What is nature?
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.
- wikipedia
Protea Flower, an example of a flowering plant, a typical natural object. image: R.Conan-Davies
But more usually when we speak of 'nature' we mean the natural world in the sense of it not being manipulated or altered by human technology. So when people use the expression Getting back to nature it really means exposing your yourself to raw aspects of nature such as wind, sun, sand, trees or seeing animals and plants.
In the classification on clearlyexplained.com, nature generally refers to those things that can exist without human intervention. Though of course many things in nature have in fact been heavily influenced by human intervention.
For example the periodic table of the elements is a construction of elements (is in the technology section) that can be considered natural, but on earth many required human intervention to discover them for example hydrogen does not routinely exist on earth in free form.
The origin of the word 'nature'
The word 'nature' has it's origins in Latin, meaning 'to be born' from the verb nasci. Recall the word nascent also means 'coming into existence'
Much of our knowledge of the workings of nature comes from science.
Discover more aspects of nature ClearlyExplained.com here: