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Giant steps: why walking in nature is good for mind, body and soul

Rather than just moving from A to B, think about your surroundings and the wider ramifications of your walk

S ix weeks after my daughter was born, I found myself on the packed dirt path that runs along the River Cam in Grantchester Meadows . It was seven in the morning and cold. Frost lined every blade of grass, and my breath made clouds in front of me. But it was a bright, sunny day. After weeks of settling into motherhood indoors – unceasing night feeds, tears, and exhaustion – a walk in the sun seemed like the best possible thing to do.

It’s not that I hadn’t been outside in all that time. Most days I’d only gone as far as the end of my neighbourhood, on short strolls to give the baby some fresh air. Before parental leave, I’d been busy in my job as a nature and travel writer, often taking long walks in the name of work – and, if I was honest, I really missed it. I hadn’t felt that feeling of really walking for a while: warmth in my legs, a building momentum, the repetition of each step beneath my feet. And I knew that I needed to feel, and do, something for me.

Walking was a way of connecting with places, a means of transportation. I didn’t often think of it as exercise. And I rarely considered, though I often felt its impact, what it did for my mental health.

Studies of walking’s benefits date back to the 1950s, with the last decade of research preoccupied with the rise of “10,000 steps a day” challenges and the use of pedometers and activity trackers. What they tell us is that while all these tools urge us towards lofty step counts, there isn’t exactly a magic number to achieve. The figure 10,000 was dreamed up as part of a 1960s pedometer marketing campaign in Japan, and a recent study indicates that half that amount can be beneficial, with a plateau in benefits after about 7,500 steps. The NHS advises that just 10 minutes of brisk walking daily makes a difference. For an activity many of us do daily without thinking, this seems remarkable, but it’s estimated that when walking over half our body’s muscle mass is engaged. And the benefits of even a moderate pace – around three miles an hour – range from improved cardiovascular health, like lower blood pressure, to better glucose metabolism, musculoskeletal health, and mental wellbeing.

However, researchers distinguish between the passive steps we take going about our lives doing things like food shopping and errands (termed “secondary purpose walking”) and the act of actually going for a walk, which was the thing I really missed. On a walk, when we’ve laced our boots a bit more intentionally, the benefits reach beyond a bit of exercise, and where we choose to walk can make a big difference.

Jessica Lee

There is a growing swathe of research to back up the idea that being in nature improves not simply mental but physical health. Most studies highlight a 1984 study by Roger Ulrich, a professor of healthcare architecture who examined whether hospital patients with a view of nature recovered faster, and better, than those who didn’t. Ulrich’s research transformed how we think about healthcare settings and urban environments: the hospital where I gave birth, for example, boasted online that birthing patients could look out onto, or even walk in, the building’s pleasant courtyard sensory garden. We could labour with a view.

But as the contemporary American philosopher, Arnold Berleant, argues, it is when we’re actually moving through a landscape, rather than treating it simply as scenery, that we most fully connect with a place and ignite all our senses. Berleant uses the term “aesthetic engagement”, but it needn’t be quite so lofty: A walk along the river might count, or perhaps time spent practising shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) , really attending to the details of the trees, the leaves, the smells and the sounds.

Over the past 20 years, research into the benefits of this kind of outdoor exercise has boomed: looking at the impact of, say, free gyms in parks or the improvement to learning outcomes for students walking in the woods. In one of the earliest studies, researchers in 2005 found that while walking or jogging improved blood pressure and mental health, viewing pleasant rural and urban scenes while doing so had a better impact on wider health and self-esteem than exercising on its own.

Many studies after this replicated this laboratory model when assessing the impact of nature on our health but, in 2018, a study of walkers in Iceland took its research out of the lab setting. The benefits of walking outdoors were compared to simply viewing a video of nature while walking on a treadmill or being sedentary while watching nature. It concluded that when facing periods of stress, walking outdoors had the most impact on wellbeing, while under circumstances of profound and ongoing stress, simply resting and looking at nature did the trick. So we know that there are different and measurable benefits between simply looking at a scene and walking out into it.

I honestly don’t like to admit to thinking about walking as a “nature cure”. “Going for a walk might help me feel better!” feels like such a simple and transactional way to describe what, to me, has always been a richer experience than just a bit of exercise.

But the 2005 study pointed to a crucial condition about how nature impacts us: the quality of the place where this “green exercise” occurred made a difference to the results. They found that walkers who viewed unpleasant scenes of degradation and pollution – what the authors termed “threats to the countryside” – experienced a negative impact on their mental wellbeing. A 2014 study found that time spent engaging with scenes of natural beauty improved people’s connection to nature. So walking in nature, you might say, is linked to actually caring about it.

Current social sciences research indicates that time spent in nature contributes to what researchers call “pro-environmental behaviours” or PEBs . Listening to birdsong, watching the sunrise – indeed, all things you might do if going for a walk – might actually make you more likely to advocate for local wildlife conservation, more likely to recycle, and to vote for greener policies and politicians. Of course, we can’t ignore that some, when taking to the trails unprepared or irresponsibly, may have a detrimental impact: it’s hard to forget the scenes of rubbish left behind in the Lake District during lockdown or reports of those who required rescue after hill walking unprepared.

Despite these outliers, I’ve found walking in nature connects us to the notion of community: not just amongst our neighbours, but amongst the other species who share the local environment. Our planet is in the throes of climate breakdown: as Britain’s coast is threatened by rising sea levels and mountain trails across Europe and elsewhere are seasonally engulfed in flames, walking is a small way of forging connection with the natural world. You won’t protect what you don’t care about, the adage goes, and I care deeply about the places I walk.

Walking, we shouldn’t forget, must never be disentangled from its history as civil disobedience and protest. From the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass for the right to roam to this April’s Kinder in Colour trespass led by walkers of colour, we are reminded that not everyone has the same level of access to the natural world, and that such access remains something we must fight for . Online, groups like Black Girls Hike and Indigenous Women Hike show us that while walking can be celebratory and full of joy, it is always political. As a pastime, walking is less plagued by calls to beat our personal bests, to one-up each other as we Sunday stroll between the stiles and hedgerows. When we walk, we can resist the urge to constantly be productive, even in our downtime. Never on a walk have I thought I needed to be pushing harder, and these are all reasons why I love it.

But for all the data on the benefits of walking in nature, and for all the grand reasons why I think walking matters, I find myself coming back to a simple idea. Walking clears my mind of busy thoughts, each step forming a rhythm to quietly think with. It brings my attention to my body and to the ground beneath my feet. It is in movement that I feel most like myself and that I most like myself. That day I took a walk by the Cam, I needed to be reminded of it.

I walked half the way to Grantchester, breathing in the cold and letting the pale sun warm my skin. And then I turned back at an arbitrary point on the path. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere in particular. Rather, as the writer Rebecca Solnit once wrote in Wanderlust , walking was “both a means and an end, travel and destination”.

Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J Lee (Virago)

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The writer extols the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and laments the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness.

Greenery with various animals—a frog, a bird, a bug—and a tiny man looking through a telescope

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre ,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer ,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit . Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to grene wode, In a mery mornynge, There he herde the notes small Of byrdes mery syngynge. “It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, That I was last here; Me Lyste a lytell for to shote At the donne dere.”

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them, — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon, — I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, — I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of, — sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, — as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumbbells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, — will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, — for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all, — I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs, — a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via , a way, or more anciently ved and vella , Varro derives from veho , to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere . Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain . This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

The Old Marlborough Road . Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan— O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travellers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle, — varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends there,” say they; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, — which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead, — that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, — affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.

“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther, — farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says, — “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World.... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX . From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants”; and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestiae , African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the center of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man, — as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, — our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, — our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra , of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say, —

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff, — still thinking more of the future than of the past or present , — I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself , though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate, — wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, — a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

Ben Jonson exclaims, —

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say, —

“How near to good is what is wild ! ”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, — a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, — the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it, — “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say, — “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum . There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, — and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, — “Leave all hope, ye that enter,” — that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, — Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included, — breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood, — her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them, — transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible , as the phrase is, — others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says, — “The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole, — Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan . I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray , the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own, — because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man, — a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect, — that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge, — Gramática parda , tawny grammar, — a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers — for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? — a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, — Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before, — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: ‘Ως τì νοών, ου κείνον νοήσεις , — “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist, — and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.

“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms, Traveller of the windy glens, Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world K όσμος , Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, — to whom the sun was servant, — who had not gone into society in the village, — who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, — notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts , those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth, — how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before, — so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me, — it was near the end of June, — on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, — for it was court-week, — and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thoughts. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,” — and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before, — where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

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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.”

essay on walk in 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.

mountain walk

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.

Lake-tree

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.

GRAND CANYON

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

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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.”

family hike

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.

nature-hike

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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Guest Essay

The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life

essay on walk in nature

By Francis Sanzaro

Mr. Sanzaro is a climber, a mountain athlete and the author of “Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature.”

Barry Lopez, nature writer extraordinaire, once remarked that one of the first things he did when arriving in a new landscape was lace up his shoes and have a stroll. But Mr. Lopez didn’t walk the way most of us walk. Open ended, without rush, bird books in his suitcase and his entire body tuned like the stiffened ears of an arctic fox, he felt the dirt crunch under his toes, ran his fingers through dew on the leaves, noticed what’s growing in the nooks, listened to what birds were yapping and — I’m speculating here on this last one — welcomed notes of sunset-mud up his nostrils, as from a ’96 bottle of Chateau Margaux.

Study after study after study has proved what we feel, intuitively, in our gut: Walking is good for us. Beneficial for our joints and muscles; astute at relieving tension, reducing anxiety and depression; a boon to creativity, likely; slows the aging process, maybe; excellent at prying our screens from our face, definitely. Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research in Dublin, has called walking a “superpower,” claiming that walking, and only walking, unlocks specific parts of our brains, places that bequeath happiness and health.

I have no beef with any of this, but I believe we have it backward. We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us. This might seem like a small distinction, a matter of semantics. But when we begin to think of walking in terms of the latter, we change the way we navigate and experience — literally and figuratively — the world around us.

To understand the difference, we need to ask more about what Mr. Lopez explained is the purpose of all this sensory input. “The purpose of such attentiveness is to gain intimacy, to rid yourself of assumption,” he wrote in his essay “A Literature of Place.”

When I first read that line, I’ll be honest, I didn’t get it. What does intimacy have to do with assumption? And what does walking have to do with intimacy? And what does “assumption” mean?

