Emma Joyner- Nature of Nature

 Right now, I have been reading and really enjoying The Nature of Nature by Enric Sala. I appreciate the author’s perspective and I find their story to be very intriguing and relatable. The background information they provided gives context into who the author is as a person and delves a little deeper into why they felt compelled to write this piece in the first place; I can relate to the author’s affinity for marine biology. The author opens the discussion with a conversation about the Biosphere 2 Project. This was a project geared towards trying to replicate the conditions of Earth if we needed to leave our planet and live on another one. However, no experiment in this project has been successful in sustaining life. It’s interesting and it sets the tone for this miraculous planet we live on. When you think about all of the factors that need to be in place to sustain life, it is so amazing that everything about our planet seems “just right”. If we were just a little closer to the Sun, we’d die, just as if we were any further from it. Even in the face of grave adversity in the mass of the many mass extinction events of the Earth’s history, life persists each time. Life has a way of resilience and starting over that’s incredible to think about. 


Some questions that came up for me when reading were: Why is it so difficult for us to understand the invisible elements of ecosystems, like the flow of energy or the relationships between organism and their environment? In what ways is our limited understanding and perspective preventing us from solving some of the environmental issues present today?


In class, we have talked about the natural tendency of humans to be often reluctant to see beyond the immediate aspects of an issue. I think about this in terms of how we approach environmental conservation. If our research is biased toward a particular group of organisms, we can easily cloud or ignore other aspects that are equally important. For example, if we assess a species that we deem to be threatened, are we missing the bigger picture of how everything is interconnected?

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