the nature of life is to grow essay

The Beauty About The Nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.

Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."

It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.

• The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
• Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
• A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
• Each natural action is graceful.

"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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

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"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Student Opinion

What Role Does Nature Play in Your Life?

By Jeremy Engle

• April 19, 2019

What are your experiences with nature?

How often do you take a leisurely stroll through the grass, a garden or the woods? How often do you stop to look at, touch or smell a flower?

How do you feel when you are alone in nature? Do you find it relaxing, invigorating, healing?

In “ The Healing Power of Gardens ,” Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who died in 2015, wrote:

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In 40 years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

The essay continues:

I have lived in New York City for 50 years, and living here is sometimes made bearable for me only by its gardens. This has been true for my patients, too. When I worked at Beth Abraham, a hospital just across the road from the New York Botanical Garden, I found that there was nothing long-shut-in patients loved more than a visit to the garden — they spoke of the hospital and the garden as two different worlds. I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication. My friend Lowell has moderately severe Tourette’s syndrome. In his usual busy, city environment, he has hundreds of tics and verbal ejaculations each day — grunting, jumping, touching things compulsively. I was therefore amazed one day when we were hiking in a desert to realize that his tics had completely disappeared. The remoteness and uncrowdedness of the scene, combined with some ineffable calming effect of nature, served to defuse his ticcing, to “normalize” his neurological state, at least for a time. An elderly lady with Parkinson’s disease, whom I met in Guam, often found herself frozen, unable to initiate movement — a common problem for those with parkinsonism. But once we led her out into the garden, where plants and a rock garden provided a varied landscape, she was galvanized by this, and could rapidly, unaided, climb up the rocks and down again. I have a number of patients with very advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, who may have very little sense of orientation to their surroundings. They have forgotten, or cannot access, how to tie their shoes or handle cooking implements. But put them in front of a flower bed with some seedlings, and they will know exactly what to do — I have never seen such a patient plant something upside down.

The essay concludes:

Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

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Blog > Essay Advice , Personal Statement , Supplementals > Writing a College Essay About Nature? 5 Questions to Ask First

Writing a College Essay About Nature? 5 Questions to Ask First

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

Writing an effective college essay about nature requires a focus on outcomes and personal growth. Ask yourself questions about what you've gained, whether it relates to your field of study, and how it presents your interdisciplinary interests.

Working in admissions at a college in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t tell you how many essays I read that were about nature. It can be a great topic, especially if you’re applying to a school that prides itself on its outdoor opportunities.

But you can’t just write any old essay about nature. It still has to serve the purpose of a personal statement .

In this post, we’ll go through five questions that will help you assess whether to write about nature and, if so, how to approach it. Plus, stick around until the end to see a few examples of college essays about nature.

A quick word

I want to start with a quick refresher on why you write college essays in the first place.

Each part of your application works together to form a cohesive application narrative . Your personal statement anchors this narrative, and your supplementals add to and diversify it.

Remember that admissions officers are strapped for time and overwhelmed with applications. Your application has to make a good first impression and keep your admissions officers’ attention.

It also has to tell admissions officers something distinctive about you that will make them want to offer you one of their limited spaces on campus. Everything must connect back to who you are.

Whether you’re writing a personal statement or a supplemental about nature, never lose sight of this question: what do I want my admissions officers to learn about me from this essay?

Let that question guide your topic selection.

5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Writing a College Essay About Nature

Alright, with that quick note out of the way, let’s move on to these questions. College essays about nature can take on endless shapes and sizes, but these questions should get you started out on the right foot.

1. What is the outcome of my time in nature?

There’s no point in writing about a topic in your college application if it’s not clear what the outcome was. Is your story related to an internal, contemplative hobby? Or did you build something, hike a challenging trail, or go on some sort of distinctive outdoor adventure?

What were the intangible outcomes? In other words, what did you learn, how did you grow, how did it change who you are today?

And what were the tangible outcomes? Did you improve yourself or the world around you? Did you clean up a park? Feel physically empowered after climbing a mountain you thought you couldn’t?

Writing with an eye toward outcomes will keep your essay focused on what matters most.

2. What new knowledge have I gained through my interactions with nature?

The outcome of your time in nature can also be about what you learned.

Whether your big takeaways were academic, intellectual, creative, or personal, exploring the knowledge you gained while interacting with nature can be a compelling way to emphasize the personal meaning nature has in your life.

Let’s pretend you want to take a more academic approach. You might choose to write about how looking through your telescope was the first time you felt like a physicist. Or maybe you did fieldwork for your biology class and it made you realize you actually hate the outdoors and want to be in a lab all day.

Or perhaps the way a sunset reflected on the water inspired a painting you created. Or a walk you took resulted in the biggest epiphany of your life. The possibilities are endless.

3. Is nature related to my field of study?

Your essay doesn’t have to relate to your intended major, but finding a connection is one way to approach writing about nature.

If you want to go into biology or environmental studies, for example, then writing about your love of nature, a conservation project you worked on, or a special outdoor skill you have might make a lot of sense.

In these cases, focusing on outcomes is especially important. You want to show admissions officers that your academic interest is also something deeply and personally meaningful to you. You aren’t just interested in it as an academic matter. You’re ready to step out into the real world and make it happen.

4. If not, how does nature show my interdisciplinary interests?

If your topic doesn’t relate to your intended major, then you might also consider how you can relate the idea of nature to any interdisciplinary interests you have.

Whether you’re applying for a major in the humanities or the sciences, interdisciplinary thinking skills are always good to demonstrate.

Taking this approach can help you tie together your application narrative. Maybe you want to study public health but are also an avid rock climber. Your personal statement about rock climbing could lead into the idea that everyone has a right to access outdoor recreation as a public health matter.

5. Am I writing a supplemental essay?

Of course, how you approach your college essay about nature will depend on whether you’re writing a personal statement or a supplemental essay.

A personal statement should be a meaningful representation of who you are, while a supplemental essay should show strong school or academic fit.

If you’re writing a supplemental essay about nature, think about what kinds of connections to the school you might be able to make. Are there relevant natural features nearby, like mountains, wetlands, or lakes? Are there co-curricular clubs that you can reference, like ecology club or backpacking club?

In supplemental essays, making specific connections between your interests and what the school has to offer can show admissions officers that you’re a natural fit.

College Essay About Nature Examples

Ready to read some great examples of college essays about nature?

Our first example, Gone Fishing , talks about the writer’s journey learning to love nature.

Kayaking the Missouri shows a student’s leadership in nature, and Ski Patrol dives into the lessons the writer learned while working on ski patrol.

Key Takeaways

Nature is a common college essay topic, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write about it. The topic can lead to really impactful personal statements and supplemental essays, as long as you keep your focus on outcomes and meaning.

Ask yourself these questions before you get started on your college essay about nature to make sure you’re keeping your attention on what will have the greatest effect on admissions officers.

And when you’re ready to take your college essays to the next level, consider signing up for the Essay Academy, our all-in-one digital college essay course.

Liked that? Try this next.

How to Write a College Essay (Exercises + Examples)

The Incredible Power of a Cohesive College Application

12 Common App Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

21 College Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

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Open a textbook in biology and you’ll find a purported definition of life, usually in the form of a list of characteristics that apply to organisms, their parts, their interactions, or their history. Often these definitions will be nothing more than descriptions or rely on more controversial theoretical commitments.

Like many basic concepts, it is difficult to non-controversially define life. Most people simply avoid the issue by ignoring marginal cases, accepting the vagueness of the boundary cases, or setting aside the whole issue as beyond their scope. Nonetheless, there are many people whose work seems to require a rigorous demarcation of life, especially in new scientific contexts, such as astrobiology, origins of life, or synthetic biology. As such, the nature of life continues to be a hotly debated topic.

This article focuses on the subject matter of biology: life. The first half of this article will focus on attempts to characterize life by both philosophers and scientists. The first section will describe alternative accounts of definitions, its two subsections will cover historical and contemporary definitions, and section 2 covers the recent countertrend in skepticism toward definitions of life. Because the various stakeholders have different goals, the second half will focus on those goals. Sections 3, 4, and 5 cover topics that some believe require a definition of life: artificial and synthetic life, the origin(s) of life, and the search for life in the Universe. Section 6 covers entities that are much larger or smaller than organisms, while section 7 covers the role life takes in the context of society, especially with respect to questions raised by new technology.

1.1 Definitions of Life from Antiquity to Darwin

1.2 contemporary definitions of life, 2. definitional skepticism, 3. artificial and synthetic life, 4. origin(s) of life, 5. search for life, 6. the macro and the micro perspectives, 7. ethics, law, and politics, 8. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. definition(s).

Few things in biology have been more extensively discussed than the definition of life. It is frustrating so little progress has been made on the topic in the face of so much research, theory, and debate. There are many reasons for this failure: disagreements about how abstract or specific definitions should be, different commitments as to what ought to be included in a definition, and even disagreement about the nature of definitions themselves. This section covers the nature and role of definitions. Each of these has been used in approaching the question of life.

Historically, when philosophers and scientists define a concept, the aim is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions. These theoretical definitions (also called real , ideal or philosophical definitions) are often impractical or fragile as they can be challenged with a single imagined counterexample. A classic case is the definition of “bachelors” as “unmarried males.” It is trivial to find examples that fit this definition without intuitively being bachelors: male dogs, baby boys, widowers, etc. Similarly, for any definition of life, one can either show living cases that are left out of the definition or non-living cases that are included by it. Life is organized, but so are geological formations. Life processes energy, but so does fire. Life evolves using complex biochemistry, but so do prions. Life is self-sustaining, but parasites are not. Life is at thermodynamic disequilibrium, but so is much else. As we’ll see shortly, perhaps theoretical definitions are too rigid a standard. The real world is far too complex for limited criteria to decide every marginal case.