I pulled out the dictionary. “Assumption” is a knot of a word, meaning both an act of taking on, such as a new job, or taking control. It also means you believe something to be such: “I assumed that was the case.” When you give the word “assumption” a kick, the shell cracks and you can see the yolk of possession. Ownership. Responsibility. Taking on. Anticipation. Judgment.

I came to truly understood the power of Mr. Lopez’s observation when I was on the edge of something. I’m a climber, skier and trail runner, but each time I went out, I felt oddly disconnected to those very same places I pined after. I sought them feverishly, yet when I arrived, I felt like a foreigner, a squatter even, never at home or at peace. The mountains had lost their joy. In truth, I was lonely, and a bit desperate.

And so, I tried ways of throwing myself into the wild. I ran deep into the Rocky Mountains while on 24-hour fasts, used exhaustion (as well as some mind-altering drugs) to loosen the grip of reality. I put myself in front of the most gorgeous places on earth. I climbed frozen waterfalls and remote desert towers. I ran at night, during hurricanes, and bobbed face up, in the middle of lakes, in the middle of the night, in my birthday suit. I was searching and searching — for what, I did not know — and in the process I was failing and failing, powerless to pry the lid and taste nature’s mysterium tremendum .

Then I read Mr. Lopez and he called me out.

I was neither attentive nor meeting the wild on its own terms. I was merely trying to pry something from the wild for my own benefit. Which means I wasn’t seeing the wild at all.

I started walking around my neighborhood more. Compared with those wild places, this was unremarkable: pacing down a sidewalk of 10-year-old maples, across cracked squares of pavement, alongside a ditch bursting with spring runoff. But I turned it into a practice of sensation. I listened. I felt. And in a remarkable way, the neighborhood came alive — alive in a way that those mountaintops or the wildflower-strewn rivulet in the valley below never had. My senses, once atrophied, came to life, and with them, so did the world around me.

My experience, which took me from the rugged wild to a tamer, humbler landscape outside my front door, went against the grain of a few hundred years of traditional nature writing, but so be it.

My strolls taught me that walking truly is a discipline and an art. The discipline of removing assumption — thinking that something is going to be beautiful does as much damage to a place as thinking it will be ugly. It is an art of attention. There was no satori, or breakthrough moment. I had the kind of experience young lovers do when, after hanging out every day for two months, it finally occurs to them they’re in love. They smile, but they can’t remember the precise moment their love began.

I realized the main thing preventing a more intimate connection to the natural world was concept — the mysterious filters our mind lodges between us and the world, at every turn, at every second, in just about every interaction. Concepts can be good: We get the concept of “mortal danger” when a car is hurtling toward us. But concepts, also a form of assumption, can neuter experience because pure sensations become impure when we judge them. Concepts are what we deploy when we ask what we can get out of a walk, rather than the opposite.

Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term “automaticity” to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as “the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources.”

We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a “praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of,” according to Ross Gay, poet and author of “The Book of Delights.” Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.

When I walk, I say, “Now I’m walking.” I ring a bell in my mind to get prepared. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to the store or for a lunchtime stroll to catch a glimpse of a sexy tree — I know I’m walking. I breathe. I swipe left on everything that tries to lodge itself between me and the world. Pebbles crunch underfoot. Leaves smile in my eyes. Sounds emanate from bottomless wells. The world gets younger, exalted. I see, smell, hear and feel things I didn’t before. It’s not profound, not magic, but it is impossible to tie a ribbon around.

Not everyone can walk. That capacity may be denied to us at birth, or we can lose mobility over time. But walking is, in the end, a metaphor for being, a place and time — a place-time — gifted to us.

We could all use that gift.

Francis Sanzaro is the author of “Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature,” “Society Elsewhere: Why the Gravest Threat to Humanity Will Come From Within,” and other books.

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essay on walk in nature

  • My Preferences
  • My Reading List
  • Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism
  • Literature Notes
  • Summary and Analysis
  • What Is Transcendentalism?
  • Introduction
  • Major Tenets
  • Reasons for the Rise of the Movement
  • Forms of Expressing Transcendental Philosophy
  • Lasting Impact of the Movement
  • Introduction to the Times
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Life and Background of Emerson
  • Introduction to Emerson's Writing
  • Selective Chronology of Emerson's Writings
  • Emerson's Reputation and Influence
  • Emerson's "Nature"
  • Major Themes
  • Emerson's "The Divinity School Address"
  • Emerson's "Experience"
  • Emerson's "Hamatreya"
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Life and Background of Thoreau
  • Introduction to Thoreau's Writing
  • Selected Chronology of Thoreau's Writings
  • Thoreau's Reputation and Influence
  • Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"
  • Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"
  • Thoreau's "Walden"
  • Thoreau's "Walking"
  • Essay Questions
  • Practice Projects
  • Cite this Literature Note

Thoreau's "Walking" Summary and Analysis

Thoreau's essay "Walking" grew out of journal entries developed in 1851 into two lectures, "Walking" and "The Wild," which were delivered in 1851 and 1852, and again in 1856 and 1857. Thoreau combined the lectures, separated them in 1854, and worked them together again for publication in 1862, as he was dying. "Walking" was first published just after the author's death, in the June 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly . (The manuscript that Thoreau prepared for the publisher has been held by the Concord Free Public Library since 1873.) "Walking" was included in the collection Excursions , first issued in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1863 and reprinted a number of times from the Ticknor and Fields plates until the publication of the Riverside Edition of Thoreau's writings in 1894. It appeared in the version of Excursions reorganized for and printed as the ninth volume of the Riverside Edition, and in the fifth volume ( Excursions and Poems ) of the 1906 Walden and Manuscript Editions. It has been printed in a number of selected editions, among them: Essays and Other Writings of Henry Thoreau , edited by Will H. Dircks (London, 1891); Selections from Thoreau , edited by Henry S. Salt (London, 1895); the Modern Library Edition of Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Brooks Atkinson (first published in New York in 1937); The Portable Thoreau , edited by Carl Bode (New York, 1957); Thoreau: The Major Essays , edited by Jeffrey L. Duncan (New York, 1972); and The Natural History Essays , edited by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City, 1980). "Walking" has also been printed separately, both in its entirety and in excerpted form.

Thoreau declares in the first sentence of "Walking":

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

The entire essay is an expansion upon the ideas expressed in this opening sentence. Thoreau explores the etymology of the word "saunter," which he believes may come from the French " Sainte-Terre " (Holy Land) or from the French " sans terre " (without land). Either derivation applies to walking as he knows it, but he prefers the former. True walking is not directionless wandering about the countryside, nor is it physical exercise. It is a crusade "to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels." Although he admits that his own walks bring him back to home and hearth at the end of the day, the walking to which he aspires demands that the walker leave his life behind in the "spirit of undying adventure, never to return." The "Walker, Errant" is in a category by himself, "a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People." But many of Thoreau's townsmen are too tied to society and daily life to walk in the proper spirit. Walking leads naturally to the fields and woods, and away from the village — scene of much busy coming and going, accessed by established roads, which Thoreau avoids. He suggests the degeneracy of the village by exploring the etymology of the word "village," connecting it to the Latin words for "road" and for "vile."

Thoreau's neighborhood offers the possibility of good walks, which he has not yet exhausted. He refers to the new perspective that even a familiar walk can provide. He deplores man's attempts to bound the landscape with fences and stakes, placed by the "Prince of Darkness" as surveyor. He contrasts the hurried walking undertaken in conducting the business of life with that made "out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in" — a kind of exploration very different from that of Vespucci or Columbus. Thoreau's walking explores a territory better expressed by mythology than history. He conveys some urgency to walk by stating that, although the landscape is not owned at present, he foresees a time when property ownership may prevail over it.

Thoreau refers to the difficulty of choosing the direction of a walk, asserting that there is a "right way" but that we often choose the wrong. The walk we should take "is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world" — a path difficult to determine because it does not yet "exist distinctly in our idea." Thoreau's own natural tendency is to head west, where the earth is "more unexhausted and richer," toward wildness and freedom. The east leads to the past — the history, art, and literature of the Old World; the west to the forest and to the future, to enterprise and the adventure of the New World. As a nation, we tend toward the west, and the particular (in the form of the individual) reflects the general tendency. Thoreau believes that physical environment inspires man and that the vast, untamed grandeur of the American wilderness is "symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of [America's] inhabitants may one day soar." He expands upon the evidence of history in Europe as reflective of the past. America, whose landscape has not yet been completely civilized, suggests "more of the future than of the past or present." The author sees in the promise of wild America " the heroic age itself ."

Thoreau takes up the subject of the wild (synonymous with the west), in which he finds "the preservation of the World." The legend of Romulus and Remus (founders of Rome, who as infants were suckled by a wolf) demonstrates that civilization has drawn strength from the wild. He writes of the wildness of primitive people, of his own yearning for "wild lands where no settler has squatted," and of his hope that each man may be "a part and parcel of Nature" (the phrase repeated from the beginning of the essay), exuding sensory evidence of his connection with her. He equates wildness with life and strength. He himself prefers the wild vigor of the swamp, a place where one can "recreate" oneself, to the cultivated garden. The wild confers health on both the individual and society. "A township where one primitive forest waves above while another . . . rots below" nurtures poets and philosophers. Thoreau perceives agriculture as an occupation that makes the farmer stronger and more natural, and the wild and free in literature as that which most appeals to the reader. Genius is an uncivilized force, like lightning, not a "taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race." Thoreau calls for a literature that truly expresses nature. Although no literature has yet adequately done so, mythology is more satisfactory. The west — the American continent — "is preparing to add its fables to those of the East," and there will be an American mythology to inspire poets everywhere.

Thoreau finds truth in "the wildest dreams of wild men," even though these truths defy common sense. He is drawn to "wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development." All good things, he declares, are wild and free. He rejoices that civilized men, like domestic animals, retain some measure of their innate wildness. Some men possess it to a greater degree than others. All men can fulfill low purposes. Only some — those who are not as suited to civilization as others — can fulfill higher purposes and should not be tamed. Whether or not we acknowledge it, there is a savage in all of us, even the most civilized, and that primal nature will show itself in impassioned or inspired moments. Civilization pulls us from nature — "this vast, savage, howling mother of ours" — and allows only social relations, "interaction man on man." Civilized life produces a hasty, rushed maturation of the individual, but does not allow the latent development that comes in periods of dormancy.

