What Is Nature?
What is nature? It is a simple question, but one that is surprisingly difficult to answer. Nature is one of the words in the English language that, along with pretty and normal, is ambiguous and vague. There is no general definition as, depending on the region of the country one is in and the people whom one asks, nature may be the small strip of trees behind the house, the 200 hundred-acre farm or “nonexistent.” The very ‘definition’ of nature shifts and changes with the region, its culture, and the people within it. One reason why the meaning of nature is so indistinct and used loosely to mean almost anything is interpretation. Nature can mean different things to different people because of how they interpret the world around…show more content… Personal experiences with nature alter the definition of what one sees as nature. While most people include the basic elementary definition of nature, (everything that is natural is nature), in their personal definitions, the main part of the definition is how they came to understand the natural world around them through their deeply personal experiences. This idea is reflected in Jenny Price’s Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA in which she learns how to see nature in different aspects after someone claimed that, “there is no nature here [in LA]” upon learning she was a nature writer (Price 3). After exploring and observing Los Angeles, Price concludes that society’s “definition of nature as only wild things” is false, as the much tainted, human abused Los Angeles River is still nature (3). Price’s interactions with a new type of nature, the “urban” nature, changed her definition of nature as she came to understand that nature is everywhere, and all around us. Just because society perceives something to be “too tame” for nature, does not mean that it is not nature – it just is not wild. The concept that nature can only be nature if it is “wild,” relates back to the troubling questions of what is nature, and how society can define it in a way that relates to everyone, especially if everyone’s view of nature is based on their personal and individual experiences with it. There may never be an answer to these questions as people’s views of nature vary not only on their personal interactions with it, but also due to their religious