Non-philosophers are typically quite frustrated by the back-and-forth that results from theoretical definitions. To that end, some favor operational (or working ) definitions, ones that work in practice to narrow down the range of phenomena under consideration. This approach is often not considered a kind of definition by philosophers (see Gupta 2021). Operational definitions tend to be philosophically shallow. For example, NASA’s operational definition of life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution” (Joyce 1994) might include viruses while excluding mules. The lack of depth of an operational definition can frustrate theoretically minded people, including other scientists.

There are several other conceptions of definition, as well. The nominal (also lexicographer or dictionary ) definition is determined by analyzing usage. It will not work for cutting edge or controversial issues because such definitions follow the slow process of cultural acceptance rather than provide guidance to researchers at the forefront of these debates. Scholars are more likely to quote a dictionary definition than be illuminated by one.

There are also demonstrative or ostensive definitions, which are concepts we can convey by mere shared observations: “that is red” while pointing at a red object, for instance. Potter Stewart famously defined pornography in this manner by saying “I know it when I see it” (Stewart 1964). Knowledge by ostension may reflect epistemic access to a natural kind, although this may feel indistinguishable from an internalized cultural category. There is huge variation among what scientists consider ‘life,’ even among objects on Earth, like viruses and prions, which suggests this kind of definition is not viable for this target.

Then there are stipulative definitions, which are terms introduced and defined by fiat. A circle in Euclidean geometry can be defined as a round plane figure whose boundary consists of infinite points equidistant to a single other point. There are no possible counterexamples to this definition, given the axioms of Euclidean geometry. This approach provides little refuge in the real world. Consider an attempt to define swans as “white birds with long necks.” By stipulation, storks, great egrets, and many cranes would be swans, while Australia’s black swans would not. Such a quick and dirty definition seems to define the category out of hand and perhaps only works within accepted axioms or theories. Life could be stipulated as “carbon-based reproducing entities,” which would rule out silicon-based life by fiat. Such a definition merely pushes the debate to the scenarios in which the stipulated definition goes against intuitive notions.

The 20th century saw some steps away from definitions toward alternative views of concepts, notably prototypes , exemplars , and theories (Machery 2009). Prototype concepts are abstract features shared by most, but not all members of a category (Rosch & Mervis 1975; Rosch 1978; Hampton 1979, 2006; Smith 2002). The definitions of life in biology textbooks might be charitably understood as prototype concepts. So, too, are the property cluster natural kinds popular in philosophy of biology (Boyd 1991, 1999, 2010; Diguez 2013; Slater 2015). Exemplars are concepts built around similarity to a particular individual case (Medin & Schaffer 1978, Nosofsky 1986). Both prototypes and exemplar concepts rely on similarity to paradigmatic cases, with the former being an imagined ideal and the latter being a real instance (Komatsu 1992). For similarity-based concepts to work in scientific cases such as life, we need an account of which similarities matter, how much, and why. In contrast to similarity-based concepts, the requirements of theory concepts are somewhat more nebulous. Theory concepts are modeled on scientific theories and thus reflect their diversity (Carey 1985, Murphy & Medin 1985, Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997). At the core, theory concepts rely on explanations for why the members of a category share certain properties. Marginal cases of life, such as viruses, prions, or protocells, might be included in some theories of life but not others.

In sum, there are many potential approaches to definitions, each with different benefits, drawbacks, and standards of success. Much more could be said about these and other possible approaches, but this will suffice for our purposes. Some of the disagreements about defining life dissolve upon clarifying which type of definition or concept is being used. Many of the explicit attempts to define life have focused on either operational and philosophical definitions, while often not acknowledging or misunderstanding the distinction between these. One will note these two definitions are at cross-purposes – operational definitions can be quick and dirty, but philosophical definitions seek to give necessary and sufficient conditions. Less work has been done on life as a non-definitional concept, although that is perhaps changing.

This subsection briefly explores historical definitions of life. There are more in depth treatments of the matter, to which an interested reader should turn (Bedau & Cleland 2010, Riskin 2015, Mix 2018). Approaches to this issue vary widely across historians, philosophers, and scientists, so some skepticism about any individual author’s approach to the topic is warranted.

We begin with the Greeks. In several dialogues, notably the Phaedrus , Timeaus , and Republic , Plato divided life into three parts: vegetable life, animal life, and rational life. All living creatures possessed the first in the form of nutrition and reproduction, animals were additionally capable of sensation and locomotion, and humans also had rational souls. Plato’s subsequent influence in Christian theology may be apparent in spirit if not in detail. In Christian theology, human life was not only rational, but also involved an eternal, spiritual soul and an internal, conscious life.

Plato’s student, Aristotle, had a different notion in which living things had an appropriate form, material, and goal-directedness ( De Anima , 412a1–416b). Aristotle held life to be a form of self-motion, perpetuation, or self-alteration (Byers 2006). For Aristotle, the capacity to resist internal and external perturbations was the essential distinction between living beings and non-living objects. Other features were accidental. This quest for demarcating the essential from the accidental for life has persisted to this day in searches for theoretical definitions of life as well as in attacks against those not interested in such definitions.

Centuries later, Descartes drew a sharper distinction between animal life and rational life than between inanimate objects and animal life. This was a turn away from medieval approaches, which had taken the gap between vegetables and animals to be broader. For Descartes, animals are analogous to complex clocks and lack the inner or spiritual life central to the human experience (Descartes 2010/1664). As such, Descartes’ category of life neither mapped onto Greek conceptions nor current conceptual frameworks. The mechanistic view developed by Descartes and his followers is often thought to be continuous with current scientific thinking, but this is perhaps anachronistic, as much of the theoretical underpinning separating animal life and rational life is no longer accepted.

The responses to Descartes came to be grouped under the heading ‘vitalism.’ Vitalism, which spanned three centuries, was a heterogenous philosophical position unified by adherents’ doubt of a fully mechanistic view of life. Vitalists had ontologies of defining features of life as varied as immaterial causes, particular arrangements of matter, a special life fluid, a particular end goal, or even mental forces. A whiggish history of biology will declare the death of vitalism with Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate. The suggestion is that if biological chemicals can be produced from mere chemistry, then biology is also mere chemistry. Although this was an important step, many chemists already had accepted a mechanistic world view, and many other researchers continued to develop vitalist theories well into the 20th century (Bergson 1959, Driesch 1905/1914).

The 20th century largely saw the mechanist/vitalist divide dissipate. Despite the difficulties described above about definitions, hundreds of scientists, philosophers, and others have tried their hand at defining life. Much of the interest is motivated by new science and new technologies – including artificial life, synthetic biology, origins of life, and astrobiology – which complicate the issue by violating some of the traditional groupings of properties associated with life. There are numerous books, articles, and workshops on the nature of life (Pályi et al. 2002, Popa 2004, Bedau & Cleland 2010).

Table 1. Some recent attempts at meta-categories for life definitions. Each column is one account’s categories, the rows are lined up according to rough similarity.

There are perhaps thousands of competing definitions proposed across hundreds of articles. A true survey of that variety would be beyond the scope of this article and beyond your patience as a reader. Nevertheless, some broad categories have been proposed that might offer some insight into current contending definitions. Table 1 summarizes three of the most rigorous attempts this century to categorize definitions of life.

Each of these authors used different approaches to arrive at their categories. Popa 2004 and Trifonov 2011 attempted to reverse engineer the categories from dozens of definitions collected from many dozens of experts, while Malaterre and Chartier 2019 conducted a more extensive, text-mining approach across 30,000 scientific articles selected from journals that published pieces in biology. As one can see, there are areas of rough overlap, but each categorization scheme has its own unique categories as well.

Most of the definitions considered by these authors straddle some of these distinctions and are often ambiguous as to whether they are intended to be theoretical definitions, operational definitions, or something else. For example, Popa 2004 considers definitions ranging from Oparin 1961’s “Any system capable of replication and mutation is alive” to Schulze-Makuch et al. 2002:

We propose to define living systems as those that are: (1) composed of bounded micro-environments in thermodynamic equilibrium with their surroundings; (2) capable of transforming energy to maintain their low-entropy states; and (3) able to replicate structurally distinct copies of themselves from an instructional code perpetuated indefinitely through time despite the demise of the individual carrier through which it is transmitted.

Categorizing definitions such as these necessarily requires some choices and reasonable people can disagree about whether each belongs in one or more categories.

The takeaway from current understandings of the definition of life is that there is no consensus forthcoming in the near future. One concern is that these are summaries of attempts to define a category for which there is only loose agreement. Many scientists disagree as to the phenomena a definition of life is intended to unify. Some scientists would include prions, viruses, and entities only hypothesized to exist in the origin of life, while others would completely reject them. Some might accept digital organisms as alive, others would deny this approach. Conceptual equivocation could have significant costs for research. One field recently quantified this cost, suggesting it is more than a merely theoretical concern (Trombley and Cottenie 2019). Given the diversity described above, one may be tempted to adopt a definitional pluralism : there are many ways to be alive. For some reason, that approach is not common in the literature.