Not every man should be cultivated, nor every part of one man. Thoreau writes that "the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports." Man needs "wild and dusky knowledge" more than lettered learning. Thoreau undercuts the notion of "Useful Knowledge," which may preclude higher understanding, preferring instead "Useful Ignorance" or "Beautiful Knowledge." His own desire for knowledge is intermittent, but his "desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant." He encourages not the seeking of knowledge per se but rather of "Sympathy with Intellect." Our understanding cannot encompass the magnitude of nature and the universal. Thoreau writes that in his own relationship with nature he lives "a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only." Even Thoreau — a man who has devoted his life to higher pursuit — cannot grasp the full meaning of nature. When we are successful in beginning to approach the universal through our experience of nature, our glimpses of understanding are fleeting and evanescent. Imperfect though our comprehension is, however, we must elevate, must seek those places that offer broader perspective. Thoreau employs the image of the rooster — crowing confidently to inspire others to alertness and awareness, expressing the "health and soundness of Nature" — used in Walden . "Walking" ends with Thoreau rhapsodically recalling a moving sunset he had earlier seen, conveying a powerful and optimistic longing for inspired understanding. In the last paragraph of the essay, Thoreau refers again to sauntering toward the Holy Land, until "one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn."

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essay on walk in nature

Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck (Tin House, 2022)

Contributor Bio

David rompf, more online by david rompf.

  • Once More to the Pond

Walking with Thoreau: A Review Essay

By david rompf.

The longest single walkable distance on Earth is a little more than fourteen thousand miles, between Cape Town, South Africa, and the Russian port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. Google Maps has confirmed this pedestrian possibility. It is not an officially recognized path like, for example, the Trans Canada Trail, a network of pathways that twist and turn across ten provinces and three territories, but rather an intercontinental route that can be traversed without the help of a car, train, or boat. If you walked eight hours a day, the trip could be completed in five hundred days. Near the halfway point, you could eat one of your knapsack lunches at the Great Pyramid of Giza; after the triumphant last step, you might write a book about your adventure. Why did you take that walk? Was it a spiritual pilgrimage? Did you do it for the sheer physical challenge, for a deep and thrilling sense of accomplishment? For the anticipation of discovering something new about the world, about yourself?

If those fourteen thousand miles were lined with bookshelves, a good number might be stocked with the many existing volumes related, in one way or another, to walking and walkers—narratives that meanderingly explore nature, the soul, philosophy, religion, history, love, mystery, addiction, grief, joy, aches and pains, vexing and dangerous interferences, and countless other dimensions of human experience. Books about walking published in the past two decades alone are plentiful. Rebecca Solnit threw her ample intellectual net around the history of walking in Wanderlust , a robust guide to the evolutionary, philosophical, literary, religious, and political underpinnings of her subject (which, as she points out, is one that is always straying). In the aftermath of a breakup, Olivia Laing packed her oatcakes and cheese for an excursion on foot along the Ouse River, where Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets, drowned herself. Lucky for us, Laing doesn’t follow suit, instead delivering alluring and crystalline prose in To The River . Robert Macfarlane follows ancient paths in The Old Ways , which, he stresses in a note, could not have been written standing still. In Flâneuse , Lauren Elkin charts the course of famous literary and artistic women walking the streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, while Edmund White, in The Flaneur , ambles exclusively through the City of Lights. Speaking of straying, I would be remiss not to mention Wild , Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of trekking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, more than one thousand miles from the Mojave Desert to Washington; it may be the only New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick with a long, hard hike as its narrative spine. The list goes on, including books on the lost art of walking, the philosophy of walking, the science and literature of pedestrianism, walking through biblical lands, across deserts high and low, walking—improbably enough—around the notoriously unwalkable Los Angeles.

In Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , Ben Shattuck embarks on his own version of this walking-and-writing tradition—which, if not a genuine “tradition,” has been a recurring obsession among an illustrious roster of writers and thinkers going back to the peripatetic philosophers. With that well-beaten track behind him, Shattuck walks with hefty literary baggage on his shoulders, not to mention the personal baggage he seeks to lighten. As if walking and writing aren’t hard enough, his particular walks demand emotional fortitude for mining past pain and present vulnerabilities, and also require a certain literary gumption, owing to their weighty associations with Thoreau—his extensive journals, his essays about walking, Walden , Civil Disobedience , and books about his expeditions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods. Shattuck, by implication, mingles with all the pilgrims who ever lived, all the nature writers and self-seeking walkers who have ventured out with purposes big and small.

What is Shattuck’s purpose? In the first few pages of Six Walks , we learn that he first came up with the idea to follow one of Thoreau’s walks when he was haunted by dreams of an ex-girlfriend. “This was years ago, in my early thirties,” he writes, “when I couldn’t find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me.”  Walking, then, is a way of throwing off that burden. While showering at dawn, Shattuck envisions a young, bearded man standing on a beach, “wind whipping his coattails, the ocean pounding in front of him.” Unlike the author, that man is happy. In his mind’s eye, Shattuck also observes him writing in a journal and wading through dune grass. The fellow glimpsed through the mists of shower and imagination is Henry David Thoreau. Shattuck, while living on the southern coast of Massachusetts, has been reading Cape Cod every night for a week when, suddenly, impulse and inspiration take hold. He puts on a bathing suit and sweater, downs a cup of coffee, fills a backpack with bread, cheese, apples, and carrots, and sets out for the Cape by foot. “I would walk the outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertips,” he writes, “as Henry had done.”

Thus begins Shattuck’s journey: not just with a footstep but also with the decision to refer to Thoreau as Henry throughout these chronicles. The choice seems, at first, unusual, and it takes some getting used to. “Henry” is quaint, and perhaps a bit precious, but as we travel along with Shattuck this first-name basis humanizes the literary giant, yanks him down from the pantheon to the fertile, buggy earth he once trod, reminding us that he was a man who drank from the pond he bathed in. “Henry,” on the page, also has the inexplicable effect of suggesting that Shattuck might find what he’s looking for on these six walks, discoveries that could soothe and surprise the twenty-first-century acolyte—and maybe the reader, too. Henry is like a sage old friend who, though long gone in body, still walks among us as a companion.

Shattuck’s initial three walks, in Part One of the book, take us to Cape Cod, Mount Katahdin in Maine, and Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts. Before setting out for the Cape, he puts a notebook in his backpack, “not because I ever journaled or made sketches, but because Henry had, and I wanted to try someone’s habits for a few days.” Part Two spans new geographical and emotional terrain, with a sixteen-mile pilgrimage from the author’s childhood home on a saltwater river to a peninsula isolated by the sea in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, where his great-great-great-grandparents summered away from their home in Chicago. This is Shattuck’s version of the southwest walk that Thoreau discusses in his famous essay “Walking.” The Sakonnet outing is followed by a journey to The Allagash in Maine, and the final walk is a do-over to Cape Cod, this time accompanied by his fiancée, whom he refers to only as “Jenny” but who is identifiable as Jenny Slate, the actress, author, and former cast member of Saturday Night Live . Both parts include off-trail interludes that allow Shattuck to wander without walking and to provide the backstory behind his quest for self-understanding. In the first of these, he visits a hypnotist in an effort to halt the nightmares that end up propelling him to take these walks. In the second, he visits Walden Pond.

Six Walks contains no map of Shattuck’s—or Thoreau’s—travels, as one might expect. Unfamiliar with much of the terrain, I began to toggle between the book and Google Maps in a mostly futile effort to visualize Shattuck’s routes. I soon gave up this disjointed exercise when I realized that the omission of maps—like calling Thoreau “Henry”—was probably a deliberate choice. After all, this book isn’t really about tracing the land journeys. It isn’t a guide for planning your own walks in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. The itinerary here is a circuitous one to Shattuck’s interior, a compass of the soul. Eschewing maps, I was happy to find, in these pages, some of the simple but exquisite black-and-white drawings that Shattuck, an artist and curator as well as a writer, made during his walks. Many, like “A Stone on the Beach,” “Light in the Grass,” and “Bullfrog on River Path,” reflect, even in their titles, a Zen aesthetic of understated elegance.

An intense yearning to get close to Henry is palpable at every turn. Shattuck’s goal on day one of his first Cape Cod walk is to visit the oysterman’s house in Wellfleet where Henry slept for a night. When he finds it, finally, with the help of a local couple, he peers through the windows. Our hearts sink even before Shattuck reveals his own reaction, because by now we recognize the tenacious grip of his sadness. “I felt no connection, no insight, no sudden power,” he writes. Henry’s spirit is nowhere to be found. Continuing on his walk toward Provincetown, Shattuck picks up a wedge of red clay that has tumbled down to the beach from the cliffs of Truro. It’s as big as a slice of wedding cake, he tells us, and he gives in to the urge to take a bite. “The chunk dissolved, milk-chocolate like, when I massaged it with my tongue into the roof of my mouth.” Denied even a morsel of fulfillment at the oysterman’s digs, he can, as consolation, consume a helping of earth once touched by Henry. It is a poignant moment that shows the depth of Shattuck’s hunger.

The hankering for Henry—as an ideal, a symbol, a literary mirror—recurs. After Shattuck is swarmed by blackflies in Maine, he quotes Thoreau’s Maine Woods : “I now first began to be seriously molested by the blackfly!” Shattuck applies DEET while Henry dabs on his own compound of turpentine, spearmint, and camphor oil. Shattuck is awakened by loons singing to each other, a sound he exquisitely describes as being “like a flute somehow played underwater”; Henry, too, hears the voice of the loon in the middle of the night. Shattuck sees a rainbow and we are offered a rainbow from Henry’s journal. In less talented hands, this one-to-one correspondence might come off as gimmicky: a writer dipping into Thoreau to pluck out tidbits of look-alike experience. Here the symmetry seems natural, organic even—there’s no pretense of seeing himself in Thoreau, or Henry in himself.

In the Walden Pond interlude, Shattuck’s pursuit of Henry and all that his walks stood for—happiness, freedom, truth of the soul, a return to childhood—takes a brief, engrossing detour into the realm of paradox. He enters the replica of Thoreau’s cabin and sits in the replica rocking chair next to the replica woodstove. Soon a tourist walks in with her young son. “Oh, look, there he is,” she says to the boy. “Ask him a question.” Shattuck, too, has become a replica, a realization that seems to stun him. “No,” he says to them. What have they encroached on—an image of Henry? A communion with Thoreau on sacred ground? He abruptly gets up and leaves. Reflecting on this discomfiting interaction, Shattuck speculates that “maybe my leaving was in character.” He means Thoreau’s character, of course, and specifically his overblown reputation as a recluse who shunned society. But maybe his leaving also revealed a sharp sliver of Shattuck’s own character, or a hybrid of his and Henry’s. Though he balks at the idea of playing along with the mistaken identity—that of reenactor—his walks are essentially, and self-admittedly, reenactments, for that is what it means, in part, to follow in someone else’s footsteps.

