot brian

Can someone tell me what a nature essay is about? Particularly this one

I’m trying to answer some questions for my school assignment.

(Eng.Comp 101)

Thank you, Cliff G

wonderful essay

What’s with the goat?

I just want to make sure this is the same Brian Doyle who wrote Joyas Volardores. Both beautifully written!

Yes, Vince, the same Brian Doyle. Here’s just a few of the other essays of his that Orion has published:

http://orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/65/

Many more have only appeared in the print edition. He’s a real favorite of ours, and our readers!

Erik, Orion

I agree with @melvin, The Same River twice is my favorite essay of all time.

Very helpful and informative article. If you do not mind then I will share it. Thank you !

When we choose to simply sit in nature together, we are writing it’s great essay.

Brian, I just read this. I haven’t yet read anything that brought me to the near tears situation but yours made me feel things I hadn’t felt in a while. At one point, minor goosebumps too.

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Nature Essay

500+ words essay on nature.

Nature is the most precious gift of God to us. Nature is like our mother; it nourishes and nurtures us. All our basic necessities are fulfilled by nature. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the land we live on, the water we drink or the food we eat, it all comes from nature. God has only gifted earth with nature; that’s why life is possible on earth. Without nature, the existence of living things would not be possible. Other planets are not blessed with this gift. So, we should be thankful to God for this beautiful nature and the existence of life on earth. Here, students can find the 500+ Words Essay on Nature. This essay will guide them in writing a good Essay on Nature and work as a sample essay for them. By going through it, students can create their own Nature Essay in English.

Nature is the natural, physical, material world or universe. “Nature” can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic. Our planet is rich in nature. Natural things look beautiful and attractive. Nature has flowing rivers, beautiful valleys, high mountains, singing birds, the oceans, the blue sky, different seasons, the rain, the beautiful moonlight etc. The beauty of nature is matchless. The blessings of nature on human beings are innumerable.

Importance and Role of Nature

If there were no nature, we wouldn’t be alive. Humankind is dependent on nature. We get oxygen to breathe from plants and trees. Thus, our respiratory system is regulated by nature. Not only this, nature has some magical healing powers which help patients suffering from various diseases to recover faster. Every minute spent in the lap of nature gives a refreshing and rejuvenating feeling. It lowers the cortisol, commonly known as the stress hormone. Even placing some nice plants around the work window will lead to lower stress. Nature enhances our brain’s activity and makes us concentrate better and be more focused. This makes our brains more creative and imaginative. Spending time in nature will provide a healthier and longer life.

Nature is very powerful and unique. Nature is also considered a source of education. We can learn humility from trees, the sturdiness from the mountains, and to smile from flowers and buds to keep smiling in tough phases of life.

The natural cycle of our ecosystem is very necessary. Ecosystems contain biotic or living parts, as well as abiotic factors or nonliving parts. Biotic factors include plants, animals, and other organisms. Abiotic factors include rocks, temperature, and humidity. Every factor in an ecosystem depends on every other factor, either directly or indirectly. We must take care of all the components of the ecosystem as it fulfils all our needs.

Nature Conservation

The resources provided on the earth are limited. If we continue to deplete the resources at this pace, then they will soon exhaust. Urbanisation and development have resulted in excessive use of resources. For example, we are cutting trees to make houses, roads, and railway tracks. We are mining minerals and fossil fuels for transportation activities. We are extensively using water for agriculture and other activities. Our comfort has led to the destruction of nature. Deforestation, global warming, wildlife destruction, environmental pollution, ecosystem imbalance etc., are the consequences that threaten biodiversity and life on earth. To overcome them, we need to conserve nature.

Conserving nature means protecting, preserving and restoring biodiversity. We can do so by taking care of small things such as making use of: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle. It will help in reducing waste management. We should plant trees in our surroundings and increase the greenery around us. Conserving water and saving it is also a way of conserving nature. We can also conserve rainwater by adopting the rainwater harvesting method. We must use and promote alternative energy sources such as solar energy and wind energy and thus adopt sustainable development concepts. We can conserve nature by taking care of small activities at home. These activities include switching off the lights, fans, and AC when not in use, switching to public transport and carpooling, composting waste at home, using recyclable bags and containers, and educating our children about climate change and nature conservation.

We hope students must have found this Essay on Nature helpful in improving their writing section. For more study material and the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive exams, keep visiting BYJU’S. Moreover, download the BYJU’S App to get interactive study videos.

Frequently Asked Questions on Nature Essay

Why is the conservation of nature important.

Humankind is completely dependent on nature and we are now depleting nature of all its resources. It is extremely important to understand that without nature, it would be impossible for any species to thrive on Earth.

What steps can we take to conserve nature?

All of us need to take at least small, minimal efforts from our side like recycling plastic, reducing wastage of all forms and keeping our house and surroundings clean.

How can we control the depletion of nature?

As much as possible, avoid purchasing unnecessary items as this will lead to waste accumulation. Avoid goods made from animal skin(leather), etc and try to reuse and recycle plastic and non-biodegradable items

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Guest Essay

Why Aren’t We Saving the Urban Forests?

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

The volunteer black walnut sapling in our front yard arrived courtesy of a local squirrel. Deep into its third spring, it looks like the kind of tree a child would draw: a narrow trunk topped by a ball of leaves. I had to mark it with a little flag to make sure my husband didn’t mow over it by accident.

As with all the other trees that have appeared in our yard through no effort of our own, I am besotted with this squirrel-planted young walnut. The baby Eastern red cedars and the baby black cherries and the baby red mulberries were all planted by birds. The baby sugar maples were planted by the wind. Some day they will be all food for the creatures who share this yard. (The baby willow oak and the three baby shingle oaks that appeared two years ago have already fed the rabbits.)

This black walnut won’t reach full maturity for another 150 years or so, and that’s if no one cuts it down — a bet I would not take. Most suburban Americans prefer a lawn unpocked by nuts and unvisited by birds, a square of nature that belongs to nothing natural.

When it comes to trees, human beings tend to like them big and tall and inconceivably ancient — preferably growing at some pretty distance. Trees are meant to grow in community with other trees, but for many people the ideal tree stands alone in an otherwise desolate landscape, tucked next to a dip in an old stone wall or visible across the vastness of fallow fields.

Last summer, in the days after a catastrophic wildfire in Maui, Hawaii, Lahaina’s historic banyan tree was rightly a focus of concern far beyond the island. When vandals cut down the legendary Sycamore Gap tree in Britain’s Northumberland National Park last fall, that too caused an international uproar . These were movie-star trees. For us they had ceased to be a part of the nameless, inscrutable forest and become instead themselves. A living organism. A friend.

But human beings cut down old trees all the time, for no reason but the inconvenience of their falling leaves or their burgeoning fruit, or because they are in the way of a road or a subdivision, or because of foolish notions of safety. The fear of a falling limb has cost many a suburban tree its life. In the 21st century we have become so separate from the natural world that we don’t feel safe in the presence of perfectly healthy trees.

I wonder what the world would be like if we could harness the outrage engendered by a tree felled in an act of vandalism, or the grief engendered by a tree at risk of dying in a wildfire, and turn it toward protecting the trees we still have left.

The overwhelming majority of Americans live in cities. In an analysis of 44 U.S. cities by the nonpartisan nonprofit Climate Central , roughly 55 percent of the study’s population live in neighborhoods with an average temperature that is at least eight degrees higher than it is in the surrounding rural areas. This phenomenon, where the built human environment is even hotter than the rest of the rapidly warming world, is known as the urban heat island effect. In New York City, the urban heat island index is a whopping 9.5 degrees.

We know forests can capture and sequester carbon before it adds to the heating climate, and we know we need to protect the forests we still have . But too few of us understand the crucial contribution that trees make in our cities and suburbs: cooling hot buildings, preventing storm-water runoff, improving air quality, pulling carbon out of the air, and the like. Not even to mention the habitat — food, shelter, nesting sites — that trees provide our wild neighbors. As the proliferating seedlings in my own yard attest, trees are an essential part of the ecosystem for local wildlife.

Newly planted saplings can help, but with nowhere near the same effectiveness as mature trees. And yet we have somehow gotten the idea that planting a tree in urban and suburban areas has the same practical effect and moral force — there, I said it — as preserving one. A tree is a tree, right? If one happens to be growing in a place where you don’t want it to grow, just cut it down and plant another in a more convenient spot.

In rapidly growing cities, where even a robust plan for planting trees can’t possibly keep pace with development, the preservation of existing trees would go a long way toward keeping the city livable for human beings as well as for wildlife. Here in Nashville, we actually have a tree-protection ordinance , though it doesn’t apply to duplexes or single-family homes, where so many of the remaining trees still live. There are ways to preserve the trees on construction sites , of course, but spec-house builders rarely bother.

As a species, we don’t have 150 years to wait for a black walnut seedling to reach its full glorious height before we start protecting the black walnut trees still among us. The parent tree of my own baby walnut lies across the street from a house that was recently torn down by a developer, along with every tree not in the public right of way. The tree surgeon who carted them off in pieces said the builder’s instructions were to clear every tree from the lot.

Today is Earth Day and Arbor Day is on Friday. Both will be celebrated across the country by a great communal effort to plant trees.

I get it. There’s something very heartwarming about watching a community come together to install a whole row of ornamental trees on a nature-impoverished city street, or to pick up a free seedling from one of the many tree giveaway efforts that sprout up among conservation nonprofits at this time of year. It feels good to dig a hole to the right depth and the right diameter, to set a baby tree down inside it and pat the soil gently around its roots. We are a tenderhearted species, and it feels very good to nurture a baby tree.

We just need to remember how good it feels to sit beneath the cooling shelter of mature trees, too. And we need to fight just as hard to save them as we work to replace the trees we’ve already lost.

Margaret Renkl , a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “ The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, ” “ Graceland, at Last ” and “ Late Migrations .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Mapping America’s access to nature, neighborhood by neighborhood

A city is a science experiment. What happens when we separate human beings from the environment in which they evolved? Can people be healthy without nature? The results have been bleak. Countless studies have shown that people who spend less time in nature die younger and suffer higher rates of mental and physical ailments.

“There’s a really, really strong case for proximity to nature influencing health in a really big way,” said Jared Hanley, the co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, an Oregon start-up whose mission is to discover what kind of nature best supports human health, map where it is and persuade people to spend more time in it.

Using satellite imagery and data on dozens of factors — including air and noise pollution, park space, open water and tree canopy — NatureQuant has distilled the elements of health-supporting nature into a single variable called NatureScore. Aggregated to the level of Census tracts — roughly the size of a neighborhood — the data provide a high-resolution image of where nature is abundant and where it is lacking across the United States.

Quantifying nature reveals unsettling truths — about how the densest neighborhoods are often bereft of nature, and about how the poorest city dwellers have the least access to the nature’s health benefits. But it could also help pinpoint which parts of our urban landscapes would benefit most from an infusion of nature.

What’s at stake

The scientific basis for nature’s health benefits is now overwhelming. Study after peer-reviewed study has shown that nature exposure is linked to living longer , sleeping better , displaying improved cognitive function , and enjoying lower rates of heart disease , obesity , depression and stress .

In rural areas, both rich and poor can easily spend time in nature. But in cities, NatureScores are higher where people have more education, are more likely to be White and earn more money.

Why does nature make us healthy? One answer is the “old friends hypothesis” that our immune systems grow stronger when regularly exposed to the natural pathogens with which we evolved. Or maybe it’s that being in nature nudges us to exercise and socialize. A third theory is that cities are just unhealthy, exposing us to lead, asbestos and vehicle exhaust, not to mention the stress of traffic and noisy construction.