Nearly everybody agrees there is a distinction between life and non-life, typically understood as a difference in kind rather than one of degree. Furthermore, most people involved accept that life is some sort of natural kind, rather than a human psychological concept. That said, a common theme in recent philosophical work has been to express skepticism of life definitions as a goal. The literature on the definition of life is vast, repetitive, and utterly inconclusive. Philosophers have disagreed as to the ultimate source of the lack of consensus, citing unstated assumptions in either the definer’s approach or the question itself. Note that many scientists are less likely to be skeptical of the goal of defining life, though also more resistant to engaging in the philosophical debate.

One skeptical view has arisen from the observation that theoretical definitions of life presume a theory of life (Cleland and Chyba 2002, Benner 2010, Cleland 2019). Although it is not obvious that the authors allude to the theory-theory of concepts, described in section 1, a common analogy is to early chemical theory. According to this analogy, early alchemists likened the alchemists’ Aqua regia (“royal water”) and Aqua fortis (“strong water”). Development of atomic theory revealed, Cleland argues, that the true nature of water was H 2 O, while the other ‘waters’ were HNO 3 + 3 HCl and HNO 3 , respectively. Cleland advocates avoiding definitions altogether, fearing they will blind us to new instances of life, and instead opts for tentative criteria, which she believes avoid the implicit dogma of even operational definitions.

Other authors have pointed out that the explanandum of life is itself up for debate (Tsokolov 2009, Mix 2020, Parke 2020). According to Emily Parke, some accept life as applying to individuals, whereas other definitions apply to collectives first (including entire planets) and individuals derivatively. Relatedly, most believe life is some kind of entity rather than some kind of relation or process (but see Nicholson and Dupré 2018). Parke also points out that some definitions seek a material basis, perhaps limiting life’s substrate to the biochemistry we know on Earth, while others are functional. Sagan famously worried about biochemical definitions because they were prone to ‘Earth Chauvinism’ for privileging our own biochemistry (1970). Other authors take our biochemistry to be independently justified as universal (Pace 2001, Benner et al. 2004, but see Bains 2004). Finally, Parke distinguishes between those that seek clean boundaries and those that accept the possibility of a continuum of ‘lifelikeness.’

Other authors have advocated a kind of quietism about definitions, maintaining that folk concepts need not match up with scientific ones (Machery 2011), any definitions would not change scientific practice (Szostak 2012), advocated a radical conceptual rethinking (Mariscal & Doolittle 2020), or denied the distinction between life & non-life entirely (Jabr 2013).

This last position of eliminativism could be expanded as it helps illustrate all other life skeptical positions. Cowie 2009 classifies eliminativist goals as either linguistic or ontological. Ontological eliminativists don’t believe the objects they are eliminating truly exist. We’re all eliminativists about something, perhaps ghosts or fairies. Linguistic/conceptual eliminativists, on the other hand are merely suspicious of theoretical terms or concepts, what Ramsey 2020 calls ‘category dissolution’ or ‘conceptual fragmentation.’ In essence, it’s not that there aren’t living things, it’s just that the category life is heterogeneous rather than a natural kind. According to Cowie, one can deny that anything matching our theoretical definition of life actually exists in the world while still accepting it as a useful fiction. Conversely, one may think scientific theories about life are fruitless or that the term is too vague and confused to be useful, without doubting life exists. If we accept any of these alternatives, we should perhaps avoid ever using the term ‘life’ in isolation and instead reference Metabolic Life and Evolutionary Life and all the other conceptions.

At play in these various forms of skepticism are several underlying assumptions. Among other disagreements, researchers disagree about what life is, whether it is a natural kind with an essence or a human construct; they disagree as to the purpose of defining life, especially if it will not change scientific practice; and they disagree as to the features of life that are relevant and the ones that are mere consequences. When researchers hold unstated assumptions such as these, they are liable to mistake the source of their disagreement.

The rest of this article will focus on uses of the various life concepts. Some of the definitions described above are derived from, or necessary for, specific scientific and societal purposes. This section focuses on artificial and synthetic life.

In principle, most contemporary scientists and philosophers believe life can be created, but there is broad disagreement as to what needs to be recreated for something to be life. In functional approaches, mere formal organization sufficiently similar to organisms may be enough. Complexly configured robots (“hardware”) or computer programs (“software”) might qualify. This view is known as Strong Artificial Life (A-Life for short) and has received much of the same pushback as the Strong Artificial Intelligence approach before it (Sober 1991, Boden 1999, Brooks 2001). Those who reject the Strong A-Life view believe that functional approaches miss some of the essential features of biology for either epistemic or ontological reasons. Epistemic objections might be consistent with the possibility of Strong A-Life, but doubt that we have the knowledge to recreate the relevant biological functions in a digital framework. Conversely, most of the objections to Strong A-Life have been ontological, resting on the view that representations cannot be equivalent to that which they represent and that perhaps life requires chemical embodiment, ruling Strong A-Life impossible by fiat.

Weak A-Life approaches, on the other hand, don’t presume the ontological equivalence of structurally similar circuits and cells. Instead, proponents suggest the more modest goal of developing a deeper understanding of life as we know it by exploring the effects of various parameters in simulations, effectively placing life in a broader context of possible biology (Langton 1989, 1995). For example, in the Terra program, software was pitted against other software for processing power (Ray 1993). Unexpected by the researchers at the time, software parasitism evolved: software would co-opt the reproductive processing of other software. Policing mechanisms also evolved, leading to an arms race between free-riders and the software trying to stop them.

Whether one accepts the strong or weak interpretation of A-Life, these in silico approaches are cheaper than equivalent work done in real organisms. They also offer possibilities that are not available in ordinary biology, such as programming alternative parameters to take the place of laws of nature and exploring relationships across deep time and space quickly and efficiently.

Another approach worth highlighting is that of synthetic life (“wetware”). Less conceptually troubled, synthetic life can also address some questions of A-Life, while allowing for a finer grain of realism. Synthetic life approaches have explored creating self-replication (Lincoln & Joyce 2009), minimal genomes (Koonin 2000, Hutchinson et al. 2016), a chemical evolution (Gromski et al. 2020), and other projects. Not all synthetic biology is in the business of investigating life as it could be, as not all computer programming is A-Life. Nevertheless, the tools developed by both can be illuminating. By exploring possibilities, scientists can discover previously hidden relationships, revealing which aspects of life are more or less plausible than expected.

Inextricable from the question of life’s nature is the question of its origin. Ancient and modern thinkers accepted that life often arose spontaneously from non-life. Two centuries of experiments eventually overturned this widely accepted view, culminating in Louis Pasteur’s swan-neck bottle experiments. Since then, the puzzle of Life’s origin has been one of the biggest and most important in all of science.

Darwin was famously silent about the problem, although in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, Darwin confided that he imagined life originating in “some warm little pond” (see Other Internet Resources below; and Peretó et al. 2009). Subsequent work on the subject was sparse until the 1920s when Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane independently proposed hypotheses for life’s origin in then plausible early Earth conditions (Haldane 1929; Oparin 2010/1936). As a graduate student in the 1950s, Stanley Miller tested the proposal, discovering dozens of amino acids in the mixture (1953). Since then, the field of origins-of-life studies has expanded dramatically.

Our earliest reliable records of this planet, some 3.5 billion years ago, contain distinctive evidence of microbial fossils, including distinctive shapes that correlate to the sizes and shapes of current prokaryotes, as well as carbon-ratios distinctive to life as we know it (Schopf 1993, Schopf et al. 2017). Many analyses have pushed our confidence in life’s earlier origin significantly further back, suggesting that basically as soon as Earth was not molten, it was filled with life (Pearce et al. 2018, Lineweaver 2020). How life started and why it started so quickly remains one of the most pressing open questions in science.

There are many open philosophical issues in origins of life research. Several of these are centered around the explanandum in question and epistemological limits to our knowledge. Researchers differ, for example, as to whether the purpose of origins-of-life research is to discover how life could have originated or how it did originate (Scharf et al. 2015, Mariscal et al. 2019). Some steps in the process could have been chancy, others could have been deterministic but highly contingent, still others could have been the only way life ever originates anywhere in the Universe.

There are several broad approaches to investigating the origin of life. “Bottom-Up” approaches begin with pre-biotic chemistry and explore how it could withstand stressors in order for lifelike entities to form and evolve. At present, there are many unsolved problems, most notably that most energetically favorable interactions would consume the proto-life forms involved. Scientists have cleverly attempted to ease the problem by relaxing assumptions: perhaps the environment provided our first boundaries (Koonin 2009), or perhaps it provided porto-genetic material (Mathis et al. 2017), all of this could have occurred in a viscous solvent instead of a cell (He et al. 2017), or on a surface (Wächtershäuser 1988), or using a variety of entities that eventually became encapsulated (Eigen & Schuster 1977). Nevertheless, the gulf between the pre-biotic chemistry and the simplest life forms is still huge and any number of explanations only account for a tiny portion of the conceptual distance.

Another approach, “Top-Down,” uses current taxa to infer the nature and timing of the origin of life on Earth. To do so, we take current examples of life on Earth and trace their ancestry, by comparing the nearly hundred shared genes, primarily associated with biological translation (Koonin 2011). All life shares a last universal common ancestor, “LUCA” for short. There may have been several origins of life, but our evidence is insufficient to distinguish this scenario from a single origin. Nevertheless, at least one origin, presumably in Earthly pre-biotic conditions, led to the existence of LUCA, an important constraint upon theorizing about the origin of life. It is widely expected that LUCA was merely one creature in a larger population and existed long after the origin of the first organism. There are also a variety of concerns with respect to LUCA: whether it was simple or complex (Mariscal & Doolittle 2015); whether it had a membrane that resembled any of the current membranes (Koonin 2011); whether the genes it contained were ancestors of our own genes or subsequently acquired (Doolittle & Brown 1994, Woese & Fox 1977; Woese 1998); whether its genome was made of DNA (Forterre 2006a), whether it was a heterotroph or autotroph; where it lived; and when it lived.