Is Shattuck questioning his mission, recognizing a certain futility in the walks? His self-doubt prompts an ongoing interrogation of his very being, which is what makes this book so relatable and compelling. It is not the trudges along the New England seaboard or up a mountain, but rather Shattuck’s probing odyssey, however it might unfold, into despair and his search for a way out that grips us as readers. A wise cliché tells us that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts. Shattuck’s particular journey—inward and outward—avoids self-absorption. As the French philosopher Frédéric Gros argued in A Philosophy of Walking , “By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history.” Perhaps this explains the unnerving brush at Walden Pond. Shattuck bristles at being ascribed an identity—Thoreau in the boy’s mind, a reenactor for the mother. The attempt at shedding his identity, if just for a few days, is under threat. The tiny cabin and its trespassers are too close for comfort.

On his walk to Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck takes MDMA, which is in the last stages of clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD. “I’d wanted to feel some of the transcendence in nature that Henry felt,” he writes, “and which I hadn’t really yet experienced in the walking, and thought the pills might help.” Shattuck goes on to describe Henry’s own drug experience when he was thirty-four, citing an entry in Thoreau’s journal documenting the effects:

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether: you go beyond the further star.

Thoreau, however, didn’t get high on ether as a means of enhancing his walks or achieving transcendence; his dentist administered it—once—before extracting some bad teeth. In his account of ascending Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck intersperses several Thoreau quotations describing the same walk, allowing the reader to mistakenly infer that Henry, too, was under the influence at the time. But Thoreau’s three-day walk to the mountain summit occurred in 1842 and his essay, “A Walk to Wachusett,” was published in The Boston Miscellany in January 1843; his dentist gave him ether in 1851. A clarification could have cleared up the confusion and, in turn, spotlighted a more salient, ironic link between the author and Henry: both have taken a drug in order to suppress an ache, and to make an experience more pleasant.

Throughout Six Walks , and especially in Part One, Shattuck’s anguish seems stubbornly intractable. While a drug might offer only a temporary transcendence, it’s easy to sympathize with Shattuck’s desire for relief. We feel for him when he asks himself whether Henry, whose brother John died six months before Thoreau’s Wachusett walk, was “doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief? Looking up to feel the comfort of one’s own smallness in the world, to displace bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky?”

Ten years pass before Shattuck begins the walks and the writing of Part Two, and a lot has happened in that time. His anxiety and distress have subsided. He gets engaged to Jenny. He no longer feels the urgency to leave home. Reading Thoreau, however, has been a constant, and in this new era of love, maturity, and greater perspective, he still feels the impulse to replicate some of Henry’s journeys. If there’s one thing he’s learned from reading Thoreau’s journals, “It’s that stepping out your front door gives you an offering in all seasons and moods. Something would come from continuing to follow him.”

In the first summer of the pandemic, Shattuck heads on foot from the house where he grew up to an ancestral home in Rhode Island, a route marked by reminders of his childhood: “Past the pond where I used to go duck hunting with my dad. Past the bushes of wild hazelnuts my mom and I picked when I was boy—the memory of which so quietly imprinted itself in my mind that I had forgotten we’d done that until I walked past them one day, saw their frilled encasings dropping by the footpath, and thought of my mom.” And then: “To the beach where my grandmother, mother, and I all played as kids in our own times, the beach surrounding the farmland my great-grandfather bought in the early 1900s. The outgoing tide had left a trim of folded particulate—seaweed and flecks of stone—that looked like a line of drawing of distant mountains.” In the fuguelike passages of this “Southwest” walk, Shattuck hits a Proustian stride. The prose is lilting and graceful here in a book of already lush prose.

Thoreau, in his seminal essay, “Walking”—published in the Atlantic Monthly a few weeks after his death in 1862—declared that when he left his house for a walk, he inevitably headed southwest, “toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. [ … ] The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.” In Part Two, one key to Shattuck’s future is found not by heading southwest but by recounting the uncomplicated pleasures of his youth. Therein lies one of the most striking affinities with Henry and his walks—a craving for an infinity of childhood freedom. While Thoreau’s obsessive, hours-long walks and his essays on the subject are often automatically associated with Nature—with all that the word has come to signify: ecological awareness, preservation, a romantic return to the pastoral, and “nature writing,” to name a few—or with a supposed rejection of society, the expression of his true purpose in sauntering can be found in his journal entry of July 21, 1851, three years after abandoning his Walden Pond cabin and eleven years before succumbing to tuberculosis. That long, rhapsodic entry, shortened here, can be read as a manifesto for Shattuck:

Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust, where you may forget in what country you are travelling; where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass [ … ] along which you may travel like a pilgrim, going nowhither; where travellers are not too often to be met; where my spirit is free; where the walls and fences are not cared for; where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth [ … ] where travellers have no occasion to stop, but pass along and leave you to your thoughts; where it makes no odds which way you face, whether you are going or coming, whether it is morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight [ … ] where you can walk and think with the least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your moodiness [ … ] by which you may go to the uttermost parts of the earth. [ … ] There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. [ … ] That’s a road I can travel [ … ] There I can walk, and recover the lost child that I am without any ringing of a bell [ … ] There I have freedom in my thought, and in my soul am free.

On his last walk—his second to the Cape—Shattuck and his fiancée, Jenny, stay in an old shack in Provincetown. Fitted out with a hand pump for water, an outhouse, and lanterns, the shelter seems more like Thoreau’s original cabin than its replica at Walden Pond. Shattuck doesn’t make this explicit comparison; he doesn’t need to. His masterful approach to past and present evokes a place that no longer exists and the profound satisfaction he takes in the night’s ramshackle accommodations. No reenactments required. In speaking with someone he loves, Shattuck has found the real thing. “I didn’t want to walk anymore,” he writes. “I didn’t want to sleep in a stranger’s house. I didn’t want to wake up before dawn to hike up Mount Katahdin or take MDMA under a chairlift or empty my breath and be pressed by the weight of Walden Pond.” Transcendence, then, is felt when it’s least expected—when we aren’t looking for it or following someone else’s lead.

The epigraph for Six Walks is a definition: “Footstep (‘fóot, step): A step taken by a person in walking, especially as heard by another.” In these pages we hear an echo across time, terrain, and imagination: Thoreau rustling in the distance as Shattuck moves forward with his life. You might read this book because you’re a fan of Thoreau, or because you’re an ardent walker and nature-lover. Or you might just read it to wander in the generous presence of Shattuck. You might cross the finish line, as I did, thinking of him as Ben.

Published on June 30, 2022

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, walking in nature.

Free stock photo of wood, dawn, landscape, nature

A reader sent me a beautiful description of the tranquility he finds walking in and communing with nature. It seems my friend has become a forest dweller in the Hindu tradition! I think that if we don’t find peace in this way, we probably won’t find it anywhere, for many seers and sages have found something vastly preferable in nature and solitude.

Here then are the words of a modern-day Thoreau.

I can heartily second Seneca’s suggestion of an outside walk, although I enjoy an opportunity not readily available. I live on 40 acres of mixed forest with a creek running across the middle. When I go outside, I am not confronted by the galling presence of even more members of this appalling species; I am surrounded by pure nature. I have rooted here; by walking over every square inch of this land, I have come to know it intimately. I recognize every tree; I know where different kinds of rock lie on the surface or just beneath it.

The blatant seasonal changes no longer attract my notice; now I recognize subtle shifts in the foliage with the passing seasons. Some places retain their green longer into the summer because the buildup of humus from the fallen leaves and needles holds more water. I note how the Douglas firs in some areas are dying, and make a note to thin the trees in that area so that the survivors will have enough sun and water to stay healthy.

In past years, I felt somewhat guilty about thinning the forest; every time I brought down a live tree, I felt like a murderer. But now I see the forest as a complete organism. The individual trees are only parts of the whole. I am nurturing the entire organism when I cut down a badly placed tree.

I see the sunlight reflecting off the foliage and see in my mind the photosynthesis taking place in the greenery. Carbon dioxide from the air and water brought up from the ground are energized by photons of light to build adenosine triphosphate molecules that are then used to power the activities of each cell. That energy goes into energy-bearing carbohydrates that spread between cells and help grow more cells. Bees and other insects collect some of those carbohydrates, drawing energy from them. Birds and lizards collect some of the insects, drawing energy from them. The energy from the sunlight spreads through the entire organism, nurturing it.

The forest is a huge calculator. It experiments with every square inch of ground, trying to find the perfect plant to place there. The precise conditions of sunlight, groundwater, and soil are all taken into the calculation, and the ideal plant grows in that place. Dozens of different species are scattered around the land, each in its own perfect place.

I have become part of this organism. I plant seedlings, water them in the summer, cut away thick brush, and clear away fuel to protect my forest in the event of a forest fire. The forest can live quite well without me, but my nurturing makes it stronger and more vigorous. The forest has sent its tendrils into my soul even as my hands have helped it grow. We are becoming one, the forest and I. We are both stronger for it, combining our “strength of life”, whose syntony is greater than the sum of our separate contributions. Communing with my forest renews my confidence in the overall goodness of the world. Let the humans stew in their own sewage; the natural world continues regardless of human idiocy.

Here on the same topic is one of my intellectual heroes, Will Durant .

We suspect that when our fires begin to burn low, we shall want the healing peace of uncrowded mountains and spacious fields. After every idea has had its day with us and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals. Then we shall take to the woods; we shall make friends of the animals; we shall leave the world to stew in its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform.

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4 thoughts on “ walking in nature ”.

This reminds me of the Zen story of the two monks who were travelling and met a woman who wanted to cross a stretch of water and was picked up by one of the monks who carried across it and then put down on the other side. Later on the second monk admonished the one who carried the woman by saying that as monks they should not touch women. The other replied; ” I put the woman down many hours ago but you are still carrying her up!!” Even though the author lives alone in tranquil nature now, yet he seems to have carried with him the whole of the city and its people from where he came!

Philosophy and Nature have enjoyed an ancient and enduring fellowship. And while you may have conflated the author, that passionate prognosticator of political peril, with his modern-day Thoreau friend, the self-proclaimed symbiont of the ecosystem, your Zen parable is instructive. For while one might unwittingly pollute the tranquility of the forest with neurotic thoughts of the city, it is also true that with sufficient practice of mindfulness, one may infuse one’s city life with the tranquility of a still pond.