Yet like space dust accreting to form planets, humans seem compelled to gather in cities. Two hundred years ago, just 7 percent of people in the United States lived in an urbanized area. By 1970, when Joni Mitchell was lamenting that we’d “paved paradise,” that figure was up to 75 percent. Today, 86 percent of us live in cities, and the share continues to rise.

The denser the city, the less health-supporting nature you are likely to find. Among the 500 most populous cities in the United States, Suffolk, Va., with just 147 people per square mile, has the highest NatureScore. Union City, N.J., is by far the densest — almost 30,000 people per square mile — and has one of the lowest NatureScores.

But density is not destiny. New York, for instance, has a better NatureScore than Los Angeles and Chicago, even though its population density is higher. And the best way to boost a city’s NatureScore is to plant trees.

The Arbor Day Foundation, which directs millions of dollars to tree planting projects around the world, started using NatureQuant’s data in 2021. If a donor comes to the Arbor Day Foundation with a plan to plant trees in a posh part of town, the data can help make the argument that the trees would do more good elsewhere.

“Everybody wants to plant in their neighborhood,” said Jeff Salem, director of communications for the Arbor Day Foundation. “But this helps that conversation of, ‘Hey, you might live in North Chicago in a really great neighborhood, but really, as you can see here, there’s some neighborhoods on the South Side that really could use your support with trees.’”

In rural America, it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, Black or White, dropped out of high school or have a PhD: you are still likely to have access to health-supporting nature. But in cities, differences in access to nature are as stark as other forms of inequality.

For example, among the fifth of Census tracts with the lowest levels of education, the average NatureScore is just 37, compared with an average score of 68 in the most educated Census tracts. The Census tracts with the lowest share of White people have an average NatureScore of 45, compared with 73 in the tracts with highest share of Whites.

NatureScores can identify neighborhoods that need trees. Planting them is another matter. “We use [the data] as a starting point. But, you know, the devil is in the details,” said Christina Smith, the executive director of Groundwork Bridgeport, an environmental nonprofit in Bridgeport, Conn., where she grew up.

Suppose you want to boost a neighborhood’s NatureScore by lining the sidewalk with trees. Before you buy the first sapling, you need to make sure the sidewalk is wide enough to fit a tree and still comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. And you’ll need money to hire workers or face the dangerous prospect of twenty high school volunteers packed into a narrow sidewalk with cars whizzing by.

What about just giving free trees to neighborhood residents? If most people rent, they won’t have the authority to plant on their property. If you manage to track down property owners, they might not want the burden of planting and caring for trees.

Yet Groundwork Bridgeport has figured out how to host successful tree giveaways (door knocking works better than direct mail, and it helps to have friends at community gardens). Last year, they distributed 100 trees to residents on the east side of the city. If all those trees are still around in 30 years, it will boost the area’s NatureScore by 15 points, amounting to an increase of a year of life expectancy for people in the neighborhood, NatureQuant told me.

Thirty years is a long time to wait, which is one of the reasons cash-strapped city governments often view tree planting as a frivolous expense compared to more pressing matters like crime and homelessness. “Trees are not a silver bullet. Trees are not going to solve poverty,” said Dan Lambe, the Arbor Day Foundation’s CEO.

But quantifying nature can make sure trees are going where they’re needed most, Lambe said: “We know we can make a difference in people’s lives by emphasizing neighborhoods that have been disadvantaged, who have been ignored, that just simply don’t have the tree benefits.”

Check my work

The NatureScores by Census tract were provided by NatureQuant, Inc., which described its methodology in this paper . Those data are as of July 31, 2023. You can find my analysis of those data along with 2020 socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census Bureau in this computational notebook . The top 500 U.S. cities were also provided by NatureQuant and are based on 2020 NatureScore data. You can find my analysis of the city data in this notebook .

You can use the code and data to produce your own analyses and charts — and to make sure mine are accurate. If you do, email me at [email protected] .

Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Nature Versus Nurture — The Nature vs Nurture Debate

The Nature Vs Nurture Debate

• Categories: Nature Versus Nurture

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Published: Jan 29, 2024

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Nature argument, nurture argument, interactionist perspective, criticisms and limitations of the debate.

• One of the most compelling examples of genetic influences on behavior is the study of identical twins. Identical twins share the same genes and were commonly separated at birth, yet they often display remarkable similarities in personality traits, interests, and even medical conditions.
• Genetic factors can lead to the onset of psychological disorders such as Autism and Schizophrenia.
• Evolution and natural selection have created inherited traits such as physical characteristics that enable humans to adapt to their environments.
• Early childhood experiences can heavily influence an individual’s cognitive development. Studies have shown that a nurturing environment positively contributes to intellectual development and conversely, poverty and violence negatively impact cognitive development.
• Socialization is a critical environmental factor that shapes one's personality. Cultural norms also deeply influence one's way of thinking, behavior, and personal identity.
• Environmental factors can heavily impact behavior, such as peer pressure and negative societal influences leading to adverse outcomes.
• Genetic factors and environmental factors have both been shown to interact to influence behavior, gene-environment interaction being critical scientific evidence of this.
• Epigenetics, the study of how environmental factors can activate or suppress certain genes, can have impacts on both personality and physical health.
• Plomin, R. (2018). Genetics and life events: The importance of childhood environments for recruitment into ‘nature’s experiments’. Psychological Review, 125(5), 778-791.
• Reiss, D., Neiderhiser, J. M., Hetherington, E. M., & Plomin, R. (2000). The relationship code: Deciphering genetic and social influences on adolescent development. Harvard University Press.
• Jablonka, E., & Raz, G. (2009). Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Prevalence , Mechanisms, and Implications for the Study of Heredity and Evolution. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 84(2), 131–176.

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Essay on Nature for Children and Students

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Nature Essay: Nature is an integral part of our lives. But even while we appreciate the blessings she bestows on us, we forget that we are plundering her treasures and thereby denying our children the pleasure of enjoying nature in all her abundance and variety.

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Find very simple and easy to understand essay on nature. Bring some creativity in the education of your lovely kids, children and students who are studying in nursery, KG, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Nature is the most important thing for our life and our kids should know about this. So motivate their learning through following nature essay.

Long and Short Essay on Nature in English

Nature essay in 100 words.

We live on the most beautiful planet, Earth which has very clean and attractive nature full of greenery. Nature is our best friend which provides us all the resources to live here. It gives us water to drink, pure air to breathe, food to eat, land to stay, animals, plants for our other uses, etc for our betterment. We should fully enjoy the nature without disturbing its ecological balance. We should care our nature, make it peaceful, keep it clean and prevent it from the destruction so that we can enjoy our nature forever. Nature is a most precious gift given by the God to us to enjoy but not to harm.

Nature Essay in 150 words

Nature is the most beautiful and attractive surrounding around us which make us happy and provide us natural environment to live healthy. Our nature provides us variety of beautiful flowers, attractive birds, animals, green plants, blue sky, land, running rivers, sea, forests, air, mountains, valleys, hills and many more things. Our God has created a beautiful nature for the healthy living of us. All the things we use for our living are the assets of nature which we should not spoil and damage.

We should not destroy the originality of the nature and should not imbalance the ecosystem cycle. Our nature provides us beautiful environment to live and enjoy so it is our responsibility to keep it clean and away from all the damages. In the modern era, many selfish and bad activities of the human being have disturbed the nature to a great extent. But we all should try to maintain our nature’s beauty.

Nature Essay in 200 words

The nature is everything around us which surrounds us with beautiful environment. We see and enjoy it every moment. We observe natural changes in it, hear it and feel it everywhere. We should take full advantage of the nature and go out of home for the morning walk daily to breathe pure air and enjoy morning beauty of nature. All though the day it changes it beauty like in the morning when sun rises everything looks bright orange and then yellowish. In the evening when sun sets it again becomes dark orange and then light dark.

The nature has everything for us but we do not have anything for it even we are destroying its property day by day to just fulfill our selfish wishes. In the modern technological world lots of inventions are getting launched daily without its advantage and disadvantage to the nature. It is our responsibility to save the declining assets of our nature to make possible the existence of life forever on the earth. If we do not take any step towards nature conservation, we are keeping our future generations at danger. We should understood its worth and value and try to maintain its natural shape.

Nature Essay in 250 words

Nature is the most precious and valuable gift to us from the God to live our life here on the earth. Nature makes our life easy by providing all the required resources for daily living. We should thankful to our nature for helping, caring and nurturing us like a mother. We can enjoy the sweet sound and scenery of the nature if we peacefully sit in the early morning in the garden. Our nature is adorned with lots of scenic beauty which we can enjoy anytime. Earth has geographical beauty and known as the city of garden or heaven. But it is sad to say that such beautiful gifts of God are declining day by day due to the technological advancement and high level of ignorance of the human beings.

Nature is like our real mother which never harms us but always nourishes us. Walking in the lap of nature in the early morning makes us healthy and strong as well as keeps us away from many lethal diseases like diabetes, chronic heart diseases, high blood pressure, liver problem, digestive system ailments, infections, brain disease, etc. It is good for our health to hear the soft sound of the birds, rattle of the breeze, sound of running fresh air, sound of running water in the river, etc in the early morning. Most of the poets, writers and people used to of yoga and meditation are seen in the early morning in the garden to re-energize their body, mind and soul.

Nature Essay in 300 words

Nature is the most important and integral part of the lives of everyone. Everyone has been blessed with the true love of God in the form of beautiful nature. We should never miss the pleasure of enjoying the nature. Nature has been the most favourite topic of the works of many famous poets, writers, painters and artists. Nature is the beautiful creation of the God which he blessed to us as a precious gift. Nature is everything which surrounds us like water, air, land, sky, fire, river, forests, animals, birds, plants, sun, moon, stars, sea, lake, rain, thunder, storm, etc. Nature is very colourful and has both living and non-living things in its lap.

Everything in the nature has their own power and uniqueness provided by the God. It has its many forms which are changing by season to season and even from minute to minute such as sea looks bright blue in the morning but by noon it looks emerald green colour. Sky changes its colour all through the day from pale pink at sunrise, dazzling blue in late morning, bright orange in evening at sunset and purple by twilight. Our mood also gets changed according to the nature such as happy and hopeful at sun shine, rainy season and spring season. We feel heartily happy at moonlight and little bored and tired in high sun light.

Nature has some powerful transformative power which changes our mood and behaviour accordingly. Nature has power to recover the patients from their diseases if they are provided with the required and pleasant environment. Nature is very essential for our healthy life so we should keep it clean and conserve it for our future generations. We should cut trees and forests, should not despoil the ocean, rivers, should not make hole in ozone layer, should not increase green house effect, global warming and many more through our selfish activities. We should get fully aware about our nature and try our best to keep it natural so that it can nourish life on the earth forever.

Nature Essay in 400 words

Nature is the natural environment which surrounds us, cares us and nourishes us every moment. It provides us a protective layer around us to prevent from the damages. We are not able to survive on the earth without nature like air, land, water, fire and sky. Nature includes everything around us like plants, animals, river, forests, rain, lake, birds, sea, thunder, sun, moon, weather, atmosphere, mountain, desserts, hills, ice, etc. Every form of nature is very powerful which has ability to nourish as well as destroy us.