The gap between Top-Down and Bottom-Up approaches is huge: untold generations passed between pre-biotic chemistry and LUCA. We may never be able to solve Life’s origin, but each step brings us closer to understanding the trajectory.

Even the most pessimistic analyses of the likelihood of life suggests life on Earth is not unique (Frank & Sullivan 2016). Many scientists take that as a good reason to search for life elsewhere in the Universe. The current search for life elsewhere focuses on two extremes: the chemical byproducts of life and the technological signals of intelligent life. The social interactions of alien populations might be interesting, but they are hard to study as of yet. Thus, we search for biosignatures that might uniquely identify life from a great distance. We’ll take each in turn.

Biosignatures, as the name implies, are purported to be markers of life. Chemical biosignatures are compounds either rarely or never produced without the assistance of life on Earth. Finding biosignatures thus implies a material conception of life, likely in the form of biochemistry, metabolism, or thermodynamics. There have been many attempts to detect biosignatures, primarily on Mars. These approaches include experiments done on planetary surfaces, observations from Earth or low-earth orbit, and study of meteors and other debris from nearby planetary bodies.

More practically, satellite or telescope observations of other planets have been used to search for gasses outside of thermodynamic equilibrium. Methane has been sporadically detected on Mars since 2004 (Formisano et al. 2004, Webster et al. 2018) with an accompanying claim of formaldehyde detection (Peplow 2005). Venus has also been a source of attention, with phosphine gas detected in the clouds above Venus (Greaves et al. 2020). A controversial finding, it nevertheless caught the scientific imagination. Future scientific research is expected to accelerate this method of observation, especially with new data gathered by the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With its equipment, JWST is able to image exoplanets at resolutions allowing the detection of gas biomarkers in the atmospheres of exoplanets (Loeb & Maoz 2013).

By contrast, there have been scarce attempts to detect chemical life while on the surface of another planet. In 1975, NASA sent the Viking landers to Mars, tasked with a variety of scientific experiments including some that were purported to detect life if it was present. One, the Labeled Release Experiment, did, but its results were inconsistent with the other on-board experiments, so the result was deemed inconclusive (Levin & Straat 1976, Ezell & Ezell 1984). The current Perseverence rover on Mars is able to assess certain biosignatures and upcoming missions by NASA, the Chinese National Space Administration, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency all seek to determine whether Mars has evidence of past or current life.

It is not obvious that life on Mars would be a separate origin than life on Earth, as the two planets exchange tons of rocks each year and it is at least theoretically possible that life could have formed on one planet and been subsequently transferred to the other (McKay 2010). Since Mars is a smaller body than Earth, it coalesced before Earth and thus it is conceivable that life might have formed there first, although this is a relatively marginal view in the astrobiology community. Meteorites from Mars and other planetary bodies have also been the source of purported biosignatures. The Martian meteorite ALH84001 was instrumental in forming the science of astrobiology in 1996, after NASA scientists discovered bacteria-like structures (McKay et al. 1996). Subsequent meteorites have also garnered scientific interest (e.g. White et al. 2014).

The other major attempt to search for life, that of searching for intelligence, more readily captures the imagination. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been ongoing for centuries (Dick 1982). Fierce debates between those that took Earth to be unique and those that took it to be one of a plurality of worlds persisted for millennia (and still do, to some extent). Advocates of the plurality of worlds view searched their telescopes for evidence. A famous instance is Percival Lowell’s drawings of Martian canals in the 1890s. Influenced by the mid-1800s observations of what appeared to be channels criss-crossing Mars, Lowell drew a series of canals based on his observations. Science fiction soon picked up the observation and conjectured a dying civilization, hoping to squeeze water out of the last bits of remaining ice in the Martian poles.

Partially driven by the science fiction following Lowell’s drawings, the early 20th century saw increased interest in detecting radio signals from Outer Space. This interest accelerated after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and was more systematically and formally approached starting in the late 1970s. SETI research has not been publicly funded since 1994, but private and public donors, as well as academic and lay researchers have kept the program going since. There are many technical challenges to the search: space is unimaginably huge, signals are weak, possibilities of interstellar communication are myriad, and our searches can only cover an insignificant portion of the task.

More controversially, many dozens of messages have been sent into Outer Space since 1974. A few have been in the form of physical objects aboard spacecraft, but most have been radio signals aimed at promising stars or star clusters. sometimes called Active SETI or METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Although the practice continues due to its low cost and relative ease, many philosophers, scientists, and policy experts have come out against the practice largely due to the risk of broadcasting our presence to potentially hostile forces on behalf of future generations that cannot consent (Smith 2020).

Scientists grow more concerned about philosophical questions when scientific limitations or conceptual choices are made apparent to them. Those scientists who study deep time, deep space, abstract issues, or questions of ethics are often keenly aware of the philosophical choices that influence their research from identification of research question to interpretation of the data. This section briefly goes through other scientific contexts in which how life is defined is relevant, which address scales well below and well above the organism level.

There are several biological entities for which it is an open question as to whether they are alive. Viruses, for example, are units of genetic material encased in a protein coat. It is unknown whether all viruses share common ancestor (Koonin et al. 2006, Moreira and López Garcia 2009) nor how they originated, be it escaped transposable elements, reduced cells, or some ancestral third option (Forterre 2006b). The status of viruses as living is mired with controversy, with some people holding virons to be alive, others believing them not to be, and a third camp has them as living only in the context of an infected cell, but a mere ‘seed’ otherwise (Forterre 2010).

There are other entities in the “twilight zone of microbiology,” including transposable elements, viroids, unculturable (but putatively existing) microbes, organisms in vegetative states, and prions (Postgate 1999). The problems facing each of these are similar: several of them can evolve by natural selection, are biochemically complex, but lack other properties associated with life. For example, prions are protein products of life that can fold other prions in a way that allows for cumulative evolution (Li et al. 2010). They are rarely included in the category ‘life’ due to their inactivity in most settings and rather simple origin as a misfold of a functional protein.

If there is a twilight zone of microbiology, there is also a twilight zone of ecology. Organisms form populations, species, lineages, clades, and ecosystems. The status of each of these is an open question, but they have many of the same features associated with life as described above. Perhaps the strongest case can be made for eusocial insects, such as some ants, bees, wasps, and termites. In several species, there are rigid distinctions between the castes that reproduce and those that do not, with many of the latter serving the role of caring for the young (Hölldobler & Wilson 2009). One might note that entities above the organism level are as a rule less integrated and connected than the organisms that comprise them. This is perhaps a general feature of life: from the perspective of every item in the biological hierarchy, its parts are much more homogenous than it is. Our cells seem much more integrated and self-contained than our bodies, so, too, are individual insects more self-contained than the colonies to which they belong.

Most controversial has been the case of Gaia. Gaia is a term from Greek mythology; she is a personification of the planet Earth. In 1979, James Lovelock, revived the concept in his book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth . In his view, the Earth-wide set of interlocking ecosystems could be viewed as a single entity. One insight of Lovelock’s was already mentioned in the previous section: planet-wide interactions are the scale that matters in detecting life elsewhere. Lovelock’s book sparked controversy centered around the plausibility of his model of the Earth as a self-regulating homeostatic system. In the view of many at the time, it was an inaccurate description: Earth could not evolve in principle, and the subsequent ontological move of granting Earth the status of life was unmotivated (Doolittle 1981). Recent attempts to revitalize the notion of Gaia on a more theoretic footing involve both abiotic and biotic regulatory mechanisms and natural selection acting at the level of clades (Lenton et al. 2018, Doolittle 2019). Regardless of current attempts at a theoretical justification, the thought of Earth as a living entity motivated many in the environmental movement and the idea remains a common reference.

The term ‘life’ is important outside of biology. Often, the focus is not on the concept of life or life in general, but on the status of individual living entities. Typically, the focus is on the beginning and end stages of individual lives, which raises legal, religious, and moral questions. The start of an individual life has been the source of contraception and abortion discussions (Noonan 1967, Dellapenna 1978). Unfortunately, developmental biology does not provide an uncontroversial starting point for when ‘life’ begins (Maienschein 2014). The end of individual lives was also a heated debate in the 20th century as new technologies were able to keep human bodies alive long after they would have died in nature (DeGrazia 2016).

Any discussion of defining life in these contexts should begin by distinguishing between life and other phenomena that are often conflated with it in public discourse, such as sentience, personhood, and moral considerability. It’s unclear how much ontological, epistemic, or moral weight the category of life has independently of other properties. Attributing moral worth to non-living entities is still a minority position in environmental or comparative philosophy (but see Leopold 1949, Basl 2019). Thus, a starting position might be that life is a prerequisite for moral considerability. Nonetheless, most humans don’t mind killing bacteria for the sake of cleanliness and many people eat or wear the flesh of animals. So, in many discussions, life is only valuable when it is the vehicle for other equally nebulous properties like sentience, personhood, or immaterial souls.