I am reminded of a photograph of my daughter sitting pensively next to a stream taken on one of our many nature walks when she was a young child, a scene that inspired a little pseudo-haiku I’d like to share with you in the interest of infusing a little natural tranquility wherever you may be.

Still pond Still pondering Still reflecting Natural Philosopher

thanks for the thoughtful reply

@ Steven Donaldson

I made my comment in the hope that the author does not conflate his past anger of when he lived among people with his present sense of tranquility now that he is living alone in nature. It is also true that one`s acid test for deep tranquility is to carry in one`s heart and mind the silence of the forest (in my case the vast desert especially at night) in the hubbub of the city.

But the post has been expanded since I made my comment. Now the author reminds me of the story “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Giono. It is a beautiful story and if you haven’t read it you can easily find a pdf copy of it on the net. Now I remembered the story I`ll read it again!

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 UPI News

Brain benefits more from a walk in nature than in city

A walk in the woods appears to sharpen the mind better than an urban asphalt amble, a new brain scan study finds.

People strolling through an arboretum at the University of Utah performed better on brain function tests than those who walked around an asphalt-laden medical campus, according to findings published recently in the journal Scientific Reports .

EEG data showed that a nature walk lit up brain regions related to executive control, which influences a person's working memory, decision-making, problem-solving and planning, researchers said.

"The kinds of things that we do on an everyday basis tend to heavily use those executive attentional networks," said researcher David Strayer , a professor of psychology at the University of Utah. "It's an essential component of higher-order thinking."

Humans have a primal need for nature, the researchers noted.

"There's an idea called biophilia that basically says that our evolution over hundreds of thousands of years has got us to have more of a connection or a love of natural living things," Strayer said in a university news release.

"And our modern urban environment has become this dense urban jungle with cellphones and cars and computers and traffic, just the opposite of that kind of restorative environment," he added.

To see how a nature walk might affect the brain, researchers recruited 92 participants and recorded EEG readings on each immediately before and after they had a 40-minute walk.

Half the participants walked through Red Butte Garden, an arboretum just east of the University of Utah, and the other half walked through the university's medical campus and parking lots.

Both routes covered two miles, with similar amounts of elevation gain.

"We know exercise benefits executive attention as well, so we want to make sure both groups have comparable amounts of exercise," said researcher Amy McDonnell , a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah.

Before the walk, all participants undertook a mentally exhausting brain exercise, followed by an attention-testing task.

"We start out by having participants do a really draining cognitive task in which they count backwards from 1,000 by sevens, which is really hard," McDonnell said. "No matter how good you are at mental math, it gets pretty draining after 10 minutes."

Participants performed the attention test again after their walk, to see how restorative the stroll had been for their minds.

Both the attention test and the EEG readings showed that a nature walk improved participants' executive control better than an urban walk.

"The participants that had walked in nature showed an improvement in their executive attention on that task, whereas the urban walkers did not, so then we know it's something unique about the environment that you're walking in," McDonnell said.

Researchers hope their future studies will tease out why natural settings might provide better brain benefits.

"If you understand something about what's making us mentally and physically healthier, you could then potentially engineer our cities so that they supported that," Strayer said.

The team is now assessing how cellphone use affects the benefits of a garden walk.

More information

Utah State University has more about nature and mental health .

Copyright © 2024 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

EEG data showed that a nature walk lit up brain regions related to executive control, which influences a person's working memory, decision-making, problem-solving and planning, researchers said.

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How to Take a Nature Walk with Kids

Verywell Family / Jiaqi Zhou

What Is a Nature Walk?

  • Nature's Importance on Development
  • Tips for Planning a Nature Walk
  • Connecting With Nature

Crisp air, the scent of fresh rain, the melodic echo of birds reverberating off tall, lush trees—is there anything more serene than immersing yourself in nature ? While we all appreciate the environment around us, today's digital age has us focused more on the glow of screens than the glow of a sunset.

The outdoors tends to take a backseat to our busy lives but making it more of a priority has significant benefits. In fact, one study found that spending just two hours per week exploring nature leads to better health and well-being.

If nature has the ability to improve the lives of adults, imagine what it can do for kids! A growing body of research suggests spending time in nature promotes better attention spans , self-discipline, creativity, physical fitness, and social connection in children. It can also help lower stress levels and make them more engaged in learning.

So, how can we ensure our kids are spending enough quality time with mother nature? One of the best ways is simple and fun, no matter their age—a nature walk!

To help explain the benefits of exploring nature, we've spoken with two experts on the topic: Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Children & Nature Network and author of "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder," and Suzanne Davis, a licensed professional counselor, registered play therapist, and owner of Davis Counseling & Play Therapy Center in Virginia.

Nature walks are an opportunity to relax, take your time, and explore the environment. "A nature walk is a great way to 'unplug,' observe, and explore nature while enjoying the outdoors ," explains Davis. "There are endless possibilities to connect with your child by creating positive activities and memories together."

Rather than a one-way interaction with a phone or tablet, nature walks stimulate all of a child's senses and provide a hands-on approach to learning about the world.

Davis adds, "[It also] provides the opportunity to improve the parent-child relationship. Taking intentional time to de-clutter the mind means being fully present in the moment with your child without distractions, which renews the body and spirit."

Why Is Nature Important for a Child’s Development?

Not only is being outdoors fun for kids, but it also helps foster their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development.

Louv explains, "The studies strongly suggest that time in nature can help many children learn to build confidence in themselves, reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, [and] calm them and help them focus."

In his book, Louv introduces the term "nature-deficit disorder," which is a concept he speaks about internationally and defines as, "Not a medical diagnosis, but a useful term—a metaphor—to describe what many of us believe are the human costs of alienation from nature, as suggested by recent research."

Benefits of Exploring Nature 

Choosing to spend time in nature (rather than avoid it) comes with an array of benefits for children. Their physical, cognitive, and emotional well-being can be improved by something as simple as playing in their own backyard.

Outdoor time keeps kids moving and exercising, which reduces stress and fatigue while improving physical health. It also promotes creativity and imagination by allowing children to freely interact with nature in their own inventive ways.

Richard Louv

Time spent in nature is obviously not a cure-all, but it can be an enormous help, especially for kids who are stressed by circumstances beyond their control.

Of course, physical benefits are not the only ones nature has to offer. Outdoor play is a lot less structured than playing inside, which gives children more freedom to interact with the environment in their own ways (ultimately boosting their confidence). A review of the literature indicates that nature can also lead to better academic performance, increase interest and enjoyment in learning, and improve children's attention spans.

When it comes to social and psychological development, nature helps children become more positive, have a closer connection to nature (including a desire to protect it), and exhibit more pro-social behaviors .

"Time spent in nature is obviously not a cure-all, but it can be an enormous help, especially for kids who are stressed by circumstances beyond their control," he says.

Tips for Planning a Nature Walk With Your Child 

Any walk can turn into a nature walk as long as you're engaged and inquisitive about the things around you. What do you see? Feel? Hear or smell? What animals, plants, insects, and birds can you point out?

When it comes to planning a nature walk, the key tip to keep in mind is to have fun with it! Nature walks don't have to be complicated, Louv says. "If children are given the opportunity to experience nature, even in simple ways, interaction and engagement follow quite naturally."

The goal is to get them engaged and excited to learn, and that's not hard to do when you're surrounded by the beauty of nature. You can explore a park, hiking trail, creek, or your own backyard. Here are a few tips for planning your child's next nature walk.

Let Them Get Dirty  

If your little one is anxious to crawl in the dirt to get a better look at bugs, then go for it! Dirt might get a bad rap, but it shouldn't. Research suggests that kids who play in the dirt are exposed to bacteria, germs, viruses, and parasites that can help build their immune system and reduce the risks of certain allergies and illnesses later in life.

Have Them Lead the Way 

When it comes to younger children, Louv recommends giving them the freedom to explore in their own ways.

"Encourage them to stop to turn over rocks, touch moss, and, when they can, climb on and over rocks and fallen trees," he says. "Whatever the environment, which you assess for any unreasonable hazards, the toddler can set the pace—stimulating confidence, agility, problem-solving , creativity, and a sense of wonder."

Most importantly, don't let the digital world interfere with the experience. "Leave your cell phone in your pocket, ringer off," Louv suggests, "and point out objects or landscape features you see. This will help anchor the words to what is seen, felt, or heard."

Get Creative

Nature is the perfect setting to promote a child's creativity and imagination. Davis suggests pretend play , such as using a stick as a sword or magic wand, or making up stories about the items found during your walk.

Your findings also work great for an art project. "Collecting rocks while on your nature walk can later be painted and re-purposed as beautiful works of art," says Davis.

Create a Scavenger Hunt 

A scavenger hunt is a great way to keep the kids engaged and interested. "Before going on your nature walk with your child, collaboratively create a list of items on a 3x5 index card to be found on your walk, and have fun locating the items on your list," suggests Davis.

Scavenger hunt items also make great art supplies—for example, pinecones can become bird feeders or shells can be turned into decorative ornaments.

Let Older Children Be More Adventurous 

For the older kids, it's all about making a deeper connection with the world around them.

"With older kids, you can encourage them to connect with nature on a deeper level by exploring their senses ," explains Louv. "Try having them walk barefoot on different surfaces to enhance the noticing of texture and terrain."

If you're feeling a little more adventurous, Louv recommends covering their eyes in order to focus on the remaining senses: "Blindfold kids and have them follow a rope through varied terrain in which they can smell, hear and feel things. Walk through the woods or a field, or along a creek, and have your kids report what they smell—then write it down in a nature journal."

Everyday Ways To Connect Children With Nature

While nature walks provide a great opportunity for children to explore the environment, there are other simple, everyday ways to keep them connected with nature. The best way to do this? Spend as much time outdoors as you can, even if it's just a walk down the street or relaxing on your back patio.

"Even in densely urban settings, nature can often be found nearby, somewhere in the neighborhood," explains Louv. "Connecting with nature can be as simple as planning regular walks around a local park, going on a picnic, or learning how to garden in containers on the back stoop."

A Word From Verywell

The power of nature can be felt even in the simplest of settings. By making a conscious effort to explore it, you and your children open the door to better health, new adventures, and irreplaceable memories.

"We all can create new natural habitats in and around our homes, schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, cities, and suburbs," says Louv. "Even in inner cities, our children grow up in nature—not with it, but in it."