Now a day, everyone has less time to enjoy nature. In the increasing crowd we forgot to enjoy nature and improve health. We started using technological instruments for our health fitness. However it is very true that nature has power to nourish us and fit us forever. Most of the writers have described the real beauty and advantage of the nature in their writings. Nature has ability to make our mind tension free and cure our diseases. Because of technological advancement in the life of human being, our nature is declining gradually which needs a high level of awareness to keep it in balance and to conserve natural assets.

God has created everything very beautifully seeing which our eyes can never be tired. But we forgot that we too have some responsibility towards our nature to relationship between nature and human beings. How beautiful scenery it looks in morning with sunrise, songs of birds, sounds of lakes, rivers, air and happy gatherings of friends in the evening in garden after a long day of crush. But we forgot to enjoy the beauty of the nature in just fulfilling our duties towards our families.

Sometimes during our holidays we spend our whole day by watching TV, reading news paper, playing indoor games or on the computer but we forgot that outside the door we can do something interesting in the lap of nature ad natural environment. Unnecessarily we left on all the lights of home, we use electricity without need which ultimately increases the heat in the environment called global warming. Our other activities like cutting trees and forests increase the amount of CO2 gas in the environment causing green house effect and global warming.

If we want to be happy and healthy always we should try our best to save our planet and its beautiful nature by stopping our foolish and selfish activities. In order to keep ecosystem in balance we should not cut trees, forests, practice energy and water conservation and many more. Ultimately we are the real user of the nature so we should really take care of it.

Essay on Nature FAQs

What is the nature essay.

A nature essay is a written piece about the natural world, often describing its beauty and significance.

What is nature in simple English?

Nature, in simple terms, refers to the outdoors, including plants, animals, and the environment around us.

What is nature 5 points?

Nature comprises trees, rivers, animals, mountains, and the sky. It's where we find beauty and life.

What is the beauty of nature?

The beauty of nature is seen in its landscapes, from colorful sunrises to lush forests, evoking awe and serenity.

What can I write about the beauty of nature?

You can write about breathtaking sunrises, calming lakes, diverse wildlife, and the peace nature brings.

How do you describe a nature walk?

A nature walk is a leisurely stroll in the outdoors, appreciating the scenery and observing plants and animals.

What is the purpose of a nature walk?

The purpose of a nature walk is to connect with nature, enjoy its tranquility, and learn about the environment.

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Essay 1 Revised

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• Open access
• Published: 24 April 2024

Network of large pedigrees reveals social practices of Avar communities

• Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6490-8101 1   na1 ,
• Zsófia Rácz   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5116-2235 2   na1 ,
• Levente Samu 2 ,
• Tamás Szeniczey 3 ,
• Norbert Faragó   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0351-1223 2 ,
• Corina Knipper 4 ,
• Ronny Friedrich   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5199-1957 4 ,
• Denisa Zlámalová 5 ,
• Luca Traverso 1 ,
• Salvatore Liccardo 6 , 7 ,
• Sandra Wabnitz 6 , 7 ,
• Divyaratan Popli 8 ,
• Ke Wang 1 , 9 ,
• Rita Radzeviciute 1 ,
• Bence Gulyás 10 ,
• István Koncz   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8113-5753 2 ,
• Csilla Balogh   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9161-1653 11 ,
• Gabriella M. Lezsák 12 ,
• Viktor Mácsai 2 ,
• Magdalena M. E. Bunbury   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3114-3138 13 ,
• Olga Spekker 2 , 14 ,
• Petrus le Roux   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5930-4995 15 ,
• Anna Szécsényi-Nagy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2095-738X 16 ,
• Balázs Gusztáv Mende 16 ,
• Heidi Colleran   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2126-8116 17 , 18 ,
• Tamás Hajdu 3 ,
• Patrick Geary   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3971-2588 19 ,
• Walter Pohl 6 , 7 ,
• Tivadar Vida   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0588-1906 2 , 20 ,
• Johannes Krause   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9144-3920 1 &
• Zuzana Hofmanová   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1336-4455 1 , 5  

Nature ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Archaeology
• Population genetics

From ad 567–568, at the onset of the Avar period, populations from the Eurasian Steppe settled in the Carpathian Basin for approximately 250 years 1 . Extensive sampling for archaeogenomics (424 individuals) and isotopes, combined with archaeological, anthropological and historical contextualization of four Avar-period cemeteries, allowed for a detailed description of the genomic structure of these communities and their kinship and social practices. We present a set of large pedigrees, reconstructed using ancient DNA, spanning nine generations and comprising around 300 individuals. We uncover a strict patrilineal kinship system, in which patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm and multiple reproductive partnering and levirate unions were common. The absence of consanguinity indicates that this society maintained a detailed memory of ancestry over generations. These kinship practices correspond with previous evidence from historical sources and anthropological research on Eurasian Steppe societies 2 . Network analyses of identity-by-descent DNA connections suggest that social cohesion between communities was maintained via female exogamy. Finally, despite the absence of major ancestry shifts, the level of resolution of our analyses allowed us to detect genetic discontinuity caused by the replacement of a community at one of the sites. This was paralleled with changes in the archaeological record and was probably a result of local political realignment.

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Kinship practices in the early state El Argar society from Bronze Age Iberia

The kinship practices and social organization of past societies are hard to assess using only the fragmentary archaeological and historical information that has survived to modern times. Biological relatedness does not necessarily correspond to social kinship, but it can nevertheless provide a powerful tool to infer elements of past kinship practices. Ancient DNA has been used for pedigree inference 3 , 4 , 5 , but being able to capture the extent of relationships in ancient populations requires a sampling approach that is focused on entire cemeteries of considerable size 6 . Only multiple observations of the same type of relatedness structure can exclude a random occurrence and indicate a reliable pattern. Archaeological contextualization adds social meaning and can disentangle the complex interplay between biological relatedness and human behaviour to help researchers to infer kinship practices on a larger scale.

From the late sixth century ad to the early ninth century, the Avars were the dominant power in eastern central Europe 1 , 7 . Originating from eastern central Asia, probably from the Rouran khaganate destroyed by the Turks, the Avars’ core group of mounted steppe warriors and their families arrived north of the Caucasus in ad 557–558, where further groups joined the march into the Carpathian Basin in 567–568 (refs. 1 , 7 ). This region became the centre of the Avar empire, where they settled among a diverse population derived from the previous Roman period followed by the Gepid and Longobard kingdoms 1 , 8 . After extensive raids into the Byzantine Balkans ended in ad 626, the Avar society changed in many ways. The archaeological record indicates that a sedentary lifestyle in new, stable settlements emerged, with larger cemeteries containing hundreds of graves, and cultural expressions became more homogeneous 9 . The Avar realm persisted until it was overcome by the Frankish armies of Charlemagne in around ad 800. Turkic titles of rank (such as khagan, iugurrus, tudun and tarkhan) mentioned in written sources document that the central Asian character of the political structure was maintained until the end of Avar rule 1 . In terms of social structure, patrilineal organization is the norm for Eurasian pastoralist steppe peoples 2 , but we were unable to investigate the social practices of the Avars until now owing to a lack of historical sources ( Supplementary Information ).

By generating new genomic data (Supplementary Table 1 ) from the exhaustive sampling of four fully excavated cemeteries from present-day Hungary, combined with new isotope data and detailed archaeological and anthropological characterization, we aimed to investigate the population structure, kinship and social organization of these communities at a high level of resolution. We identified 298 biologically closely related individuals that allowed us to reconstruct extensive pedigrees and build networks of distant relatedness across the Great Hungarian Plain. We found striking evidence of recurrent patterns that allowed us to trace kinship and social practices, gain insights into the mobility of men and women and refine the chronology of the sites. In the largest cemetery, we were able to identify a community replacement associated with changes in the archaeological record and dietary habits, suggesting local political realignment. This replacement was not accompanied by an ancestry shift and was detected only by changes in the biological relatedness pattern.

Analysis of entire cemeteries

The Great Hungarian Plain was the main settlement area for steppe populations during the Avar period. We chose four cemeteries to cover equally its two main regions, divided by the river Tisza: the Transtisza region (TT) east of the river and the Danube–Tisza interfluve region (DTI) to the west (Fig. 1 ). The DTI was the power centre of the khaganate (the Avar empire), where burials of the highest Avar elite (for example, Kunbábony) were found, and these burials were also investigated in a previous genomic study 10 . From this region, we sampled the site of Kunpeszér (KUP; 33 burials), comprising an early Avar elite cemetery group with rich grave goods, exquisite gold- and silver-decorated swords, belts and jewellery, and a second cemetery group of poor late Avar burials 11 . The site of Kunszállás (KFJ; 63 burials) from the same region, founded in the mid-seventh-century ad , already belongs to the more-uniform material culture of the middle and late Avar period 12 . The TT region is well known for burial customs associated with the steppe, such as the placement of animals, animal skins or horse implements near the deceased. We chose Rákóczifalva (RK) because it is one of the region’s largest cemeteries (279 out of 308 graves sampled) that was continuously occupied from around ad 570 to the mid-ninth century 13 . From RK we additionally sequenced 56 individuals from the second to the sixth century to extend the available data on pre-Avar periods and to capture the Avar-period transition on a local scale. The cemetery of Hajdúnánás (HNJ; 18 burials) was selected to cover the northern section of the TT region 14 , 15 ( Supplementary Information ; Supplementary Table 2 ).

Kunpeszér and Kunszállás are located in the DTI; Hajdúnánás and Rákóczifalva are in the TT region. Right, typical archaeological elements that characterize and distinguish between the two main habitation areas of steppe-descent populations of the Avar period: prestigious swords of the DTI elites (KUP) and evidence of burials with horse or animal skin at TT sites (RK). Bottom, timeline of the Avar period in the Carpathian Basin highlighting the three main chronological phases (early, middle and late) showing key historical events. Photo of Kunpeszér sword: Katona József Museum (Kecskemét, Hungary); photo of Rákóczifalva excavation: Sándor Hegedűs. The figure contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024. The map was plotted using R 34 .

After quality controls ( Methods ; Supplementary Table 1 ) we obtained genome-wide (around 1,240,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs); Methods ) data for 424 individuals with an average coverage of 2.6×. Furthermore, we produced new strontium, carbon and nitrogen isotope data ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr; δ 13 C and δ 15 N; Supplementary Table 3 ) for 154 individuals from RK, KUP and KFJ, and 57 new radiocarbon dates for RK (Supplementary Tables 2 and  6 ).

Pedigrees: strict patriliny within sites

To reconstruct the pedigrees, we estimated close biological relatedness using recently published software, KIN (ref. 16 ), which was designed to identify first-, second- or third-degree related individuals (defined as close genetic relatedness) in low-coverage ancient DNA ( Methods ). We found no close genetic relatedness between sites, but most individuals in each site were closely related, constituting a total of 373 pairs of first-degree (235 parent–child and 138 siblings) and more than 500 pairs of second-degree relatives (Supplementary Table 4 ). Such a large number, especially of first-degree pairs, allowed us to reconstruct a total of 31 pedigrees of varying sizes, ranging from 2 to 146 individuals (Fig. 2a , Extended Data Figs. 1 – 3 and Supplementary Figs. 6 , 10 and 15 ). These extended genealogies show a strict patrilineal descent with almost no exceptions. This finding provides compelling evidence for patrilocality and female exogamy, which explains the striking difference in Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity observed among related individuals (Extended Data Fig. 4 ).

a , A large (146 individuals) interconnected set of sub-pedigrees, numbered 1 to 5, and four smaller pedigrees (34 individuals) numbered 6, 7, 8 and 12. Levirate unions are shown with pink lines connecting the individuals involved. The male individuals’ Y haplogroups are shown with coloured borders around the individuals. Black symbols refer to individuals whose ancient DNA we have and white ones indicate missing individuals inferred on the basis of the available data. The horizontal axis to the left shows a timeline spanning the whole Avar period, covering the nine or more generations of the pedigrees. b , Cemetery map of RK 8, with graves colour coded according to the pedigree shown in a . The middle Avar period archaeological transition is exemplified by the different abundance of graves with a horse harness and graves with post holes (each image corresponds to a finding in a grave; silhouette of a horse is from Pixabay). This transition strikingly corresponds to the community shift and spatial organization of the cemetery. The left part is where mostly early-to-middle Avar period individuals and J1a male individuals are found (pink halo), and the right part is where mostly middle-to-late Avar period individuals and J2b male individuals are found (yellow halo).