If any living entities have a distinct moral or ontological status, most philosophers would accept that humans are among them (Rolston 1975, Goodpaster 1978). In these contexts, it matters when individual humans come into being and acquire such a status in their own right, be it conception, birth, or some time period in between. Considered opinions differ as to when this occurs and in virtue of what, be it mere possibility of self-sustained life, sentience, or other features. There is still a rampant pro-life/pro-choice split in cultural politics, which is somewhat lessened in European countries (Corbella 2020). There are equivalent, but less tendentious analogues in the contexts of euthanasia, the death penalty, war, and the prevention of death and disease. In these debates, both ethical and metaphysical commitments matter.

The public questions of life are often raised by new technologies. In the abortion discussion above, for example, new techniques to end pregnancies, from birth control to abortion procedures, as well as new medical technologies facilitating premature deliveries made the topic more contentious. Other technological innovations also raise questions about life. One such area is that of transhumanism (c.f. More and Vita-More 2013). Transhumanism is the movement aimed toward the use of technology for the human enhancement of social, psychological, and physical lives. These can range from prosthetics to implants or from pharmaceuticals to mental ‘uploading.’ There are bioconservatives, who argue against transhumanism for practical, moral, or aesthetic reasons. There are also posthumanists, who look forward to a world in which humans are replaced or eliminated by subsequent artificial intelligence. The debate over whether such posthumans might be ‘alive’ is similar in structure to the artificial life discussion in section 3. Bioconservatives also argue against this view. Among the topics in these debates are whether a particular technology counts as therapy or enhancement, whether the risks of alteration outweigh the benefits, whether certain goals of transhumanism are even possible, and which alterations will affect the moral or ontological status of the people that receive them.

That life is a source of ethical, legal, and political controversy is to be expected. And although it is beyond the scope of this article to adjudicate these debates, advocates ought to be aware of the deep vagueness in biology and disagreement within philosophy with respect to what life is, what an individual living organism is, when individual lives begin or end, and what features of life ground moral considerability.

Although the conceptual terrain of life concepts is well covered, there is no accepted view as yet. This is unlikely to change given the disciplinary backgrounds, explanatory values, and theoretical commitments of the stakeholders involved. A wide range of practices rely on competing conceptions of life: including artificial life, origins-of-life research, the search for life, and other projects described above.

Future scientific discoveries or inventions may break this impasse, as they have in other cases of theoretical gridlock. The development of atomic theory, discussed in section 2, created new categorical divisions that scientists accepted as more real than the categories of the ancients or alchemists. With this conceptual fragmentation, old categories were discarded and new ones accepted. One can imagine something similar happening in the case of life: many discoveries might show a clear cluster of how complex, lifelike entities can form from prebiotic chemistry, eventually winning over the majority of the scientific and philosophical community (e.g. Weber 2007, 2010).

Conversely, a simple decision might be made based on shared values or explanatory goals. The example of death may be illustrative. After decades of debate, a new decision, not a discovery, was made. Physicians concluded the irreversibility of death was the most important property for their purposes. They adopted the concept of whole-brain death as their operational criterion (DeGrazia 2016). The facts on the ground did not change, but the shared understanding did.

Finally, perhaps life will be accepted as a polysemous concept with each definitional cluster applying to a subset of the whole: biochemical life, evolutionary life, metabolic life, etc. Researchers may rely on context, accept some miscommunication, or simply stipulate the kind of life they mean. The example of planets, discussed in Brusse 2016 may help make this point. There was always a huge diversity within the category planet, which included the Sun and Moon until the Renaissance. In the early 1800s, asteroids were discovered. Initially, they were considered planets, they were demoted to ‘minor’ planets a few decades later, then simply ‘asteroids’ after the 1950s. Pluto was discovered in 1930, recognized as the smallest planet by the 1970s. From 1992 until 2006, many objects similar to Pluto were discovered until astronomers decided that the term planet actually covered at least two distinct, but scientifically interesting categories: typical planets and dwarf planets. Similarly, perhaps some of the categories described in section 1.2 will form the basis of accepted sub-categories of life.

It is still an open question as to how long the current situation will persist before a discovery forces a scientific reckoning or a decision obviates the need. For now, the debate continues.

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The meanings of life

Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. how do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one.

by Roy F Baumeister   + BIO

Parents often say: ‘I just want my children to be happy.’ It is unusual to hear: ‘I just want my children’s lives to be meaningful,’ yet that’s what most of us seem to want for ourselves. We fear meaninglessness. We fret about the ‘nihilism’ of this or that aspect of our culture. When we lose a sense of meaning, we get depressed. What is this thing we call meaning, and why might we need it so badly?

Let’s start with the last question. To be sure, happiness and meaningfulness frequently overlap. Perhaps some degree of meaning is a prerequisite for happiness, a necessary but insufficient condition. If that were the case, people might pursue meaning for purely instrumental reasons, as a step on the road towards happiness. But then, is there any reason to want meaning for its own sake? And if there isn’t, why would people ever choose lives that are more meaningful than happy, as they sometimes do?

The difference between meaningfulness and happiness was the focus of an investigation I worked on with my fellow social psychologists Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology this August. We carried out a survey of nearly 400 US citizens, ranging in age from 18 to 78. The survey posed questions about the extent to which people thought their lives were happy and the extent to which they thought they were meaningful. We did not supply a definition of happiness or meaning, so our subjects responded using their own understanding of those words. By asking a large number of other questions, we were able to see which factors went with happiness and which went with meaningfulness.

As you might expect, the two states turned out to overlap substantially. Almost half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice versa. Nevertheless, using statistical controls we were able to tease two apart, isolating the ‘pure’ effects of each one that were not based on the other. We narrowed our search to look for factors that had opposite effects on happiness and meaning, or at least, factors that had a positive correlation with one and not even a hint of a positive correlation with the other (negative or zero correlations were fine). Using this method, we found five sets of major differences between happiness and meaningfulness, five areas where different versions of the good life parted company.

The first had to do with getting what you want and need. Not surprisingly, satisfaction of desires was a reliable source of happiness. But it had nothing — maybe even less than nothing ­— to add to a sense of meaning. People are happier to the extent that they find their lives easy rather than difficult. Happy people say they have enough money to buy the things they want and the things they need. Good health is a factor that contributes to happiness but not to meaningfulness. Healthy people are happier than sick people, but the lives of sick people do not lack meaning. The more often people feel good — a feeling that can arise from getting what one wants or needs — the happier they are. The less often they feel bad, the happier they are. But the frequency of good and bad feelings turns out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions.

The second set of differences involved time frame. Meaning and happiness are apparently experienced quite differently in time. Happiness is about the present; meaning is about the future, or, more precisely, about linking past, present and future. The more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were. Time spent imagining the future was linked especially strongly to higher meaningfulness and lower happiness (as was worry, which I’ll come to later). Conversely, the more time people spent thinking about the here and now, the happier they were. Misery is often focused on the present, too, but people are happy more often than they are miserable. If you want to maximise your happiness, it looks like good advice to focus on the present, especially if your needs are being satisfied. Meaning, on the other hand, seems to come from assembling past, present and future into some kind of coherent story.

T his begins to suggest a theory for why it is we care so much about meaning. Perhaps the idea is to make happiness last . Happiness seems present-focused and fleeting, whereas meaning extends into the future and the past and looks fairly stable. For this reason, people might think that pursuing a meaningful life helps them to stay happy in the long run. They might even be right — though, in empirical fact, happiness is often fairly consistent over time. Those of us who are happy today are also likely to be happy months or even years from now, and those who are unhappy about something today commonly turn out to be unhappy about other things in the distant future. It feels as though happiness comes from outside, but the weight of evidence suggests that a big part of it comes from inside. Despite these realities, people experience happiness as something that is felt here and now, and that cannot be counted on to last. By contrast, meaning is seen as lasting, and so people might think they can establish a basis for a more lasting kind of happiness by cultivating meaning.

Social life was the locus of our third set of differences. As you might expect, connections to other people turned out to be important both for meaning and for happiness. Being alone in the world is linked to low levels of happiness and meaningfulness, as is feeling lonely. Nevertheless, it was the particular character of one’s social connections that determined which state they helped to bring about. Simply put, meaningfulness comes from contributing to other people, whereas happiness comes from what they contribute to you. This runs counter to some conventional wisdom: it is widely assumed that helping other people makes you happy. Well, to the extent that it does, the effect depends entirely on the overlap between meaning and happiness. Helping others had a big positive contribution to meaningfulness independent of happiness, but there was no sign that it boosted happiness independently of meaning. If anything, the effect was in the opposite direction: once we correct for the boost it gives to meaning, helping others can actually detract from one’s own happiness.

We found echoes of this phenomenon when we asked our subjects how much time they spent taking care of children. For non-parents, childcare contributed nothing to happiness or meaningfulness. Taking care of other people’s children is apparently neither very pleasant nor very unpleasant, and it doesn’t feel meaningful either. For parents, on the other hand, caring for children was a substantial source of meaning, though it still seemed irrelevant to happiness, probably because children are sometimes delightful and sometimes stressful and annoying, so it balances out.

Our survey had people rate themselves as ‘givers’ or as ‘takers’. Regarding oneself as a giving person strongly predicted more meaningfulness and less happiness. The effects for being a taker were weaker, possibly because people are reluctant to admit that they are takers. Even so, it was fairly clear that being a taker (or at least, considering oneself to be one) boosted happiness but reduced meaning.