White MP, Alcock I, Grellier J, et al. Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing .  Sci Rep . 2019;9(1):7730. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3

Kuo M. Six ways nature helps children learn . Greater Good.

Kuo FE, Faber Taylor A. A potential natural treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Evidence from a national study .  Am J Public Health . 2004;94(9):1580-1586. doi:10.2105/ajph.94.9.1580

Faber Taylor A, Kuo FE. Children with attention deficits concentrate better after walk in the park .  J Atten Disord . 2009;12(5):402-409.

Kuo M, Barnes M, Jordan C. Do experiences with nature promote learning? Converging evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship .  Front Psychol . 2019;10:305. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305

Dopko R, Capaldi C, Zelenski J. The psychological and social benefits of a nature experience for children: A preliminary investigation . Journal of Environmental Psychology . 2019; 63:134-138. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.05.002

National Wildlife Federation. The dirt on dirt .

By Alex Vance Alex Vance is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from pregnancy and parenting to health and wellness. She is a former news and features writer for Moms.com and Blog Writer for The HOTH. Her motherhood-related pieces have been published on Scary Mommy, Motherhood Understood, and Thought Catalog.

LearnTrainer.com

12 Great Essay on Nature In English

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  • Post category: Content Writing

Essay on Nature In English

Throughout human history, nature has captivated and inspired people from all walks of life. Whether through poetry, literature, art or scientific inquiry, humans have long been fascinated by the beauty and complexity of the natural world.

English, with its expansive lexicon and rich literary heritage, has played a particularly important role in expressing the depth of human emotions evoked by nature. In this essay, we will examine various works of English literature that illustrate the profound connection between humanity and the natural world.

Nature has played a significant role in English literature throughout history, particularly during the Romantic period. Poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge drew inspiration from nature, expressing their deep appreciation and empathy towards it.

They believed that nature holds the key to human spirituality, and their works reflect this belief. In the 20th century, writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf explored the intricate relationship between humans and nature, emphasizing the impact it has on our psyche. Their literature delves into the complexities of this relationship and its effects on the human experience.

Essay Example 1

Nature is a fundamental aspect of our existence that surrounds us and sustains us. It encompasses all that is naturally occurring in our world, including flora and fauna, mountains, oceans, and forests. Nature is a source of beauty that appeals to our senses and offers us peace and tranquility away from the chaos of everyday life.

Composing an essay on nature presents a wonderful opportunity to delve into and appreciate the splendor of our world. For instance, one can expound on how nature provides a refuge from the pressures of modern living or on the need to conserve our natural resources. To write a compelling essay on nature in English, one requires a comprehensive understanding of the topic to engage the reader and heighten their consciousness about the importance of nature.

Nature is a beautiful and awe-inspiring gift of God that surrounds us and provides us with everything we need to survive. It is a dynamic living system that includes everything from forests and oceans to deserts and mountains, and everything in between.

We will explore the many facets of nature and its impact on human life. From the beauty and serenity of sunrise to the destructive force of a hurricane, nature is both breathtakingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful. Through a deeper understanding and appreciation of nature, we can protect and conserve it for future generations.

Essay Example 3

The subject of nature is multifaceted and has the ability to evoke strong emotions in individuals. The captivating beauty of nature appeals to people of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Example 3 of an essay on nature in English highlights the significance of nature in our lives and its impact on our physical, emotional, and psychological well-being.

The essay effectively portrays nature as an indispensable component that nurtures and sustains life on Earth. The author describes nature as a source of inspiration, peace, and tranquility. The essay emphasizes the vast biodiversity present on our planet and its provision of important ecosystem services, such as clean air and water, food production, and climate regulation.

Essay Example 4

The study and appreciation of nature have long fascinated many individuals due to its vast and diverse resources. Over the course of history, humanity has made great strides in exploring and understanding nature, leading to remarkable discoveries and advancements in various fields. The English essay on nature example 4 provides an insightful and captivating perspective on the beauty and significance of nature.

The essay opens with an engaging introduction that sparks the reader’s interest by describing the world as a harmonious and stunning place. The author begins by describing their observation of a breathtaking sunrise, highlighting the poetic and peaceful energy that accompanies the beginning of a new day. The author proceeds to explain that nature offers a sanctuary that promotes tranquility and renovation.

The essay beautifully describes the varying moods of nature, from the peaceful sunsets, chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves, to the fury of storms and the high tides of oceans. Through the use of descriptive language, the author paints a picture of the vast and diverse resources of nature.

Essay Example 5

Introduction :

Throughout the ages, nature has captivated and inspired humanity with its awe-inspiring power and enigmatic beauty. It has served as a muse for numerous artists, poets and philosophers, evoking admiration, wonder and contemplation. The following essay on nature is an illustrative example that highlights the magnificence of the natural world and emphasizes the crucial significance of its preservation. This essay delves into the ways in which nature nurtures and sustains us, its intrinsic value to human life, and the imperative need to safeguard it for posterity.

Nature gives upon us a multitude of essential benefits crucial for our survival. The air we breathe, the food we consume, and the water we drink are all gifts that we receive from nature. The interconnections of all living beings with nature plays a vital role in our well-being, and a balanced natural system supports our health.

Furthermore, nature offers us not only the necessities of life but also beauty, tranquility, and inspiration. From the serene countryside hills to the grandiose mountain peaks and the forceful ocean waves, nature presents us with infinite opportunities to marvel at its splendid magnificence.

However, despite the many benefits nature provides us, we are often guilty of exploiting it for our own needs. Human activities like deforestation, pollution.

Essay Example 6

Nature is a beautiful creation of God, comprising of everything that exists in the world apart from human beings. It refers to the plants, animals, forests, rivers, oceans, mountains and everything that nature has bestowed upon us.

The importance of nature in our lives cannot be overstated. It gives us the resources we need to sustain life while also providing us with aesthetic pleasures. The beauty of nature is such that it leaves us in awe and inspires us to create and innovate.

Essay Example 7

Nature, in all its diversity and splendor, has a significant role to play in our lives. It is a natural source of inspiration and is essential for physical and emotional well-being. A walk in a forest filled with lush greenery, chirping birds, and the sound of the flowing river can have a calming and purifying effect on our mind and soul. The mountains with their majestic presence teach us perseverance, while the vast oceans remind us of the vastness and depth of life.

In contemporary times, the escalating apprehensions of climate change, ecological deterioration, and contamination necessitate our recognition of the significance of preserving nature. As responsible citizens, it is incumbent upon us to safeguard and sustain the natural environment so that it can perpetuate its bountiful resources for our benefit.

Essay Example 8

Nature has been the inspiration and subject of some of the greatest literary pieces in history. The beauty and diversity of nature make it a fascinating topic to explore and write about. In this essay on nature example 7 in English, we will discuss the importance of nature, how it affects human life, and the role of humans in preserving it. Nature offers a variety of benefits to humans, including clean air, fresh water, and nourishing food.

It provides a calm and peaceful environment that allows individuals to relax and rejuvenate. Additionally, nature contributes to spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth, as can be seen in the works of poets and artists who find inspiration in its beauty.

However, despite its importance, nature is often exploited and threatened by human activities, leading to environmental degradation, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. It is the responsibility of humans to take affirmative action to conserve and protect nature for the benefit of the present and future generations.

Essay Example 9

The natural world has long captivated the human imagination, inspiring artists, poets, scientists, and everyday individuals alike. Its exquisite beauty and intricacy offer an inexhaustible array of topics for exploration, reflection, and admiration. In the English essay example on nature (Example 8), the author examines the theme of nature and its beneficial effects on our well-being.

The author convincingly argues that nature is not only aesthetically pleasing but also offers numerous physical and mental health benefits. Through vivid and descriptive language, the author evokes the splendor of the natural world, urging us to pause and appreciate its wonders. This essay is a powerful testament to the vital role nature plays in our lives and the imperative to safeguard and preserve it for generations.

Essay Example 10

As we explore the topic of nature, we understand how its beauty and power continue to surprise us. Nature exemplifies something greater than ourselves, as it creates a peaceful atmosphere that can inspire us to appreciate the world around us.

Essay Example 11

The natural world is an awe-inspiring creation of divine beauty, resulting from the intricate interplay of various elements. It serves as a sanctuary of peace and tranquility due to its inherent magnificence. It affords individuals the perfect opportunity for introspection, reflection, and contemplation, enabling them to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings. Despite its soul-soothing effects, we often fail to appreciate its significance in our daily lives.

Given the ongoing impact of global warming on our environment, valuing nature has become critical. We now have a responsibility to safeguard it. The sustainability of the natural world is inextricably linked to our survival, and our actions continue to threaten it. Conserving and protecting the natural world is paramount.

Essay Example 12

Nature is a topic that has been a source of inspiration for writers and artists for centuries. It is a subject that has intrigued human beings since the beginning of time. In this essay on nature example 10 in English, we explore the beauty and importance of nature in our lives.

Nature is not just a source of inspiration, but it is also a provider of resources that sustain our lives. Trees give us oxygen to breathe, water supplies us with life-sustaining hydration, and soil provides the nourishment we need to grow food.

In addition, nature serves as a valuable means of solace for individuals in search of serenity and tranquility amid the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Its capacity to soothe the mind and spirit is irrefutable, providing a sanctuary of calm that is challenging to find elsewhere.

Finally, nature provides us with a glimpse into the divine. Its intricate and breathtaking beauty frequently astounds us, evoking admiration and wonder for its grandeur and reminding us of the enigmatic and powerful nature of the universe.

In summary, the natural world holds immense significance in our daily existence, affording us countless advantages that we often overlook. It is incumbent upon us to preserve and safeguard our ecosystem for the benefit of upcoming generations.

Through this act, we can secure a sustainable future for ourselves and the earth. Additionally, taking the time to admire the splendor of nature and its positive influence on our mental and physical health can bring a feeling of tranquility and satisfaction to our fast-paced lives. As the adage goes, “Nature never rushes, yet everything is achieved.”

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Toni Seychelle

Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

nature essay

Significance of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

Conservation of Nature

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

essay on walk in nature

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

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

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

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Student Blog – Phil 124

Reflection #2: out in nature.

The word “natural” is a term that can have several connotations depending on its audience. Therefore, for me, nature is the only thing that we as humans have no control over. We become powerless and thus the only power we have to become the spectators, listeners and appreciators.