Within RK, 202 individuals had at least one close relative at the site and only 64 were unrelated. Among the related individuals, 146 formed an extended ‘macro’ pedigree spanning up to nine continuous generations. We divided this into five connected pedigrees (numbered 1 to 5; Methods ) descended from 11 founding male individuals. A further 34 individuals formed 4 additional multigenerational pedigrees (numbered 6, 7, 8 and 12) chronologically dated to the early Avar period (Fig. 2a ), and the rest formed smaller units (Supplementary Figs. 15 and 16 ).

a , Visualization of the network of IBD connections (edges) between individuals (nodes) coloured according to their site: RK, KFJ, KUP and HNJ. The male individuals’ Y haplogroups are shown with coloured borders. The strength of the IBD connection is summarized by the maximum IBD length (centimorgans) for each pair of individuals. The distribution of these lengths from the lowest (>12 cM cut-off) to the highest (>280 cM for first-degree relatives) is indicated by the width and colour scale of each edge. b , Networks for adult male individuals only (top) and adult female individuals only (bottom). c , Network statistics calculated on the adults-only network. Left, degree centrality, k (the number of links held by the node), against the cumulative density function of the degree distribution, defined as the probability that k is more than a value x P ( k  >  x ). Right, total k plotted against the ratio of k calculated between site edges ( k B ) to total k .

Adults (more than 18 years old) represent 83% of the whole RK cemetery, with nearly equal numbers of male and female individuals (Table 1 ). However, the RK pedigrees contain twice as many male individuals as female ones. This male bias is due to a higher ratio of sons to daughters: we found 102 sons (77 adults and 25 subadults) and 20 daughters, mostly subadults (5 adults and 15 subadults). A strict patrilineality can be observed from the descent structure of the pedigrees. Only one adult daughter (RKC024) has offspring buried in the cemetery, and her son (RKC012) is second-degree related to other members of the pedigree through the missing father (Supplementary Table 4 ). Consequently, RKC024 and her missing partner are sixth-degree related. All the other mothers lack parents at the site and are considered exogamous partners. Instead, all the fathers are descendants of the founding male individual(s) of their respective pedigree, with no exceptions (Fig. 2a ). The founding role in the life of the communities may have been especially important 2 . In several cases, founding male individuals (or, in the case of brothers, one of the male individuals) were buried with valuable grave goods considered status symbols: horse harnesses and belt sets in the early Avar period and belt sets in the middle and late periods (Supplementary Fig. 10 ).

The KFJ pedigree presents the same pattern of genetic relatedness (Extended Data Fig. 1 ). Here, of the 45 individuals forming the second-largest pedigree, 21 are sons (10 of whom are subadults) and 13 are daughters (11 subadults). We observe a similar tendency in the small KUP and HNJ cemeteries, although with fewer individuals (Extended Data Figs. 2 and 3 ).

These patterns are reflected in the striking difference between female lines (mtDNA haplogroups) and male lines (Y-chromosome haplogroups). Only two Y-chromosome lineages, J1a-Z2317 and J2b-CTS11760 (J1a and J2b hereafter), are found in pedigrees 1–8 and 12 in RK, compared with around 50 different mtDNA haplogroups; only one Y-chromosome lineage, N1a-Y16220 (N1a hereafter) is found in both KFJ and KUP among related and unrelated individuals (compared with around 20 mtDNA haplogroups); and another, Q1a-L715 (Q1a hereafter), is shared between all male individuals of HNJ pedigree 1 (Extended Data Fig. 4 ).

A comparison of pedigrees with the spatial arrangement of graves and grave groups allows us to assess how much biological and social relatedness correspond, and demonstrates that the concept of descent was central to the organization of the burial site. With few exceptions, all individuals from the same pedigree are found in the same burial cluster (Fig. 2b ).

In terms of closer-descent units, we discovered that parents, infants, juveniles and even adult male siblings were buried near each other, forming clusters of close relatives (Supplementary Fig. 9 ). Within these groups we often find unrelated female individuals. In fact, there is a strong sex bias among the 64 unrelated individuals in RK, because 51 are female and only 13 are male. Most of these female individuals are young adults. Male individuals have a more balanced age distribution, and among related female individuals, older adults are more frequent (Supplementary Fig. 11 ). The age distribution, position in the pedigree clusters, chronology, burial customs and grave goods suggest that the unrelated female individuals are likely to be exogamous partners of lineage male individuals who had not yet reproduced, or whose children were not found at the site. Therefore, they are not detected as biologically related but could still be part of the social unit.

On the basis of the pedigrees, we can speculate that the beginning of the reproductive age for women was 18–20 years. The youngest mothers were 18–22 years old at death, whereas the youngest fathers were 24–29 years old at death. This is consistent with the observation that juveniles are buried next to their parents (female individuals of 16–19 and male ones of 18–22 years old at death), and lineage female individuals disappear from the pedigrees at late juvenile–early adult age.

Marriage strategies and levirate unions

Another consistent pattern between sites is that male and female individuals often had multiple reproductive partners. In RK only, we discovered 15 cases involving a male partner and 7 cases involving a female one ( Supplementary Information ). Male individuals had two partners in ten cases, three partners in four cases, and four partners in one case (RKF042); around 85% of these individuals are older men (aged 35–59). The young ages of female partners at death may indicate serial monogamy (RKC011), but the presence of older female partners in multiple partnerships suggest polygyny (RKF042 and RKF180). Multiple reproductive partners were also discovered in HNJ and KFJ (one and four cases, respectively). That means that polygyny might not have been restricted to the highest stratum of society that is known from the historical sources, but also occurred in the general population 1 .

We also identified multiple cases (five in RK and two in KFJ) and, through indirect evidence, another case in KUP, of closely related male individuals having offspring with the same female partner: three pairs of fathers and sons, two pairs of full brothers, one pair of paternal half-brothers and one pair of paternal uncle and nephew (Extended Data Figs. 1 and 2 ). We assume that these unions were levirate matches (although in some cases concurrent polyandry cannot be excluded; Supplementary Information ). Even though the word levirate has a biblical origin 17 , in historical and anthropological research the term has a wider application referring to marriages between a widow and an agnate of the deceased. Often found in pastoral societies, which are patrilocal, patrilineal and observe female exogamy, the levirate custom was common in Central Asia and the Caucasus until recent times 18 , 19 . Although not mentioned for the Avars, levirate partnerships are attested to in contemporary written sources for several steppe peoples 20 , 21 , which suggests that what we find in the pedigrees is probably formal levirate, not extramarital relationships.

According to the sources 22 , no levirate union could occur if the deceased’s agnate was related to the widow by blood. Indeed, we find no cases of biological consanguinity, based on the absence of long runs of homozygosity (ROH) segments in all analysed individuals (Extended Data Fig. 5 ). We do not even detect ROH patterns consistent with more-distant consanguineous unions, such as at the level of second-degree cousins, despite a high occurrence of levirate and multipartner unions. Among Eurasian steppe peoples, intermarriage within the paternal line was permitted only after a certain number of generations, which could range between five and nine 20 , 21 . Such rules would explain the absence of even distant biological consanguinity. It is intriguing that the only case we detected of reproductive partners being related was to the sixth degree (which would still be consistent with such rules) and involves the only non-exogamous female individual in RK. This further suggests the uniqueness of this single case.

All the aforementioned phenomena lead us to assume that the segment of Avar society we investigated had a structure comparable to that of Eurasian pastoralist steppe people 2 , 21 : the elementary social unit is the patrilineally organized family. Patrilineal genealogies are the constitutive elements of the society and, within them, descent lines are traced and ranked according to the birth order of the male founders. This concept results in a strictly hierarchical structure in the smaller, as well as in the larger, units of society, as evidenced in the archaeological material by various status indicators (Supplementary Fig. 10 ). We can consider as a contemporary parallel to Avar society the old Turkic kinship system that has been reconstructed on the basis of the Orkhon inscriptions, which date from the eighth century ( Supplementary Information ).

Community links through female exogamy

We observe that exogamous female individuals have a central role in connecting the different founding patrilines both within RK and between the sites. One unique case is represented by the female individual RKF140, who is part of two different levirate unions and had a total of four reproductive partners from two different pedigrees, linking the two large patrilineal units of the middle–late Avar period pedigrees (3 and 4–5). In fact, most of the large RK pedigrees are connected through female lines: one missing first-degree-related female individual (sister or mother) connects pedigrees 1 and 2, and two maternal second-degree relatives connect pedigrees 2 and 3.

The role of exogamous female individuals becomes even more evident when analysing the patterns of pairwise ancIBD haplotype-IBD (identical-by-descent) sharing within and between individuals from the four Avar sites (Fig. 3 ). In the network analyses of IBD sharing (Fig. 3a ), we can observe tight clusters, reflecting the close genetic relatedness, expectedly within the large pedigrees of RK and KFJ. In the adults-only network (Fig. 3b ), we estimate that many female individuals plot outside each site’s cluster and have significantly fewer IBD connections than do male individuals, reflected by the lower degree centrality distribution, corresponding to the number of connections each individual has ( P  < 0.05 using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test after 1,000 permutations; Fig. 3c ). Female individuals instead show significantly higher ratios of connections between sites ( P  < 0.05 using Welch’s t -test; Fig. 3c ). Furthermore, we found seven cases of female individuals (and no male ones) who are unrelated within site presenting IBD connections with another site (Fig. 3a,b ). Taken together, our evidence shows the existence of networks of communities centred tightly around a patriline and related to other communities by exogamous female individuals.

We included data from previously published Avar-period sites 10 , 23 in the IBD network, although there is a bias in sampling strategies between our entire-cemetery-sampling approach and previous sparse-sampling approaches in which only a few individuals per site were analysed, preventing us from observing the full extent of the connections (Extended Data Fig. 6a ).

Nevertheless, it is possible to observe geographic structuring, because we find more intra- than inter-regional connections among the DTI and TT sites. Furthermore, the two nearby sites of Hortobágy-Árkus and HNJ (which are about 50 km apart) are particularly highly connected and share the same Y haplogroup (Extended Data Fig. 6a ). We also observe that DTI male individuals with the N1a Y haplogroup tend to cluster together. This lineage is not only common between KUP and KFJ sites but is also shared among the early Avar-period DTI elite sites. Interestingly, the supposedly highest-status individual among these sites (the solitary burial of Kunbábony, which was interpreted as a possible khagan burial on the basis of rich status symbols found in the grave 8 ) has the highest number of between-sites IBD connections among all of the new and previously published individuals analysed (Extended Data Fig. 6b ).