The depth of social ties can also make a difference in how social life contributes to happiness and meaning. Spending time with friends was linked to higher happiness but it was irrelevant to meaning. Having a few beers with buddies or enjoying a nice lunch conversation with friends might be a source of pleasure but, on the whole, it appears not to be very important to a meaningful life. By comparison, spending more time with loved ones was linked to higher meaning and was irrelevant to happiness. The difference, presumably, is in the depth of the relationship. Time with friends is often devoted to simple pleasures, without much at stake, so it may foster good feelings while doing little to increase meaning. If your friends are grumpy or tiresome, you can just move on. Time with loved ones is not so uniformly pleasant. Sometimes one has to pay bills, deal with illnesses or repairs, and do other unsatisfying chores. And of course, loved ones can be difficult too, in which case you generally have to work on the relationship and hash it out. It is probably no coincidence that arguing was itself associated with more meaning and less happiness.

If happiness is about getting what you want, it appears that meaningfulness is about doing things that express yourself

A fourth category of differences had to do with struggles, problems, stresses and the like. In general, these went with lower happiness and higher meaningfulness. We asked how many positive and negative events people had recently experienced. Having lots of good things happen turned out to be helpful for both meaning and happiness. No surprise there. But bad things were a different story. Highly meaningful lives encounter plenty of negative events, which of course reduce happiness. Indeed, stress and negative life events were two powerful blows to happiness, despite their significant positive association with a meaningful life. We begin to get a sense of what the happy but not very meaningful life would be like. Stress, problems, worrying, arguing, reflecting on challenges and struggles — all these are notably low or absent from the lives of purely happy people, but they seem to be part and parcel of a highly meaningful life. The transition to retirement illustrates this difference: with the cessation of work demands and stresses, happiness goes up but meaningfulness drops.

Do people go out looking for stress in order to add meaning to their lives? It seems more likely that they seek meaning by pursuing projects that are difficult and uncertain. One tries to accomplish things in the world: this brings both ups and downs, so the net gain to happiness might be small, but the process contributes to meaningfulness either way. To use an example close to home, conducting research adds immensely to the sense of a meaningful life (what could be meaningful than working to increase the store of human knowledge?), but projects rarely go exactly as planned, and the many failures and frustrations along the way can suck some of the joy out of the process.

The final category of differences had to do with the self and personal identity. Activities that express the self are an important source of meaning but are mostly irrelevant to happiness. Of the 37 items on our list that asked people to rate whether some activity (such as working, exercising or meditating) was an expression or reflection of the self, 25 yielded significant positive correlations with a meaningful life and none was negative. Only two of the 37 items (socialising, and partying without alcohol) were positively linked to happiness, and some even had a significant negative relationship. The worst was worry: if you think of yourself as a worrier, that seems to be quite a downer.

If happiness is about getting what you want, it appears that meaningfulness is about doing things that express yourself. Even just caring about issues of personal identity and self-definition was associated with more meaning, though it was irrelevant, if not outright detrimental, to happiness. This might seem almost paradoxical: happiness is selfish, in the sense that it is about getting what you want and having other people do things that benefit you, and yet the self is more tied to meaning than happiness. Expressing yourself, defining yourself, building a good reputation and other self-oriented activities are more about meaning than happiness.

D oes all of this really tell us anything about the meaning of life? A ‘yes’ answer depends on some debatable assumptions, not least the idea that people will tell the truth about whether their lives are meaningful. Another assumption is that we are even capable of giving a true answer. Can we know whether our lives are meaningful? Wouldn’t we have to be able to say exactly what that meaning is? Recall that my colleagues and I did not give our study respondents a definition of meaning, and we didn’t ask them to define it themselves. We just asked them to rate their level of agreement with statements such as: ‘In general, I consider my life to be meaningful.’ To look deeper into the meaning of life, it might help to clarify some basic principles.

First of all, what is life? One answer supplies the title to A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), Anthony Marra’s moving novel about Chechnya following the two recent wars. A character is stranded in her apartment with nothing to do and starts reading her sister’s Soviet-era medical dictionary. It offers her little in the way of useful or even comprehensible information — except for its definition of life, which she circles in red: ‘Life: a constellation of vital phenomena — organisation, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.’ That, in a sense, is what ‘life’ means. I should add that we now know it is a special kind of physical process: not atoms or chemicals themselves, but the highly organised dance they perform. The chemicals in a body are pretty much the same from the moment before death to the moment after. Death doesn’t alter this or that substance: the entire dynamic state of the system changes. Nonetheless, life is a purely physical reality.

The meaning of ‘meaning’ is more complicated. Words and sentences have meaning, as do lives. Is it the same kind of thing in both cases? In one sense, the ‘meaning’ of ‘life’ could be a simple dictionary definition, something like the one I gave in the previous paragraph. But that’s not what people want when they ask about the meaning of life, any more than it would help someone who was suffering from an identity crisis to read the name on their driver’s licence. One important difference between linguistic meaning and what I’ll call the meaningfulness of a human life is that the second seems to entail a value judgment, or a cluster of them, which in turn implies a certain kind of emotion. Your mathematics homework is full of meaning in the sense that it consists entirely of a network of concepts — meanings, in other words. But in most cases there is not much emotion linked to doing sums, and so people tend not to regard it as very meaningful in the sense in which we are interested. (In fact, some people loathe doing mathematics, or have anxiety about it, but those reactions hardly seem conducive to viewing the subject as a source of meaning in life.)

Questions about life’s meaning are really about meaningfulness. We don’t simply want to know the dictionary definition of our lives, if they have such a thing. We want our lives to have value, to fit into some kind of intelligible context. Yet these existential concerns do seem to touch on the merely linguistic sense of the word ‘meaning’ because they invoke understanding and mental associations. It is remarkable how many synonyms for meaningfulness also refer to merely verbal content: we talk, for instance, about the point of life, or its significance, or whether or not it makes sense. If we want to understand the meaning of life, it seems as though we need to grapple with the nature of meaning in this less exalted sense.

A bear can walk down the hill and get a drink, as can a person, but only a person thinks the words ‘I’m going to go down and get a drink’

Linguistic meaning is a kind of non-physical connection. Two things can be connected physically, for example when they are nailed together, or when one of them exerts a gravitational or magnetic pull on the other. But they can also be connected symbolically. The connection between a flag and the country it represents is not a physical connection, molecule to molecule. It remains the same even if the country and the flag are on opposite sides of the planet, making direct physical connection impossible.

The human mind has evolved to use meaning to understand things. This is part of the human way of being social: we talk about what we do and experience. Most of what we know we learn from others, not from direct experience. Our very survival depends on learning language, co-operating with others, following moral and legal rules and so on. Language is the tool with which humans manipulate meaning. Anthropologists love to find exceptions to any rule, but so far they have failed to find any culture that dispenses with language. It is a human universal. But there’s an important distinction to make here. Although language as a whole is universal, particular languages are invented: they vary by culture. Meaning is universal, too, but we don’t invent it. It is discovered. Think back to the maths homework: the symbols are arbitrary human inventions, but the idea expressed by 5 x 8 = 43 is inherently false and that’s not something that human beings made up or can change.

The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara, coined the term ‘left-brain interpreter’ to refer to a section in one side of the brain that seems almost entirely dedicated to verbalising everything that happens to it. The left-brain interpreter’s account is not always correct, as Gazzaniga has demonstrated. People quickly devise an explanation for whatever they do or experience, fudging the details to fit their story. Their mistakes have led Gazzaniga to question whether this process has any value at all, but perhaps his disappointment is coloured by the scientist’s natural assumption that the purpose of thinking is to figure out the truth (this, after all, is what scientists themselves supposedly do). On the contrary, I suggest that a big part of the purpose of thinking is to help one talk to other people. Minds make mistakes but, when we talk about them, other people can spot the errors and correct them. By and large, humankind approaches the truth collectively, by discussing and arguing, rather than by thinking things through alone.

Many writers, especially those with experience of meditation and Zen, remark on how the human mind seems to prattle on all day. When you try to meditate, your mind overflows with thoughts, sometimes called the ‘inner monologue’. Why does it do this? William James, author of The Principles of Psychology (1890), said that thinking is for doing, but in fact a lot of thinking seems irrelevant to doing. Putting our thoughts into words is, however, vital preparation for communicating those thoughts to other people. Talking is important: it is how the human creature connects to its group and participates in it — and that is how we solve the eternal biological problems of survival and reproduction. Humans evolved minds that chatter all day because chattering aloud is how we survive. Talking requires people to take what they do and put it into words. A bear can walk down the hill and get a drink, as can a person, but only a person thinks the words ‘I’m going to go down and get a drink.’ In fact, the human might not just think those words but also say them aloud, and then others can come along for the trip — or perhaps offer a warning not to go after all, because someone saw a bear at the waterside. By talking, the human being shares information and connects with others, which is what we as a species are all about.

Studies on children support the idea that the human mind is naturally programmed to put things into words. Children go through stages of saying aloud the names of everything they encounter and of wanting to bestow names on all sorts of individual things, such as shirts, animals, even their own bowel movements. (For a time, our little daughter was naming hers after various relatives, seemingly without any animosity or disrespect, though we encouraged her not to inform the namesakes.) This kind of talk is not directly useful for solving problems or any of the familiar pragmatic uses of thinking, but it does help to translate the physical events of one’s life into speech so that they can be shared and discussed with others. The human mind evolved to join the collective discourse, the social narrative. Our relentless efforts to make sense of things start small, with individual items and events. Very gradually, we work towards bigger, more integrated frameworks. In a sense, we climb the ladder of meaning — from single words and concepts to simple combinations (sentences), and then on to the grand narrative, sweeping visions, or cosmic theories.