For my field trip, I went to an area between the Kennedy Center and Potomac River; an area that is located in the city yet has managed to isolate it from the artificial. I preferred this specific spot because one of the most natural processes is the sunset, and this is the best place to watch it. I define sunset as a natural process because it is a moment in which we don’t have control over. Sunsets are an art painted within our universe yet the artist is anonymous and no human being can interfere with the brush strokes. Sunsets are the only connection between daylight and moonlight, the two most natural lights that creates life on planet earth.

This spot is neither a natural park nor a protected natural space. It is just a green space that is full of trees, squirrels and birds in front of the Potomac River. It has a path beside it so people can pass by with bicycles, running or walking. I realized this place while I was out for a run too but it was special for me because I realized I was impermanent there. I was just a passenger like everyone else there, just enjoying the ride and wasn’t able to adjust anything. My role there was either to enjoy the view or continue walking.

In my life, nature has a very important role because I believe that nature is our true home. Whenever I feel stressed or need to calm down or even ponder, I go to a place that I consider “natural”. As it is highlighted in Thoreau’s “Walking” nature is something that you should feel both with your spirit and body. Only when you are able to sense the nature with both of your spirit and body, you feel as a whole with nature. You not only feel enlightened, but also tend to perceive the world through a different lens. “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” When I am a whole with nature I not only feel relaxed, but also safe, since I feel like I am home; a place where my soul is tranquil, free and limitless.

I try to enjoy nature as much as I can since we, as humans and a society, are destroying it. If the natural spaces get extinct not only will my life but also all of the living creatures’ lives will be affected. As we are destroying nature, we are also destroying various ecosystems. As Jennifer Trowbridge discusses in the “The Significance of Biodiversity: Why We Should Protect the Natural Environment”, biodiversity should remain in order to evolution to continue. “However, humans have been the main cause of recent rapid “evolutionary” change. Ecosystems are being destroyed, animals and plants becoming extinct, and biodiversity is being lost due to increased human activity.” We are ruining the environment and causing the rate of change to become rapid and therefore very dangerous. No species can adapt to these abnormal ecosystems. Various species go through strange evolutions that cannot be classified “natural” and therefore end up in a path of extinction. We should be aware of the fact that we cannot build biodiversity once we destroy it. It is a damage that is irreversible.

Furthermore, we need nature not only for our ecosystem but also for the progress of humanity. Nature is what inspires us. It is what helps us to grow. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.” As long as we walk, we get inspired, healed, relaxed and therefore grow. If we all start walking together and caring more about the environment, we can all pause life for just a second and enjoy the sunset.

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Benefits of walking in nature if you have arthritis: Louise’s story

essay on walk in nature

Being active is one of the best things you can do to help manage your arthritis symptoms.

But if you don’t know how to start, Louise, 56, who lives with fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis , suggests grabbing some fresh air and going for a walk.

Here she shares how this simple activity helps her manage her pain levels and how spending time in nature boosts her mental wellbeing.

Living with fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis: Symptoms and diagnosis

Smiling Louise who has pink hair and cat-eyed sunglasses on a walk

Osteoarthritis  happens when the body can no longer maintain and repair one or more joints.

Eventually, the cartilage (the smooth cushioning substance covering the ends of bones) becomes thin and uneven, preventing the joint from moving easily.

Fibromyalgia is a long-term condition that causes many symptoms, including pain all over your body, constant exhaustion that doesn’t improve with rest (fatigue), and many other symptoms too.

Unlike arthritis where the problem is in the joints themselves, fibromyalgia is thought to happen when your central nervous system (your brain and spine) is not able to control or process sensory signals from other parts of your body in a healthy way.

"For me, it’s the feeling of fogginess that affects me most. Not being able to think clearly or not being able to remember the simplest of words.”

Louise, 56, who lives with fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis

“When fatigue hits, for me it’s most noticeable when I try to walk. I describe it as trying to wade through treacle. It feels like you want to power on, but your legs just won’t go.

“When you start off with a walk, you might feel that way. But if you just keep going and manage it for five to 10 minutes, I often find that it eases.”

Managing pain: Louise’s walking journey

As her pain worsened, Louise says: “I felt like the only way I could deal with this was through pain medicines. This is where opioid medicines started to come into the picture, and that was the sort of beginning of the downfall for me.

"Then I was referred to a Pain Service in Torbay where I started to learn about pain and the limitation of the drugs." 

Eventually, she got the help and support she needed, and her healthcare team helped her discontinue the opioid medicines slowly.

“To deal with the side effects of the withdrawal, the consultant suggested walking up and down the ward because exercise helps your body release endorphins, which are feel-good hormones.”

“Before I went into hospital, I took about 20 steps a day from the bed to the chair to the toilet again. But eventually I started clocking up more steps. I found that walking really helped. It was amazing, so I kept it up."

“When I came out of hospital, we’d drive to a flat place like the seafront, and I would walk along with a walker. Then eventually I started walking in local parks.

“Within the first year, my fitness improved from walking every day, I was able to ditch the walker and poles, I lost 8.5 stone in weight, and became a Ramblers Wellbeing Walk Leader, so I could set up a group for people with pain and health conditions."

Benefits of walking

Woman walking her dogs on country lane

It’s also helpful because:

  • It helps strengthen the muscles around your joints.
  • It can help you maintain a healthy weight.
  • It reduces the risk of osteoporosis .
  • You can choose the distance and pace that suits you.
  • It’s a free activity that can be done pretty much anywhere.
  • It can boost your mental well-being.
  • Spending time outside in the spring and summer is a great way to get some vitamin D . This is a vitamin that helps the body absorb calcium and phosphate to keep the bones strong. Just make sure you wear sunscreen and stay safe in the sun.

“What I didn't know was that the less I moved, the more I would hurt,” says Louise. “But actually, if I get up out the chair now, it might hurt a little bit initially, but if I keep it going it eases. So, it’s worth preserving.

"Even though it feels really daunting because you've got all that pain and it feels counterintuitive, actually getting active is the best thing you can do."

“Remember, you don't need to go and walk five miles. You don't even need to go and walk a mile. If it's completely new to you, just walk to the end of your drive and then tomorrow try and go a little bit further. Build on it slowly.”

What is mindfulness?

Man walking in woods

She says that walking in her local park is a great way to practise mindfulness.

“Mindfulness is about being present in the moment,” she explains. “So, while I'm walking, I’ll try and notice all the sights, sounds, and smells, around me. It’s a sensory experience.

“It means I'm not focusing on any pain I might have. I'm not focusing on worries I might have. I'm just in the moment experiencing nature. For me, it's the most powerful form of mindfulness and it never fails to make me feel good.

We've all got worries and sometimes it can feel like you’ve got the weight of the world on you. But if you get out into nature, it changes your whole mindset.”

"When you live with a health condition, especially arthritis, being as active as I possibly can be and being mindful while doing it is the most effective medicine I’ve found.”

How can i walk mindfully.

On your next walk, you could try:

  • Listening to the sound of the birds or the crunching leaves as you walk.
  • Looking out for flowers, mushrooms, wildlife, or different types of trees.
  • Noticing how the landscape changes every season.
  • Bringing your thoughts back to the present moment if your mind wanders.

“I find walking in cities and towns to be just as enjoyable,” adds Louise, "Just look up and see what’s around you. You can find some of the most amazing architecture. And if you find the sound of traffic overwhelming, you could put in some headphones and listen to something calming”

Making walking a daily habit

Louise knows that if you haven’t been active for a while, it can be difficult to get started.

However, she “would say give it a go because you don't know if you’ll enjoy it until you've tried it.”

If you want to make walking a daily habit, you could try:

  • Walking with friends, family or joining a walking group .
  • Starting small and slowly build up.
  • Schedule your walks so they become part of your routine .
  • Explore beautiful landscapes and scenery.
  • Set yourself small, but meaningful, goals and reward yourself when you achieve them

We’re here to help 

If you want to get more movement in your life, remember you don’t have to take the first step alone.

There are plenty of walking groups across the country for you to try, such as Ramblers UK or Paths for All . 

If you’ve been affected by issues in this story and need support with drug treatment, remember you’re entitled to NHS care in the same way as anyone else who has a health problem.

You should talk to your GP or approach a local drug service yourself . They can talk you through all your options. If you need help or support with your condition, you can also: 

  • Call our free helpline on 0800 5200 520 
  • Join our online community 
  • Stay in touch and follow us on X (Twitter) , Facebook and Instagram . 

In your area

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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:

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  • Nature Essay

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Essay About Nature

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

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

Importance of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

Role and Importance of Nature

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

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

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

Save Our Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature Conservation

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

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

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

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FAQs on Nature Essay

1. How Do You Define Nature?

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

2. How is Nature Important to Us?

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

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

3. How Should We Save Our Nature?

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

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Essay on Nature

essay on nature

Here we have shared the Essay on Nature in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 250, 400, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on Nature in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams. 

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on Nature in 150-250 words

Essay on nature in 300-450 words, essay on nature in 500-1000 words.

Nature is a precious gift that surrounds us, encompassing the world’s landscapes, ecosystems, and living beings. It is a source of immense beauty, inspiration, and solace. From towering mountains to vast oceans, lush forests to serene meadows, nature provides us with breathtaking sights and a sense of awe.

Nature is not only visually captivating but also essential for our survival and well-being. It sustains life by providing clean air, fresh water, and fertile soil. It is home to a diverse array of plants and animals, each playing a vital role in maintaining ecological balance.

Furthermore, spending time in nature has numerous benefits for our physical and mental health. It rejuvenates our spirits, reduces stress, and enhances our overall well-being. Immersing ourselves in nature’s tranquility allows us to disconnect from the fast-paced world and reconnect with our inner selves.

However, human activities have taken a toll on nature. Deforestation, pollution, and climate change threaten the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. It is our responsibility to protect and conserve nature for future generations.

Appreciating nature’s beauty and recognizing its significance is crucial. We must strive to live in harmony with nature, practicing sustainable lifestyles and preserving natural resources. By valuing and respecting nature, we can ensure its preservation and continue to enjoy its countless gifts.

In conclusion, nature is a precious and awe-inspiring entity that sustains life and provides solace and inspiration. It is essential for our physical and mental well-being. As stewards of the Earth, it is our responsibility to protect and conserve nature, ensuring its preservation for future generations to cherish and enjoy.

Nature is a magnificent and awe-inspiring gift that surrounds us, encompassing the diverse landscapes, ecosystems, and living beings that make up our planet. From the majestic mountains to the serene lakes, from the vibrant forests to the vast oceans, nature captivates us with its beauty, power, and serenity.