Realignment of local power

Archaeologically, RK spans the whole Avar period. By incorporating the relative chronological framework provided by the generations of the pedigrees in the Bayesian modelling of 14 C dates, which reduces the uncertainties of the dates by up to 60% (ref. 24 ), we were able to refine the start and end events of three large pedigrees (with a maximum span of around 300 years) and place them in a relative order (Supplementary Fig. 43 , Supplementary Table 6 and Supplementary Information ). Integrating chronology and pedigrees allows us to observe a shift in the local community in the second half of the seventh century. First, ten smaller pedigrees are found in the early Avar period, but only three connected ones dominate in the middle and late phases (Fig. 2 ). Strikingly, the J1a male lineage is mostly found in the early pedigrees, whereas the J2b haplogroup appears and becomes the predominant male lineage in the later ones (pedigrees 3, 4 and 5 all carry haplogroup J2b). We can clearly pinpoint when this shift occurs: going from pedigree 2 to pedigree 3, through the connection between the two maternal half-brothers, with one from pedigree 2 carrying J1a and one from pedigree 3 carrying J2b. In fact, pedigree 2 is the only one spanning from the early to the late phase, continuing the only two remaining J1a descent lineages after this shift. The haplotype IBD network in RK shows an even clearer pattern, indicating the community shift, because all of the different J1a-carrying pedigrees and the J2b pedigrees 3, 4 and 5 share more IBDs within them than between them, forming two clearly distinct clusters separating J1a and J2b male individuals (Fig. 3a ).

Interestingly, one generation above (generation 4, dating to the middle Avar period), in pedigree 2 there are 12 related male individuals, of whom only three had children buried at the site. All the remaining male individuals except two juveniles (aged 18–22 and 15–17) were adults with no children found in the cemetery. This evidence further supports the replacement of the patriline in the community buried in RK. No associated skeletal traumas were observed in these individuals, so the shift in the male lineage cannot be clearly attributed to an act of violence. In fact, all of them are buried close to unrelated female individuals, who were potentially their exogamous partners, suggesting that the change of community occurred in the following generation of their children not buried at site. Given the strong patrilineality observed in all the sites we analysed, this change must have had strong social implications.

This shift mirrors the archaeological evidence (Fig. 2b and Extended Data Fig. 7 ). First, the western grave group of the RK site is made up of the large pedigree 2 and the several smaller pedigrees from the early Avar period. This part of the burial place was abandoned, and it is conceivable that many of the descendants of pedigree 2 left at that time. Except for a few scattered early burials, the central part of the cemetery was then established in the middle Avar period by the founders of pedigrees 4–5, along with the eastern part, which is mostly composed of pedigree 3 and the latest group of individuals from pedigree 2, who are the ones biologically related to pedigree 3. New burial customs, such as wooden grave constructions, distinguish the graves of newly settled families, whereas the old ones, such as burial with a horse harness or a pot next to the deceased person’s head, were phased out (Fig. 2b and Extended Data Fig. 7 ).

In RK, we also found significantly higher δ 13 C and lower δ 15 N values in the early Avar period than in the subsequent phases (Supplementary Fig. 25 ). Especially during the early phase, the carbon isotope data revealed a gradual change in dietary composition from substantial contributions of a C 4 component, which was probably millet, a primary staple crop in Eastern Asia 25 , to the predominance of C 3 plants. Although millet was also consumed in the subsequent phases, individuals with outstandingly high δ 13 C values are lacking in the middle and late Avar periods. The higher δ 15 N values in the later phases indicate an increase in the consumption of meat and dairy products. However, largely overlapping ranges indicate that this affected only some of the individuals ( Supplementary Information  and Supplementary Figs. 25 and 26 ). Starting in the early phase, but especially in the middle and late phases, we observe a number of burials of male individuals with outstandingly high δ 15 N values (Supplementary Figs. 25 and 26 ).

Taken together, these findings indicate that there was a replacement of the community buried, and thus likely to be living, in RK during the middle Avar period. Although the ancestry of the individuals and the descent system before and after the shift did not change (Fig. 4 ), the succeeding community differed in its burial customs and dietary habits. It is noteworthy that the HNJ and KFJ cemeteries were established in this later period, implying that larger transformations occurred in the Carpathian Basin in the second half of the seventh century 9 , 26 .

a , ‘Eurasian PCA’ (principal component analysis; see  Methods ) for each of the four sites. Modern individuals used to calculate the PCA are shown as grey dots. The variance explained by the first two principal components (PC1 and PC2) is shown in brackets. The approximate geographical locations of the most-relevant modern individuals are shown: northern (N.) and southern (S.) Europe, the Caucasus region and the eastern Eurasian Steppe (EES) to the Amur River Basin (ARB). Ancient individuals are highlighted by symbols coloured by period (early, middle and late) and black when dated generally to the Avar period: filled coloured symbols represent individuals who have at least one close genetic relative at the site (first or second degree), and empty symbols indicate unrelated individuals. b , Site-based density plot of Eurasian PCA Euclidean distance of the first three PCs of each individual to the PC coordinates of the Rouran genome, used as a proxy for a non-admixed EES ancestry.

Steppe descent communities in Europe

Population-genomic analyses (Fig. 4 , Extended Data Fig. 8 , Supplementary Information  and Supplementary Figs. 12 – 14 ) confirm that the four cemeteries belonged to communities with steppe descent. Most (88%) of the individuals carry portions of a northeast-Asian ancestry profile that is ultimately traceable to the eastern Eurasian Steppe 10 , 23 , 27 with varying degrees of admixture with western Eurasian sources. The northeast-Asian ancestry ranges from a median of about 100% in the DTI site of KUP to just 32% in the TT site of RK (Extended Data Fig. 8c and Supplementary Information ). Independent evidence from the admixture modelling of qpWave/qpAdm and admixture dating of DATES reveals a process of continuous admixture between western and eastern sources over centuries that largely predates the Avar period, and therefore the arrival of these populations in the Carpathian Basin, and presumably took place in the steppe (Extended Data Figs. 8 and 9 and Supplementary Information ). These analyses suggest that the post-arrival admixture with the local contemporary (post-sixth century) Carpathian Basin population was around 20% (Extended Data Figs. 8 and 9 and Supplementary Information ).

Despite these clear patterns confirming a recent steppe origin for these populations, the strontium-isotope compositions ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) were largely similar, with values consistent with local and regional variations 28 (Supplementary Fig. 23 ). The datasets from KUP and KFJ were isotopically indistinguishable from one another, whereas the burials at RK yielded substantially more radiogenic strontium, indicating a small variation of the local baseline values ( Supplementary Information ). This homogeneity indicates that although local mobility (within the Great Hungarian Plain, for example) is plausible, migration between distant areas (such as across the Eurasian Steppe) is unlikely because they would always need to be isotopically indistinguishable. This implies that, with one potential exception ( Supplementary Information  and Supplementary Fig. 23 ), the first generation of migrants was not buried at the cemetery, and that there was high regional continuity across the Avar period.

The density of sampling allowed us to uncover a pattern of geographic structuring of genomic ancestry that went unnoticed in previous studies. This is most evident between the DTI sites (KUP and KFJ) and the TT site of RK, which cover the whole Avar period. However, their admixture profiles remain largely distinguishable and non-overlapping (Fig. 4b ). In fact, although KFJ has high amounts of northeast-Asian ancestry in the late Avar period, RK individuals, even in the early phase, carry admixed ancestries, 95% of which were dated pre-arrival (Extended Data Fig. 9 ). This is in line with the observation of higher IBD sharing within DTI and TT than between the two regions (Extended Data Fig. 6a ). These differences mirror cultural differences found in the archaeological record. Several features of the TT sites, especially at RK ( Supplementary Information ), are strikingly similar to those of nomadic burials of the sixth to seventh century in the Pontic Steppe, known as the Sivashovka horizon 29 (Supplementary Fig. 3 ). Instead, some cultural elements of the elite of the DTI area, which includes the early graves of the KUP site, can be traced back to the eastern Eurasian Steppe 30 , 31 , 32 .

In conclusion, we confirm the arrival and establishment in the Carpathian Basin of entire communities of steppe descent. We reveal that genetically and culturally distinct steppe communities settled in the area and, despite some admixture with the local population, remained distinct during the course of the Avar period. This substantial post-arrival genetic continuity, together with striking isotopic homogeneity over time, poses a challenge to the long-lasting archaeological hypothesis 1 , 33 that there were successive large-scale migrations from the steppe, indicating instead a pattern of local, small-distance mobility once settled.

Conclusions

The reconstruction of extended multigenerational pedigrees from four Avar-period sites indicates a consistent reproductive strategy based on patrilineal descent, patrilocality, female exogamy, strict avoidance of consanguinity, and, in several cases, multiple reproductive partners and the practice of what seems to have been levirate unions. We found indications that social and biological relatedness overlapped to a large degree, because patterns of biological relatedness corresponded to the spatial distribution of the graves and grave goods. These social practices survived political changes, shifts in lifestyle reflected in material culture, dietary changes, and interactions with the local population from the late sixth century to the early ninth century ad . Descent units were strictly organized around patrilines but on a larger scale were connected by exogamous female individuals, and these connections may have been one of the main cohesive elements of Avar society. Mostly small pedigrees, of two to four generations, were found in the early phase, and larger ones, of four to seven generations, started in the mid-seventh century. This change reflects the increasing size of cemeteries and settlements since the middle Avar period and the development of the early medieval settlement system in the Carpathian Basin. The largest site we analysed (RK) experienced a community shift in the second half of the seventh century, which was probably caused by a realignment of local power, but it had no effect on the social organization or general ancestry patterns. Detecting this shift required the reconstruction of a biological-relatedness network of the entire cemetery and shows that genetic continuity at the level of ancestry might still conceal the replacement of whole communities.

Ancient-DNA laboratory analyses

For the archaeogenetic investigations, petrous bones and teeth were preferentially sampled (Supplementary Table 1 ). Samples were prepared in dedicated ancient-DNA laboratory facilities at the HUN-REN RCH Institute of Archaeogenomics in Budapest. Sample surfaces were decontaminated using UVC light and cleaned by mechanical removal. About 25–50 mg bone powder was obtained by drilling or powdering and transferred to MPI-EVA in Leipzig, Germany. DNA extraction and subsequent laboratory steps were done in the Ancient DNA Core Unit of the MPI-EVA. DNA was extracted from between 25 mg and 52 mg of powdered sample material using a silica-based method optimized for the recovery of short DNA fragments 35 . Briefly, lysates were prepared by adding 1 ml extraction buffer (0.45 M EDTA, pH 8.0, 0.25 mg ml –1 proteinase K, 0.05% Tween-20) to the sample material in 2.0-ml Eppendorf LoBind tubes and rotating the tubes at 37 °C for approximately 16 h 35 , 36 . Using an automated liquid-handling system (Bravo NGS Workstation B, Agilent Technologies), DNA was purified from 150 µl lysate using silica-coated magnetic beads and binding buffer D, as described previously 36 . Elution volume was 30 µl. Extraction blanks without sample material were carried alongside the samples during DNA extraction.

DNA libraries were prepared from 30 µl extract using an automated version of single-stranded DNA-library preparation 37 described in detail previously 38 . Escherichia coli uracil–DNA–glycosylase (UDG) and E. coli endonuclease VIII were added during library preparation to remove uracils from the interior of molecules. Libraries were prepared from both the sample DNA extracts and the extraction blanks, and further negative controls (library blanks) were added. Library yields and efficiency of library preparation were determined using two quantitative PCR assays 38 . Libraries were tagged with pairs of sample-specific indices by PCR extension using AccuPrime Pfx DNA polymerase as described previously 38 . Indexed libraries were amplified and purified using SPRI (solid-phase reversible immobilization) technology 39 as described previously 38 .