Democracy provides a revealing example of how we use meaning. It does not exist in nature. Every year, countless human groups conduct elections, but so far nobody has observed even a single one in any other species. Was democracy invented or discovered? It probably emerged independently in many different places, but the underlying similarities suggest that the idea was out there, ready to be found. The specific practices for implementing it (how votes are taken, for example) are invented. All the same, it seems as though the idea of democracy was just waiting for people to stumble upon it and put it to use.

Wondering about the meaning of life indicates that one has climbed a long way up the ladder. To understand the meaning of some newly encountered item, people might ask why it was made, how it got there or what it is useful for. When they come to the question of life’s meaning, similar questions arise: why or for what purpose was life created? How did this life get here? What is the right or best way to make use of it? It is natural to expect and assume that these questions have answers. A child learns what a banana is: it comes from the store and, before that, from a tree. It’s good to eat, which you do by (very important) first removing the outer peel to get at the soft, sweet inside. It’s natural to assume that life could be understood in the same way. Just figure out (or learn from others) what it’s about and what to do with it. Go to school, get a job, get married, have kids? Sure thing. There is, moreover, a good reason to want to get all this straight. If you had a banana and failed to understand it, you might not get the benefit of eating it. In the same way, if your life had a purpose and you didn’t know it, you might end up wasting it. How sad to miss out on the meaning of life, if there is one.

Marriage is a good example of how meaning pins down the world and increases stability

We begin to see how the notion of a meaning of life puts two quite different things together. Life is a physical and chemical process. Meaning is non-physical connection, something that exists in networks of symbols and contexts. Because it is not purely physical, it can leap across great distances to connect through space and time. Remember our findings about the different time frames of happiness and meaning. Happiness can be close to physical reality, because it occurs right here in the present. In an important sense, animals can probably be happy without much in the way of meaning. Meaning, by contrast, links past, present and future in ways that go beyond physical connection. When modern Jews celebrate Passover, or when Christians celebrate communion by symbolically drinking the blood and eating the flesh of their god, their actions are guided by symbolic connections to events in the distant past (indeed, events whose very reality is disputed). The link from the past to the present is not a physical one, the way a row of dominoes falls, but rather a mental connection that leaps across the centuries.

Questions about life’s meaning are prompted by more than mere idle curiosity or fear of missing out. Meaning is a powerful tool in human life. To understand what that tool is used for, it helps to appreciate something else about life as a process of ongoing change. A living thing might always be in flux, but life cannot be at peace with endless change. Living things yearn for stability, seeking to establish harmonious relationships with their environment. They want to know how to get food, water, shelter and the like. They find or create places where they can rest and be safe. They might keep the same home for years. Life, in other words, is change accompanied by a constant striving to slow or stop the process of change, which leads ultimately to death. If only change could stop, especially at some perfect point: that was the theme of the profound story of Faust’s bet with the devil. Faust lost his soul because he could not resist the wish that a wonderful moment would last forever. Such dreams are futile. Life cannot stop changing until it ends. But living things work hard to establish some degree of stability, reducing the chaos of constant change to a somewhat stable status quo.

By contrast, meaning is largely fixed. Language is possible only insofar as words have the same meaning for everyone, and the same meaning tomorrow as today. (Languages do change, but slowly and somewhat reluctantly, relative stability being essential to their function.) Meaning therefore presents itself as an important tool by which the human animal might impose stability on its world. By recognising the steady rotation of the seasons, people can plan for future years. By establishing enduring property rights, we can develop farms to grow food.

Crucially, the human being works with others to impose its meanings. Language has to be shared, for private languages are not real languages. By communicating and working together, we create a predictable, reliable, trustworthy world, one in which you can take the bus or plane to get somewhere, trust that food can be purchased next Tuesday, know you won’t have to sleep out in the rain or snow but can count on a warm dry bed, and so forth.

Marriage is a good example of how meaning pins down the world and increases stability. Most animals mate, and some do so for long periods or even for life, but only humans marry. My colleagues who study close relationships will tell you that relationships continue to evolve and change, even after many years of marriage. However, the fact of marriage is constant. You are either married or not, and that does not fluctuate from day to day, even though your feelings and actions toward your spouse might change considerably. Marriage smooths out these bumps and helps to stabilise the relationship. That’s one reason that people are more likely to stay together if they are married than if not. Tracking all your feelings toward your romantic partner over time would be difficult, complicated and probably always incomplete. But knowing when you made the transition from not married to married is easy, as it occurred on a precise occasion that was officially recorded. Meaning is more stable than emotion, and so living things use meaning as part of their never-ending quest to achieve stability.

T he Austrian psychoanalytic thinker Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) tried to update Freudian theory by adding a universal desire for meaningfulness to Freud’s other drives. He emphasised a sense of purpose, which is undoubtedly one aspect but perhaps not the full story. My own efforts to understand how people find meaning in life eventually settled on a list of four ‘needs for meaning’, and in the subsequent years that list has held up reasonably well.

The point of this list is that you will find life meaningful to the extent that you have something that addresses each of these four needs. Conversely, people who fail to satisfy one or more of these needs are likely to find life less than adequately meaningful. Changes with regard to any of these needs should also affect how meaningful the person finds his or her life.

The first need is, indeed, for purpose. Frankl was right: without purpose, life lacks meaning. A purpose is a future event or state that lends structure to the present, thus linking different times into a single story. Purposes can be sorted into two broad categories. One might strive toward a particular goal (to win a championship, become vice president or raise healthy children) or toward a condition of fulfilment (happiness, spiritual salvation, financial security, wisdom).

People ask what is the meaning of life, as if there is a single answer

Life goals come from three sources, so in a sense every human life has three basic sources of purpose. One is nature. It built you for a particular purpose, which is to sustain life by surviving and reproducing. Nature doesn’t care whether you’re happy, much as people wish to be happy. We are descended from people who were good at reproducing and at surviving long enough to do so. Nature’s purpose for you is not all-encompassing. It doesn’t care what you do on a Sunday afternoon as long as you manage to survive and, sooner or later, reproduce.

The second source of purpose is culture. Culture tells you what is valuable and important. Some cultures tell you exactly what you are supposed to do: they mark you out for a particular slot (farmer, soldier, mother etc). Others offer a much wider range of options and put less pressure on you to adopt a particular one, though they certainly reward some choices more than others.

That brings us to the third source of goals: your own choices. In modern Western countries in particular, society presents you with a broad range of paths and you decide which one to take. For whatever reason — inclination, talent, inertia, high pay, good benefits — you choose one set of goals for yourself (your occupation, for example). You create the meaning of your life, fleshing out the sketch that nature and culture provided. You can even choose to defy it: many people choose not to reproduce, and some even choose not to survive. Many others resist and rebel at what their culture has chosen for them.

The second need for meaning is value. This means having a basis for knowing what is right and wrong, good and bad. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are among the first words children learn. They are some of the earliest and most culturally universal concepts, and among the few words that house pets sometimes acquire. In terms of brain reactions, the feeling that something is good or bad comes very fast, almost immediately after you recognise what it is. Solitary creatures judge good and bad by how they feel upon encountering something (does it reward them or punish them?). Humans, as social beings, can understand good and bad in loftier ways, such as their moral quality.

In practice, when it comes to making life meaningful, people need to find values that cast their lives in positive ways, justifying who they are and what they do. Justification is ultimately subject to social, consensual judgment, so one needs to have explanations that will satisfy other people in the society (especially the people who enforce the laws). Again, nature makes some values, and culture adds a truckload of additional ones. It’s not clear whether people can invent their own values, but some do originate from inside the self and become elaborated. People have strong inner desires that shape their reactions.

The third need is for efficacy. It’s not very satisfying to have goals and values if you can’t do anything about them. People like to feel that they can make a difference. Their values have to find expression in their life and work. Or, to look at it the other way around, people have to be able steer events towards positive outcomes (by their lights) and away from negative ones.

The last need is for self-worth. People with meaningful lives typically have some basis for thinking that they are good people, maybe even a little better than certain other people. At a minimum, people want to believe that they are better than they might have been had they chosen or behaved or performed badly. They have earned some degree of respect.

The meaningful life, then, has four properties. It has purposes that guide actions from present and past into the future, lending it direction. It has values that enable us to judge what is good and bad; and, in particular, that allow us to justify our actions and strivings as good. It is marked by efficacy, in which our actions make a positive contribution towards realising our goals and values. And it provides a basis for regarding ourselves in a positive light, as good and worthy people.

People ask what is the meaning of life, as if there is a single answer. There is no one answer: there are thousands of different ones. A life will be meaningful if it finds responses to the four questions of purpose, value, efficacy, and self-worth. It is these questions, not the answers, that endure and unify.

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Mere imitation

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Growth Is the Only Evidence of Life

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Nature and Humanity as Source of Life, Living and Everyday Transformation

Like most of us, I hold a deep desire to leave a legacy. I want to know my life and my work made a difference, even by the smallest measure. Yet for the longest time, life meant searching for meaning rather than experiencing it. Although I was, and will forever be, committed to living in a way that benefits Earth and all her inhabitants, I was unable to express that commitment tangibly. I thought making a difference meant leading an amazing new initiative and that I needed a particular title or position to do so. Further, as an employee of the National Park Service (NPS)—a bureau of the United States government and one of the largest bureaucracies in the world—I had little hope I could affect any kind of change through my work. The ‘system’ seemed too strong, too entrenched, too bound by red tape. Filled with frustration, I fell into a trap of feeling that each day was the same as the last and I had no hope that tomorrow would be any different.