Nature provides us with numerous benefits and is essential for our survival and well-being. It is the source of clean air, freshwater, and fertile soil that sustains life on Earth. The intricate web of ecosystems, comprising plants, animals, and microorganisms, works together to maintain the delicate balance of nature.

Beyond its practical importance, nature has a profound impact on our physical and mental health. Spending time in nature has been shown to reduce stress, improve mood, and enhance overall well-being. The sight of a breathtaking sunset, the sound of waves crashing on the shore, or the touch of grass beneath our feet can have a soothing and therapeutic effect, allowing us to reconnect with ourselves and find solace in the beauty of the natural world.

Unfortunately, human activities have had a detrimental impact on nature. Deforestation, pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction threaten the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. It is imperative that we recognize the urgency of preserving and protecting nature for future generations.

Conservation and sustainable practices are vital for ensuring the continued well-being of our planet. We must strive to live in harmony with nature, embracing sustainable lifestyles and adopting practices that minimize our ecological footprint. This includes reducing waste, conserving energy and water, practicing responsible consumption, and supporting conservation efforts.

Furthermore, education and awareness play a crucial role in fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of nature. By learning about the intricate interconnectedness of ecosystems and the importance of biodiversity, we can develop a sense of responsibility and take action to protect and conserve the natural world.

Preserving nature is not just about ensuring our own well-being; it is a moral obligation to future generations and a commitment to the intrinsic value of all living beings and ecosystems. By valuing and respecting nature, we can create a more sustainable and harmonious future, where humans coexist with the natural world in a mutually beneficial relationship.

In conclusion, nature is a source of wonder, beauty, and vital resources. It sustains life, nourishes our souls, and provides us with a profound sense of connection. As custodians of the Earth, it is our responsibility to protect and preserve nature, adopting sustainable practices and fostering a deep appreciation for the natural world. By doing so, we can ensure a vibrant and thriving planet for ourselves and future generations to enjoy and cherish.

Title: Nature – A Pristine Gift Nurturing Life and Inspiring the Human Spirit

Introduction :

Nature, with its awe-inspiring landscapes, diverse ecosystems, and intricate web of life, is a pristine gift that surrounds us. It captivates us with its beauty, serenity, and transformative power. This essay explores the profound relationship between humans and nature, highlighting its importance for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It also emphasizes the urgent need to protect and preserve nature in the face of environmental challenges.

The Beauty and Diversity of Nature

Nature encompasses a vast array of breathtaking landscapes, from snow-capped mountains to lush forests, from vast oceans to tranquil meadows. Each holds its unique charm, captivating us with its grandeur, tranquility, and raw beauty. From the vibrant colors of blooming flowers to the graceful flight of birds, nature’s diversity evokes wonder and ignites our imagination.

Nurturing Life and Ecosystems

Nature sustains life on Earth, providing vital resources and supporting intricate ecosystems. It supplies us with clean air, freshwater, and fertile soil, enabling the growth of crops and the survival of diverse species. The delicate balance of ecosystems ensures the survival of plants, animals, and microorganisms, each playing a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity and ecological harmony.

Physical and Mental Well-being

Spending time in nature has numerous physical and mental health benefits. It reduces stress, anxiety, and depression, promoting a sense of calm and well-being. The healing power of nature can be seen in activities such as forest bathing, where individuals immerse themselves in natural environments to enhance their overall health. Nature provides a respite from the fast-paced urban life, allowing us to disconnect, recharge, and rejuvenate our spirits.

Inspiration and Spiritual Connection

Nature inspires us and stirs our innermost emotions. The grandeur of a mountain range, the rhythmic crashing of waves, or the delicate beauty of a flower can evoke a profound sense of awe and wonder. Nature’s beauty stimulates our creativity, kindles our imagination, and nurtures our spirit. It serves as a reminder of our place in the larger tapestry of life, connecting us to something greater than ourselves.

Environmental Challenges and the Need for Conservation

Nature is facing unprecedented challenges due to human activities. Deforestation, pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction pose significant threats to the delicate balance of ecosystems and the survival of countless species. The urgency to protect and preserve nature has never been greater. Conservation efforts, sustainable practices, and environmental awareness are crucial in mitigating these challenges and ensuring a sustainable future.

Cultivating a Connection with Nature

To protect and preserve nature, it is essential to cultivate a deep connection and appreciation for the natural world. Education plays a vital role in fostering environmental awareness and instilling a sense of responsibility. Encouraging outdoor experiences, nature-based activities, and environmental stewardship programs can nurture a love for nature and promote a sense of guardianship of the planet.

Conclusion :

Nature is a remarkable and invaluable gift, nurturing life, inspiring the human spirit, and offering solace and serenity. It is essential for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. However, it faces significant challenges that threaten its delicate balance and the well-being of future generations. By protecting and preserving nature, adopting sustainable practices, and fostering a deep connection with the natural world, we can ensure a vibrant and thriving planet for ourselves and future generations to enjoy and cherish. Let us embrace our role as stewards of the Earth and work collectively to safeguard nature’s invaluable gifts.

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  • ‘Architecton’ Review: Victor Kossakovsky’s Magnetic Film Essay Reflects On Man’s Relationship With Nature – Berlin Film Festival

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Architecton documentary

In a haunting prolog, we see the ruins of a housing estate in what is presumably war-torn Ukraine (Kossakovsky doesn’t always tell you where his cameras are pointing). A drone soars above the carnage, revealing the extent of the damage to buildings where people once lived. The evidence of their having been there now seems almost pathetic; these spaces seem barely adequate for existence, let alone survival. It’s the ugly, ignominious end of an ugly, ignominious building, but Kossakovsky’s seemingly cryptic tone-poem film is just dangling that idea in front of us as an aperitif.

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The film itself starts with a very strange ritual; an unnamed architect (later revealed to be Michele De Lucchi, another Italian) is building a stone circle in his garden. There is no purpose to this object other than to be a human-free zone: once completed, only De Lucchi’s dog is to be allowed within it.

While all this is going on, Kossakovsky’s roving eye takes us around the world, in a travelogue that shows us the resilience of the old world versus the transience of the modern. It shows the poetics of ruin, but it is a cycle with diminishing returns; the debris of the Romans and Greeks still has a grandeur and majesty that is missing from the shabby detritus of the modern world, as we see in the aftermath of the earthquake that laid waste to Turkey in the summer of last year.

It’s all very gnomic, but Kossakovsky can’t help but blurt his thoughts out in the epilogue, with a thesis that is really very simple: “Why do we build ugly, boring buildings when we know how to make beautiful ones?”

De Lucchi, a wonderfully lugubrious presence, knows this very well, and speaks quite candidly about his own complicity in this increasingly prevalent anti-aesthetic, saying that, as a global entity, we need to think about “what we build that nourishes the planet and what we build that will destroy it… Architecture is a way to think about how we live, how we behave.”

Such a concept isn’t all that new — it’s over 100 years since Le Corbusier declared that “a house is machine for living in” — but Kossakovsky’s fascinating, magnetic film essay does help us to reassess what we’ve lost over the centuries. And, best of all, it isn’t depressing; like Reggio’s film, it is a warning sounded in the good faith of being heard in the nick of time.

Architecton verbalizes something we are all thinking in the modern age of war and climate change: what will we leave behind, and what will it say about us to future generations? We can only pray that they’ll think of us kindly.

Title: Architecton Festival:   Berlin (Competition) Distributor: A24 Sales agent: The Match Factory Director: Victor Kossakovsky Running time:  1 hr 38 min

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  • 20 February 2024

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

essay on walk in nature

  • Kate Crawford 0

Kate Crawford is a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City and author of the 2021 book Atlas of AI .

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Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.

essay on walk in nature

Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science?

Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

And it’s not just energy. Generative AI systems need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. In West Des Moines, Iowa, a giant data-centre cluster serves OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4. A lawsuit by local residents revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use — increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports. One preprint 1 suggests that, globally, the demand for water for AI could be half that of the United Kingdom by 2027. In another 2 , Facebook AI researchers called the environmental effects of the industry’s pursuit of scale the “elephant in the room”.

Rather than pipe-dream technologies, we need pragmatic actions to limit AI’s ecological impacts now.

There’s no reason this can’t be done. The industry could prioritize using less energy, build more efficient models and rethink how it designs and uses data centres. As the BigScience project in France demonstrated with its BLOOM model 3 , it is possible to build a model of a similar size to OpenAI’s GPT-3 with a much lower carbon footprint. But that’s not what’s happening in the industry at large.

It remains very hard to get accurate and complete data on environmental impacts. The full planetary costs of generative AI are closely guarded corporate secrets. Figures rely on lab-based studies by researchers such as Emma Strubell 4 and Sasha Luccioni 3 ; limited company reports; and data released by local governments. At present, there’s little incentive for companies to change.

essay on walk in nature

There are holes in Europe’s AI Act — and researchers can help to fill them

But at last, legislators are taking notice. On 1 February, US Democrats led by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024 . The bill directs the National Institute for Standards and Technology to collaborate with academia, industry and civil society to establish standards for assessing AI’s environmental impact, and to create a voluntary reporting framework for AI developers and operators. Whether the legislation will pass remains uncertain.

Voluntary measures rarely produce a lasting culture of accountability and consistent adoption, because they rely on goodwill. Given the urgency, more needs to be done.

To truly address the environmental impacts of AI requires a multifaceted approach including the AI industry, researchers and legislators. In industry, sustainable practices should be imperative, and should include measuring and publicly reporting energy and water use; prioritizing the development of energy-efficient hardware, algorithms, and data centres; and using only renewable energy. Regular environmental audits by independent bodies would support transparency and adherence to standards.

Researchers could optimize neural network architectures for sustainability and collaborate with social and environmental scientists to guide technical designs towards greater ecological sustainability.

Finally, legislators should offer both carrots and sticks. At the outset, they could set benchmarks for energy and water use, incentivize the adoption of renewable energy and mandate comprehensive environmental reporting and impact assessments. The Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act is a start, but much more will be needed — and the clock is ticking.

Nature 626 , 693 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00478-x

Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. A. & Ren, S. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 (2023).

Wu, C.-J. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00364 (2021).

Luccioni, A. S., Viguier, S. & Ligozat, A.-L. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02001 (2022).

Kaack, L. H. et al. Nature Clim. Chang. 12 , 518–527 (2022).

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Competing Interests

K.C. is employed by both USC Annenberg, and Microsoft Research, which makes generative AI systems.

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