Sample and control libraries were enriched in solution for 1,237,207 informative SNPs (a method commonly used in the field and known as 1240k capture 40 ) targeting 394,577 SNPs first reported in ref. 41 (390k panel) and 842,630 SNPs first reported in ref. 42 (840k panel). Two consecutive rounds of 1240k capture were performed using the Bravo NGS workstation B. Up to 20 libraries were pooled together and sequenced single-read or pair-read on a HiSeq4000 sequencing platform (Illumina Technology). In total, 440 1240k-enriched libraries were sequenced and an average coverage of 2.6× (median 2.25×) for the 1,237,207 sites in the genome, corresponding to a median of 708,514 1240k SNPs covered at least once (Supplementary Table 1 ).

Ancient-DNA data process and quality controls

The raw sequenced read data (fastq files) were processed through a nf-core/eager v.2.3.2 pipeline 43 ( https://nf-co.re/eager ). To remove adaptors and short reads of less than 30 base pairs, AdapterRemoval v.2.3.1 was used 44 . The reads were then mapped to the Human Reference Genome Hs37d5 using the bwa v0.7.17 aln/samse alignment algorithm 45 with the parameters -n and -l set to 0.01 and 1,024, respectively. The reads with phred mapping quality of less than 30 were then discarded using -q (q30-reads) in Samtools v1.9 (ref. 46 ). We then used the Picard tools MarkDuplicates function ( https://github.com/broadinstitute/picard ) to remove PCR duplicates. To estimate the amount of cytosine-to-thymine taphonomic deamination at the ends of the mapped fragments, we used mapDamage v.2.0 (ref. 47 ) run on a subset of 100,000 q30 reads. Exogenous human autosomal DNA contamination was estimated in male individuals by assessing X-chromosome heterozygosity levels using ANGSD v.0.910 (ref. 48 ) and mtDNA contamination in male and female individuals was estimated using Schmutzi 49 . Schmutzi was also used to reconstruct the consensus mitochondrial genome sequence of each individual used as input for HaploGrep2 (ref. 50 ) to assign mitochondrial haplogroups. For the purpose of graphical representation in Extended Data Fig. 4 , all the mitochondrial haplogroups were pruned to the first three characters. If two individuals had, respectively, a two- and three-characters resolution, both of their haplogroups were trimmed to the first two characters. Individuals with only a one-character resolution were excluded from the plot.

Y-chromosome haplogroups were inferred using two different methodologies and the results compared. The Y-chromosome variants were called from in the bam files from samples whose genetic sex was estimated to be male or unassigned using the Samtools v1.9 46 mpileup and PileupCaller ( https://github.com/stschiff/sequenceTools ) using the mode --majorityCall; Y-chromosome haplogroup assignment was performed using the software yHaplo ( https://github.com/23andMe/yhaplo ), with ISOGG panel v.11.349 as a reference ( https://isogg.org/tree/ ; date of access: 2 February 2023). Y-chromosome haplogroups were also defined using the Y-Lineage-Tracker subcommand ‘classify’ 51 , using as a reference panel the ISOGG Y-haplogroup tree v.15.73 ( https://isogg.org/tree/ ); in this case the input files were genotypes from each individual, estimated using the allelePresence method from the ATLAS ( https://bitbucket.org/wegmannlab/atlas/ ) 52 call tool, accounting for post-mortem damage patterns and base-score recalibration patterns, estimated respectively with the ATLAS tools PMD and recal.

The results from the two methodologies were then compared, taking into account the differences between the two reference panels. In cases where the two methodologies yielded deeply diverging results (that is, to the first two ISOGG alphanumeric classification symbols) or were discordant with the estimated reciprocal genetic relatedness between individuals (described in the Biological relatedness section), the haplogroup assessment was further investigated using the software pathPhynder 53 with default options, using as reference the BigTree Y-chromosome dataset and the reference phylogenetic tree for sample placement provided by GitHub with the software and as input files the bam files filtered for phred mapping quality more than 30. In any other case, the conservative results from Y-LineageTracker (the column Key haplogroup) were considered reliable, given the more-stringent estimation of the genotypes and the updated ISOGG Y-chromosome phylogenetic tree version.

The results of the whole procedure can be found in Supplementary Table 1 . PileupCaller ( https://github.com/stschiff/sequenceTools ) was used to carry out genotype calling from the q30 reads with the --randomHaploid flag that calls haploid genotypes by randomly choosing one high-quality base (phred base quality score ≥30) on the 1240k panel (pseudodiploid calls). We also used the --singleStrandMode, which removes only real cytosine-to-thymine deamination observed with single-stranded DNA libraries by ignoring cytosine–thymine polymorphisms at reads aligning to the forward strand and guanine–adenine polymorphisms at reads aligning to the reverse strand.

To produce the Y-chromosome haplogroup plots in Extended Data Fig. 4 , all the haplogroup nomenclature was pruned to the first three characters; haplogroups with less than three characters of ISOGG notation were excluded from the plots. Complete Y-chromosome haplogroups can be found in Supplementary Table 1 .

We found low mitochondrial contamination estimates (Supplementary Table 1 ). Most were less than 5% and only five samples had values between 5% and 10%. Of these we excluded one female individual (RKF048) with 7% contamination and one individual (KFJ019) with 5% contamination and ambiguous sex determination (an indirect sign of possible contamination); the remaining male individuals had low nuclear contamination and were therefore kept for nuclear genomic analyses. We also found low nuclear contamination estimates among the male individuals. We excluded four further individuals with values of more than 7%; RKF094 (15% contamination) was still counted among the related as showing high likelihood of close genetic relatedness with other individuals (Supplementary Table 4 ). We also excluded individuals with particularly low coverage (more than 20,000 SNPs) because they were not practically usable for further analyses (additional filtering for higher coverage thresholds is detailed for specific analyses in the following sections); these include two individuals also excluded for contamination and another 15 individuals still included as showing high likelihoods of close relatedness (RKF225, HNJ005, HNJ009 and RKF128). We kept 419 individuals for further analyses, 413 excluding one pair among the identical pairs found, and 424 including the previously published individuals from the KUP and KFJ sites 10 (Supplementary Table 1 ). We then merged them with a reference genome-wide panel of 2,280 modern individuals genotyped with microarray technology using the commercial HumanOrigins chip 54 , 55 , 56 and previously published ancient-individuals’ genotypes sequenced with the same 1240k capture method or a 1240k SNPs subset from data obtained using whole-genome shotgun sequencing 10 , 27 , 54 , 55 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 downloaded from Poseidon ( https://poseidon-framework.github.io ). We produced two datasets, one including the modern data and the SNPs overlap between the 1240k sites and the HumanOrigins SNP chip (1240KHO dataset, around 600,000 SNPs), and one with ancient data and the whole 1240k panel (the 1240k dataset).

Genomic ancestry modelling with PCA, qpWave/qpAdm, DATES

We used principal component analysis (PCA) with smartpca v.16000 in the EIGENSOFT v.6.0.1 package 75 on the 1240KHO dataset using the lsqproject and the autoshrink parameters to project the genotypes of the ancient individuals (containing variable amounts of missing data) on top of the principal components calculated on the set of modern worldwide populations. For one PCA (Fig. 4a ) we used a subset of Eurasian populations (the Eurasian PCA) as originally in reference 54 adapted as in reference 27 , and for another PCA (Extended Data Fig. 8b ) we used a standard subset of only west Eurasian populations (the west Eurasian PCA), as originally reported 76 and then adapted 10 .

We used the software qpWave/qpAdm (v.1520) of the ADMIXTOOLS package 56 to run the f 4 -statistics-based ancestry analyses on the 1240k dataset 41 , 77 . Standard errors for the computed f -statistics were estimated using a block jack-knife with a 5-cM block. We used the default allsnps: NO parameter, thereby calculating all the underlying f 4 -statistics using the SNP overlap between all the groups for each test. We used a set of outgroups (or right populations) that are similar to those of a previous study 10 that included representatives of ancient Eurasian lineages (European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, European/Anatolia Neolithic, Levant Neolithic, Iranian Neolithic for western Eurasia, and ancient North Eurasian lineage (ANE 76 ), ANA, ancient Siberian and southern East Asia for eastern Eurasia, and key non-Eurasian ones (African, South Asian, Native American) when available, otherwise hte present-day proxies Mbuti.DG, Levant_N, Onge.DG, Iran_N, Iron_Gates_HG, EHG, Mixe.DG, Anatolia_N, DevilsCave_N.SG, Tarim_EMBA1, Kolyma_M.SG and YR_LN. The only difference with respect to ref. 10 is that we used Tarim_EMBA1 (ref. 72 ) instead of the three Russia_Bolshoy individuals 65 , which is a higher-coverage dataset of 12 individuals and a better representative of the ANE lineage 73 than any other high-ANE ancestry group available in the literature.

To select the sources (or left populations) to model the admixed ancestry of our newly sequenced individuals (the targets), we followed the following rationale. Among the data available from previous studies, we selected only ancient populations (of more than two individuals) that are either approximately contemporaneous or temporally preceding but are as close as possible to the time period of our target individuals, as suggested previously 78 . In our selection, we also considered the findings from a previous genomic study of the Avar period 10 , as well as populations that are geographically, historically and archaeologically relevant. This led to a selection of 13 different source groups falling in 3 categories. (1) Sources representative of the east Eurasian Steppe ancestry that include ancient populations and cultures available from preceding time periods in the east Eurasian Steppe and surrounding areas in east Asia. (2) ‘Pre-Avar’ populations that are found in the Carpathian Basin in the first centuries ad , before the Avar period. (3) Relevant temporally preceding (first millennia bc and ad ) populations available from across the Pontic- and central Asian Steppe (the ‘steppe’ sources).

Two- and three-way combinations of these sources led to a total of 190 different combinations being tested, all with qpWave P -values of much less than 0.05, which means that the sources are sufficiently differentiated with respect to the set of outgroups. They are therefore suitable sources to be tested 76 (Supplementary Table 5 ), applying the following rationale, which is the same as that used in a previous study 10 based on suggestions discussed previously 78 . We first tested two-way admixing sources using all combinations of eastern Eurasian Steppe groups plus the pre-Avar and steppe sources. If we could reject one but not the other, between the pre-Avar and steppe source models (if one had P  < 0.05 we can reject; if the other had P   >  0.05 we cannot reject), we considered the one we cannot reject ( P   >  0.05) as valid. If the two-way models did not significantly reject one or the other between the pre-Avar and steppe sources (both with P   >  0.05) or produced no fitting results at all (both with P    < 0.05), we proceeded by testing three-way competitive models, including the eastern Eurasian populations and contrasting directly the pre-Avar plus steppe sources as well as pre-Avar plus pre-Avar, accounting for the variability in ancestry and time period between the pre-Avar populations.

If the three-way models resulted in one of the two contrasting sources between pre-Avar plus steppe resetting the other (bringing its estimated admixture proportion to 0%), we considered these models. If the contrasting sources had intermediate admixture proportions, we considered as successful only those tests that could reject one of the two scenarios between either pre-Avar plus steppe or pre-Avar plus pre-Avar. The individuals who still had unresolved or non-fitting models between a pre-Avar or a steppe source were considered unsolved or failed and were not used for further meta-analyses or interpretations.

For the sake of simplicity and consistency, we chose one eastern Eurasian source to include in our plots and summary statistics: the genetically easternmost group of individuals from the early Avar period in the DTI region (DTI_EA_East; Fig. 4 and previously published 10 ), to which we added data from unrelated individuals at the early-period site of KUP that presented the same genomic profile (Supplementary Fig. 12 ). We always used this eastern proxy, except in the few instances in which it did not produce fitting models, in favour of another one, suggesting an existing heterogeneity in the eastern component although much reduced with respect to the variability in the western sources (Supplementary Table 5 ). Nevertheless, it is important to note that although DTI_EA_East is the source that overall produced more fitting models, several other eastern sources (including lateXiongnu, AR_Xianbei_P_2c) resulted in many equally fitting models as well (Supplementary Table 5 ).

We used DATES v.753 ( https://github.com/priyamoorjani/DATES ) to date the average time of the east–west Eurasian ancestry admixture estimated for most of the Avar period individuals from the four sites analysed. This method is based on the same principle as many admixture dating methods 70 , 79 ; it assumes an admixture event between two admixing source populations, an east Asian and a west Eurasian one; in our case we used the unadmixed and high-SNP-covered LBA/IA group of the Ulaanzuukh_SlabGrave in Mongolia 63 or the same DTI_EA_East group used in the main qpAdm models as an ANA proxy and the pre-Avar Carpathian Basin ancient sources, Sarmatian 10 and Longobard period 58 individuals, as a west Eurasian ancestry proxy. DATES calculates the decay of ancestry covariance coefficients between every pair of available overlapping SNPs between the test individuals and the source populations over increasing-genetic-distance windows 70 . Population-genetic theory suggests that if admixture happens, an exponential function can be fitted to the decay of weighted ancestry covariance, and the number of generations since admixture can be derived from the parameters of such functions 79 . The higher age limit of admixture events that would still produce detectable decays is theoretically considered to be around 4,000 years 80 . In practice, recent admixture events (about one to three generations ago) are not properly detected because chromosomal recombination had insufficient generation time to start producing the expected decay pattern 81 , 82 . To estimate the goodness of a fit, DATES calculates standard errors and Z -scores using a jack-knife approach, dropping a chromosome at a time. We set a maximum distance parameter of 0.5 cM, a bin size of 0.001 and a starting genetic distance of 0.45 cM. The integrated least-square function was used to estimate the number of generations since admixture parameter. If the raw data show no decay, the exponential function either cannot be fitted or is fitted with low Z -scores, much less than 2, and unreasonable dating estimates with negative values, or large numbers over the theoretical maximum of 4,000 years back in time. All samples showing such values were also inferred as non-admixed by PCA and qpAdm and were excluded from our inferences. For Extended Data Fig. 9 , we also included dates with Z -scores of less than 2 (shown with a transparency factor) because in part they reflect the recent (for example, first or second generation) admixture events that we can observe directly in the pedigrees. These DATES estimates are mostly not significant because there is no decay pattern yet to fit an exponential function, but some still provide qualitatively correct recent admixture dates (Supplementary Table 1 ). We used a standard of 29 years per generation 70 to convert the generation times in years since admixture, and used the Avar-period chronological phase of the individuals as the date at death.

Biological relatedness

We used KIN 16 as the primary method to assess biological relatedness between each pair of individuals from the four sites we investigated, although we validated the relatedness estimates with the independent methods of haplotype-IBD (detailed below) and BREAD ( https://github.com/jonotuke/BREADR ) ( Supplementary Information ). Given that single-stranded UDG-half treated libraries still preserve a roughly 10–30% proportion of C-to-T deamination at the last two base pairs of the mapped fragments, for this analyses we masked two base pairs at both ends of the q30 reads using the trimBam module of bamUtil v.1.0.13 (ref. 83 ) and used these masked bam files as input data. KIN can confidently identify first- and second-degree relations while differentiating between parent–child and sibling relations 16 . Although the method does not explicitly differentiate relationships within the second degree, it outputs information about IBD sharing that can help to differentiate between avuncular and grandparent–grandchild relationships. We simulated avuncular, half-sibling and grandparent–grandchild pairs ( Supplementary Information ) to show that the length of IBD segments and the number of IBD segments can be used to differentiate between avuncular and grandparent–grandchild relationships, while half siblings overlap with both cases. Furthermore, KIN provides indications about third-degree relationships (with around 70% accuracy at 4× sequence coverage). Although these analyses are not sufficient to confidently identify within second-degree relationships, and may lack the power to identify third-degree relatives, they can be crucial when combined with other information, such as pedigree information from different pairs as well as from information about the skeletal age at death, the sex and the uniparental haplogroups (Y chromosome and mtDNA). Therefore, all this information was considered when building and cross-checking the pedigrees of biological relatedness ( Supplementary Information ). For clarity, we numbered the pedigrees that we found and we define one pedigree as a group of individuals who can be directly connected with close genetic relatedness and for whom a line of descent can be traced. In the case of the largest pedigree we reconstructed (146 individuals from RK), we divided it into five pedigrees descending from five different groups of 11 ‘founder male individuals’ (including multiple brothers as co-founders).

Simulations on second-degree relationships

We followed the methods section for KIN 16 and simulated eight diploid individuals using msprime 84 with default parameters for the mutation rate (1 × 10 –8 per base per generation), the recombination rate r (1 × 10 –8 per base per generation) and an effective population size of 3,000. For each individual, we simulated 22 chromosomes with the same lengths as the GRCh38.p14 genome. To form a pedigree, we first simulated a recombined set of chromosomes for each parent and combined them to create the progeny. We obtained recombination points for each chromosome from the software Ped-sim 85 . We matched the genotype density and the coverage of reads to that of our samples. We simulated 60 such pedigrees (see figure S9 in ref. 16 and Supplementary Figs. 17 and 18 ).

Consanguinity test (ROHs)

Consanguinity can be tested genetically by a straightforward approach: counting the length and number of long stretches of homozygous portions along the genome of an individual. This analysis is usually defined as ROHs. To estimate ROH, we applied a method called hapROH 86 that was designed to infer them on pseudo-haploid, lower-coverage and higher-missing-data ancient DNA samples; the method has also been shown empirically to be highly consistent with independent ROH estimates calculated on the same ancient imputed diploid genomes 10 . Specific patterns of long ROH (more than 4 cM) along the genome of an individual are typical of consanguineous unions between some of its recent ancestors (up to second-degree cousins 86 ). In Extended Data Fig. 5 we plotted ROH using the python package implemented in hapROH ( https://pypi.org/project/hapROH/ ).

Genotype likelihood calls and imputation/phasing

Haplotype-based analyses (such as IBD described below) require information of the phase for each pair of paternal and maternal chromosomes of an individual, and this in turn requires there to be virtually no missing data along the genome. Obtaining such data from ancient genomes has been shown by recent studies 87 , 88 to be reliable in other similar contexts for coverage of more than 0.5–0.7×, and it has also been applied to 1240k capture data 10 , 89 through simultaneous statistical imputation and phasing. We used the ancient-DNA-specific genotype caller MLE function of ATLAS ( https://bitbucket.org/wegmannlab/atlas/ ) 52 to call genotype likelihoods. ATLAS can also calculate the base-quality recalibration (the recal function) that we performed in batches among libraries sequenced in the same sequencing run, accounting for specific sequencing errors. ATLAS recalibration also corrects the base qualities accounting for the empirical ancient DNA-damage pattern observed from the data and reduces the effect of reference bias introduced by genome mapping by relying on a list of 10 million highly conserved genomic positions across 88 mammal species downloaded from ensembl ( https://grch37.ensembl.org/ ). We called genotype likelihoods on the whole 1,000-genomes SNPs panel of around 20 million SNPs and used these calls as input data for imputation with GLIMPSE 90 , for which we used the phased 1,000 genomes phase-3 release data as reference haplotypes 91 . We ran GLIMPSE with the default parameters using sex-averaged genetic maps from HapMap, as suggested previously 88 . The function GLIMPSE_phase was used to perform simultaneous imputation and phasing on genomic chunks of 2,000,000 base pairs with a buffer of 200,000 base pairs. We then used the integrated GLIMPSE_ligate and GLIMPSE_sample functions and bcftools v1.3 (refs. 88 , 92 ) to obtain the final phase/imputed vcf files with the genotypes posterior probabilities at every 1240k position.

Haplotype IBD sharing analysis

We performed haplotype IBD analysis with ancIBD, a recently developed method that accounts for the high phasing errors of ancient DNA 93 . This analysis searches for long haploid blocks along the genomes of two individuals that are identical by descent (IBD), meaning they have been inherited by a common ancestor at some time in the past. Therefore, it can detect close genetic relatives (first to third degrees of relation) as KIN does, but it can also detect more-distant relations, up to sixth degree, within ranges of biological stochasticity 85 . However, it requires a much higher threshold of coverage, reducing the number of individuals analysed relative to KIN. We used imputed or phased data, including only those individuals with more than 450,000 SNPs obtained with our pseudo-haploid calls and SNPs with genotype posterior probabilities greater than 0.99 after imputation. We used the HapBLOCK function of ancIBD to perform the pairwise estimation with default parameters and only shared blocks of more than 8 cM containing more than 220 SNPs per centimorgan were considered. To further filter for possible false-positive hits, we considered only shared IBD segments longer than 12 cM, and if a pair of individuals had segments of less than 16 cM, we included them only if they had more than one such segment (Supplementary Table 4 ). We used Cytoscape v.3.9.1 (ref. 94 ) to plot the networks of pairwise IBD relations.

Network analysis

For the IBD network analysis, only the Avar-period individuals were included. Because subadult individuals might be a confounding factor when assessing the sex-specific patterns of mobility and connectedness, we made an additional network that included only adults. The threshold of adulthood was set at 18 years of age, based on the lower limit of the estimated age of the youngest parent. The entire network consisted of 257 nodes, of which 195 represented adults (105 male and 90 female individuals) and 62 subadults (35 male and 27 female individuals) from four archaeological sites. The links of the network are represented by the IBD connections, which number 2,658 if the entire network is considered and 1,211 if only the adults are selected (Supplementary Table 4 ). In our analysis, we considered both unweighted and weighted networks. The unweighted network represents a configuration in which the found IBD relations define the presence or absence of links irrespective of their values. However, in the weighted network, the links are weighted by the maximum IBD values of the analysis, allowing the magnitude of relatedness to be evaluated. Both networks are undirected because sharing of IBD segments between two individuals has no directionality.

Degree centrality ( k ) is defined as the number of links held by the node. The average degree ⟨ k ⟩ of the Avar-period adults’ network is 18.07. Considering the assigned weights on the links, which in our case is the sum of the weights (max_IBD) of the links attached to each node, the mean strength ⟨ w ⟩ is 1,620.54. When sex is considered as a node attribute, the degree and the strength distributions are significantly different between male and female individuals (Fig. 3c and Supplementary Figs. 47 and 48 ). For male individuals, ⟨ k ⟩ is 27.39 and ⟨ w ⟩ is 2,392.37, whereas for female individuals, ⟨ k ⟩ is 7.21 and ⟨ w ⟩ is 720.08. The two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test revealed significant differences between the male and female individuals’ degree and strength distribution ( P  < 0.05).

The degree centrality of a node can be partitioned into within-module ( k W ) and between-module ( k B ) links by considering the archaeological site of the burial as a module. The k B / k ratio represents the ratio of between-module connections over the total connections, which can range between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating that related individuals are buried solely at the same site and 1 indicating that related individuals are buried only at a different site. To evaluate this ratio, the value of degree centrality must also be considered because individuals with small degree centrality may have a higher k B / k ratio. The other results of the analysis are explained in Supplementary Figs. 44 – 48 . The analysis was performed using R and the node measurements were calculated using customized R scripts with the igraph package 95 .

Isotope analysis and 14 C dating

14 C dating and isotope analysis (δ 13 C, δ 15 N) was performed in the same bone material in the isotope and radiocarbon laboratories at the Curt Engelhorn Centre Archaeometry in Mannheim, Germany. Bone samples were cleaned, chemically treated and collagen extracted using a modified Longin method 96 . For stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen, triplicates of the resulting collagen were combusted in an elemental analyser (PYROcube, Elementar) and isotopic ratios were measured by isotope ratio mass spectrometry (precisION, Elementar). The same collagen extract was used for 14 C dating. After ultrafiltration to remove short-chained macromolecules, the collagen was reduced to graphite using either a commercially available system (AGE3, IonPlus) or a custom-made system. A MICADAS-type accelerator mass spectrometer (IonPlus) was used to determine the conventional 14 C ages 97 . 14 C dates were modelled in the software Oxcal v.4.4.4 (ref. 98 ) and terrestrial samples were calibrated using IntCal20 (ref. 99 ). Bayesian modelling of 14 C dates include prior information of relative chronological information provided by pedigrees following methods outlined previously 24 . Model results and detailed explanations are given in Supplementary Tables 2 and 3 and Supplementary Information .

For all strontium measurements, the tooth enamel was extracted in a laboratory at the Institute of Archaeogenomics in Budapest. The surface of the teeth was cleaned by a Dremel tool with an abrasion tip, then, after a ten-minute ultrasonic bath, the enamel was carefully powdered with a diamond-coated dental drill bit attached to the Dremel tool, until 25–50 mg was obtained. Strontium separation chemistry for all samples followed a previous method 100 . Analyses were performed on a Nu Instruments NuPlasma HR at the MC-ICP-MS facility in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town in Rondebosch, South Africa, and followed the procedure and referencing values (SRM987 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of 0.710255) described previously 101 . Past 4.11 software 102 was used for the statistical analysis of the isotope data.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Acknowledgements

We thank G. Csíky for work on the archaeological dataset; K. Sebők for help with the excavation documentation of the Rákóczifalva cemetery; A. Ben Rohrlach for advice on network statistical analyses; H. Ringbauer for sharing data, feedback and discussion on IBD analyses; and I. Rainer, P. Hofman and A. Plonka for graphical support. Data were produced by the Ancient DNA Core Unit of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which is funded by the Max Planck Society. M. Spross, H. Beigzad, L. Schwarz, S. Lindauer, E. Dimitrakopoulos, E. Podolskaja, M. Hänisch and J. Wintel contributed to stable isotope analyses and radiocarbon dating at CEZA. S. Gábriel, D. Pokker, V. Bódis and K. Kerestély contributed to the DNA sample preparation in the HUN-REN RCH Institute of Archaeogenomics in Budapest. We thank the Hungarian Natural History Museum and the Department of Biological Anthropology of the University of Szeged for access to samples. This project received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant 856453 ERC-2019-SyG), the Czech Grant Agency (GACR 21-17092X), the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004593) and the Max Planck Society. T.S. was supported by the ÚNKP-22-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund. The analysis of the pre-Avar radiocarbon data was supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Fund project 128035 led by Z.R.

Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society.

Author information

These authors contributed equally: Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, Zsófia Rácz

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone, Luca Traverso, Ke Wang, Rita Radzeviciute, Johannes Krause & Zuzana Hofmanová

Institute of Archaeological Sciences, ELTE - Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Zsófia Rácz, Levente Samu, Norbert Faragó, István Koncz, Viktor Mácsai, Olga Spekker & Tivadar Vida

Department of Biological Anthropology, ELTE - Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Tamás Szeniczey & Tamás Hajdu

Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry gGmbH, Mannheim, Germany

Corina Knipper & Ronny Friedrich

Department of Archaeology and Museology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia

Denisa Zlámalová & Zuzana Hofmanová

Department of History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Salvatore Liccardo, Sandra Wabnitz & Walter Pohl

Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

Department of Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Divyaratan Popli

MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, Hungary

Bence Gulyás

Department of Art History, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey

Csilla Balogh

Institute of History, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary

Gabriella M. Lezsák

ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland, Australia

Magdalena M. E. Bunbury

Department of Biological Anthropology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

Olga Spekker

Department of Geological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

Petrus le Roux

Institute of Archaeogenomics, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary

Anna Szécsényi-Nagy & Balázs Gusztáv Mende

BirthRites Lise Meitner Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Heidi Colleran

Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

Patrick Geary

Institute of Archaeology, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary

Tivadar Vida

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Contributions

Conceived and led by: Z.H., J.K., T.V., W.P., P.G., G.A.G.-R., and Z.R. Formal analyses: G.A.G.-R., Z.R., L.S., T.S., N.F., C.K., R.F., L.T., D.Z., D.P., K.W. Sample preparation and laboratory work: R.R., B.G., I.K., C.B., G.M.L., V.M., O.S., M.M.E.B., P.R., A.S.-N., B.G.M., T.H. Visualization: G.A.G.-R., L.S., Z.R., T.S., N.F., C.K., R.F., L.T., D.Z., D.P. Writing, original draft: G.A.G.-R., Z.R., Z.H., W.P., L.S., S.L., S.W., T.S., N.F., C.K., R.F., L.T. Writing, reviewing and editing: J.K., T.V., P.G., H.C. with contributions from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone , Tivadar Vida , Johannes Krause or Zuzana Hofmanová .

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Competing interests.

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Nature thanks Daniel Ziemann and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 pedigree and cemetery map of the individuals analyzed in the site of kunszállás (kfj)..

a ) pedigree highlighting the father-son levirate union discovered. b ) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Kunszállás.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Pedigrees and cemetery map of the individuals analyzed in the site of Kunpeszér (KUP).

a ) the unconnected early (left) and late (right) Avar period pedigrees highlighting the possible levirate union reconstructed for pedigree 1. b ) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Kunpeszér.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Pedigrees and cemetery map of the individuals analyzed in the site of Hajdúnánás (HNJ).

a ) the unconnected admixed ancestry pedigree 1 and European ancestry pedigree 2. b ) cemetery map showing the burial location of the related and unrelated individuals in Hajdúnánás.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Pie-charts showing the frequency of the Y-chromosome and mtDNA haplogroups in the four Avar-period sites.

The four sites are dominated by one predominant Y-chromosome lineage (or two in case of RK) and the remaining ones are mostly restricted to outlier, unrelated individuals or smaller pedigrees not genetically related to the main ones whose patterns are analyzed in this article. While the mtDN-haplogroup diversity is much higher and more uniformly distributed.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Runs of homozygosity (ROH), test for consanguinity.

all the Avar period individuals from the 4 sites are shown in 4 panels. The only individual that shows a pattern of long ROH consistent with its parents being relatively close relatives (possible 1 st cousins) is a European ancestry individual found in the RK site, unrelated and unconnected through IBDs to the main extended pedigrees described in the article.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Network analysis of the ancIBD haplotype-IBD sharing between the Avar-period individuals analyzed in the study and previously published.

a ) Visualization of the network of IBD connections (edges) between the ancient individuals (nodes) colored coded as in Fig. 3 . The published individuals were retrieved from a number of different sites and are color coded to the regions where the site is located, DTI or TT. b ) box plot showing the number of IBD connections for all the individuals from the network in a) having at least one IBD link with individuals from a site other than its own (237 individuals meeting this requirement). The plot shows all individual data points as well as the median (black line), upper and lower quartiles (the contour of the box) and the whiskers are the minimum and maximum values as calculated by the standard boxplot() function in R. c ) map showing the sites with individuals connected to Kunbábony though IBDs. The thickness of the lines corresponds to the number of individuals connected. The base geographic map is from https://www.naturalearthdata.com and plotted with R 34 .

Extended Data Fig. 7 Summary of main burial customs and cemetery map of Rákóczifalva 8 and 8 A.

On the top, the main characteristics of burial customs in the early to middle and the middle to late Avar period in the Rákóczifalva (RK) cemetery. In the early phase, several people were buried with horse tools, pots, and animal skin (partial animal), while in the late phase, wooden grave structures were the dominant feature of burial customs. The changes in burial customs correspond to the community shift and the spatial organization of the cemetery. On the bottom, the cemetery map shows the distribution of early, middle and late Avar-period graves. The left part of the cemetery is where early to middle Avar period graves are found, while the middle and right part contain predominantly middle to late Avar-period graves.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Evaluation of the sources of admixture with Western or Central Eurasian ancestries.

a ) Map showing the location of the published data used as reference for our ancestry modeling. b ) “Eurasian PCA” (left) and “West Eurasian PCA” (right), showing the ancient genomes from the sites in a) and unpublished pre-Avar individuals from the RK site. c ) Summary of the best working qpAdm models for the newly sequenced individuals from the 4 sites. Gray color represents unspecified West Eurasian sources and the pie charts at the bottom show the sites’ average for the specific West Eurasian sources tested (full data in Supplementary Table 5 ). Gray slices in the pie charts represent models with unresolved West Eurasian sources. The base geographic map is from https://www.naturalearthdata.com .

Extended Data Fig. 9 Results of DATES admixture dates for all the newly sequenced individuals.

a ) Individuals are colored according to their chronological category and b ) colored according to their site. On the x axis are reported the Eurasian PCA Euclidean distances of each individual to the Rouran genome, used as a proxy for a non-admixed East Eurasian Steppe ancestry 10 . A transparency factor is added to the admixture dates with Z-score <2. Standard errors (SE) and Z-scores are obtained using a standard jackknife approach of 23 independent runs, dropping a chromosome at the time (Methods).

Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

This file contains Supplementary text and data, including Supplementary Figs. 1–50, Supplementary Tables 7–11 and Supplementary references.

Reporting Summary

Peer review file, supplementary table 1.

Metadata for all the individuals processed for genomic sequencing and individual-based summary of best qpAdm ancestry deconvolution models and individual-based DATES admixture dating.

Supplementary Table 2

Archaeological and anthropological data of the Avar-period cemeteries of Rakoczifalva-Bagi-foldek sites 8 and 8A (RK), Kunszallas-Fulopjakab (KFJ), Kunpeszer-Felsőpeszeri ut (KUP) and Hajdunanas-Furj-halom-jaras site 41A (HNJ).

Supplementary Table 3

New stable isotope data.

Supplementary Table 4

Pairwise genetic relatedness estimates obtained with the various methods described in the text and their summary statistics: KIN analyses on TT and DTI sites; haplotype IBD analyses run with ancIBD; concordance between BREADR and KIN.

Supplementary Table 5

All the RK-site individual-based qpWave/qpAdm models tested in the study.

Supplementary Table 6

New 14 C dates produced for the study.

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Gnecchi-Ruscone, G.A., Rácz, Z., Samu, L. et al. Network of large pedigrees reveals social practices of Avar communities. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4

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Received : 13 April 2023

Accepted : 13 March 2024

Published : 24 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4

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Reporting by Marc Jones in London; Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Edited by Tomasz Janowski and Jonathan Oatis

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