Nurturing Nature, Mentoring People

In the Sonoran Desert, mesquite trees serve as nurse trees for young saguaro cacti. These sheltering trees shade saguaros from the desert’s intense sunlight, blanket them from winter cold, and hide them from rodents, birds and other animals that eat them. Saguaros rarely grow to maturity in the absence of these trees.

Enter Dr. Monica Sharma and her conscious full-spectrum (CFS) approach to leadership that sources people’s wisdom while creating results to solve problems and shift systems that maintain the status quo. Monica’s work awakened a part of me that I had long ago lost and forgotten. This part of me was not my artist self, though I became much more creative. This part was not my ‘heart,’ though I certainly became more whole-hearted and less head-centered, as scientists tend to be. The part of me that woke up opened me to see and create patterns, allowing me to leverage my strengths and abilities to reach beyond what I believed was possible. Although I have always considered myself a visionary, the CFS principles opened me to possibilities beyond my wildest dreams. More importantly, they inspired me to take action right where I was, with the resources I had, to create the changes I wished to see through routine activities in my job. In other words, I began transforming my everyday actions at work and at home.

Working with CFS principles, I developed the Generative Action for Impact and Awareness (GAIA) Framework, an approach for solving environmental and social problems by sourcing the inner capacities of individuals and shifting the systems that maintain the status quo. Taking conscious full-spectrum action enables us to design and implement projects in a way that goes beyond treating symptoms by addressing systems issues and delivering sustainable results for people and planet. We use the GAIA Framework to design actions to respond to diverse conditions to help people innovate, generate breakthroughs, and sustain the specific changes needed for the planet and her inhabitants to thrive.

The More We Give, The More We Receive

Soil provides nutrients and the structure plants need to grow. As they grow, plants extract nutrients from soil and return organic matter, which in turn enriches the soil, making it more fertile. Through time, as plants come and go, the productivity of the soil increases, enabling it to support more and more plant life. Plants serve as food for animals. Animals also return nutrients to the soil. This is an underlying principle of nature: the more it gives, the more it receives.

The National Park Service is known for outstanding environmental education programs. While we excel at providing opportunities for people to explore nature, we don’t deliberately engage people in our conservation mission or create awareness of the interdependence between people and the environment. I’m working to change that through a series of projects using the GAIA Framework. My goal is to create transformational learning centers in parks through which we deliver environmental education programs that give people understanding of why we need a healthy environment to live healthy and productive lives and the effect our current lifestyle has on the environment, even in our most protected and sacred places (our national parks). These programs are designed to inspire people into action and demonstrate the power that one person, one family, or an entire community has to make a difference on local and global issues while also providing opportunities for taking action to deliver powerful results. Program topics vary; however, all focus on issues intended to create and maintain thriving communities and a healthy environment, demonstrate the benefit of public lands (and other commons) to people and communities, identify the pressures on public lands, and highlight actions we can all take today to make a difference.

Distinguishing Traditional and Transformational Education

The intention behind these programs is to help people engage their inner selves as they explore the great outdoors, so they find long-lost parts of themselves as I did. As this connection occurs, we start using our strengths and abilities to create change that serves ALL, not just me or mine. When our deepest values and commitments are the source of our actions, we discover a deep sense of fulfillment and feel alive as never before. It’s exhilarating! In a practical sense, we also expand our influence, even when we have no authority, because people want what we’ve got.

I am not an environmental educator and I have no authority over educational programs in any of our parks. My expertise lies in natural resource monitoring. Therefore, influencing educational programs required a circuitous route, starting within my realm of authority and influence. We created transformational monitoring products for parks using the GAIA Framework by shifting our focus from transferring knowledge to making invisible patterns visible and increasing our understanding of the context and complexity of environmental issues and connectedness of all things. In addition to providing information to park staff, we develop products for visitors to help them see themselves as agents of change—stewards of the parks and stewards of their homes and communities.

Change Is Not Good, It’s Not Bad, It Simply Is.

The transition between seasons is a reminder that change is a constant in this world. We must also cope with disturbances such as fires, floods, hurricanes and more. While we typically view these disturbances as negative, they are processes that shape our natural world and are often beneficial in the long term. Fires clear out debris and return nutrients to the soil. River valleys are fertile farm grounds because of past floods. When conditions change, plants must adapt or die. Animals also have the option of moving. Humans have a vast array of choices when responding to change. First and foremost, we can choose to be creative or we can choose to be victims.

As a result of the success of these products, parks asked for my assistance in designing new programs for visitors and exhibits in visitor’s centers to promote environmental awareness and empower individuals to wake up, reconnect to what matters most, and take action. NPS is always looking to engage youth in parks and grow the next generation of environmental stewards. Building on that theme, we implemented a leadership program to teach CFS principles to children between the ages of 9 and 12 whose parents were homeless or nearly so. We used examples from nature to illustrate that change is a natural part of life and the choices we have in responding to change. We used food to explore culture and how to embrace diversity. We used superheroes to help them articulate their inner values and commitments. One child brought tears to my eyes when he declared that he could use his superhero strengths to do what he believed was right and say ‘no’ to drugs.

Transformational products are reaching visitors via a grassroots-type effort. As educational programs are developed or revised, transformational principles are incorporated and these products are shared across parks. The national strategy for our educational programs was revised in 2013 and it includes transformational elements. We are still in the early stages of implementing these programs in parks and we don’t yet have information on the number of visitors we are inspiring into action. We do know that nearly 300 million people visit national parks in the US each year. If only 10% of our visitors are inspired to take action through this program, that’s 30 million people a year serving as change agents, strengthening our communities and stewarding the environment. Win!

Education and monitoring are routine activities in the National Park Service. We aren’t doing anything new, nor have we started new initiatives. We’re simply doing what we already do but in a new way, which is key to opening spaces in bureaucracies for transformation. It’s easy to make excuses for why we can’t start something new… we rarely have funding or personnel or time. However, if we’re going to have a meeting or write a report anyway, why not use the opportunity to create a new possibility? It’s far easier to get permission from leadership if your idea or project is tied to existing work, projects or performance measures. Leaders will give you bonus points for helping them accomplish their objectives with little or no additional cost.

Two other keys for working successfully in bureaucracies include empowering those around you and creating excellence in your work. When we empower those around us, they too become agents of change and champions of transformational work. We also create accountability, responsibility, commitment and a dynamic work environment that is highly creative, productive and fun. In this environment, it’s easy to be excellent in our work and deliver results. We’ll only be able to create space for transformational programs if we’re known for delivering results—if the higher-ups trust us to get the job done and make them look good. That said, don’t let me give you the impression that doing this work is always easy. It isn’t. Sometimes we need to take a lesson from a tree and simply stand our ground until winter’s chill passes. Persistence, a lot of persistence, is required.

The foundation of the GAIA Framework consists of transformational learning tools that create ‘aha moments’ based on inquiry, distinctions and generating new perspectives. The principles were honed by more than 50 practitioners working with Dr. Monica Sharma to deliver results on the ground worldwide, along with 25 world-class coaches. We use Annie Leonard’s and Donella Meadow’s work on systems thinking to understand the relationships between actions and events and find leverage points for action. This work is also informed by Daniel Goleman’s writing on emotional intelligence, which links self-awareness to self-expression through action. Other contributing ideas are Likert-Emberling’s stages of evolutionary organizations to provide an implementation framework, Robert Keegan’s transformational conversations, Howard Gardner’s exploration of learning for the future, and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory to understand phenomena better. The methodology is coherent, aligned and produces results. Simultaneously, it is also flexible because the whole process is based on inquiry and does not prescribe particular procedures or methods. This flexibility also allows the framework to be applied to solve any kind of problem.

The framework is simple. We identify particular measurable results we want to create to solve a problem. For example, distributing food is a specific solution to reduce hunger. However, this solution is not sustainable if the systems that support the current status quo remain intact. Shifting these systems could include distribution of seeds and development of community gardens. For changes to be sustainable, the systems we have in place and the values on which the systems are based must support the change. For example, we will be more successful at eliminating hunger if we act from a commitment that every person in our community is nourished and fed. Alignment of commitments, words and actions results in sustained, meaningful change. Misalignment of our actions with our words and commitments leads to rhetoric, which ultimately leads nowhere.

Pattern and Structure are Foundation for Everything

Although it may not seem like it, wild plants and animals are governed by structured patterns and processes that occur in nature. The seasons are one example. The water cycle is another. Water is transported around the Earth by wind, falls to earth via rain and snow, nourishes plants and animals, and is returned to the sky via evaporation and transpiration—more so in some places on Earth than others. The ocean currents and wind also follow patterns. Together, these patterns create deserts, rainforests and other ecosystems.

Identification of results and system shifts requires clarity of thinking and a comprehensive understanding of the system we’re working in to ensure the results and products deliver the desired outcome. Use of systems thinking enables us to align our projects so they build on each other synergistically. For me, this has been critical for success. Prior to using the GAIA Framework, I possessed the ability to create results, but I wasn’t very strategic about identifying leverage points or discerning the importance of particular projects, so I spent a lot of time on many ‘good little things’ rather than a few great ones that generated meaningful results.

Prior to learning to think, be and operate in this way, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I could use monitoring data to influence environmental education programs. I knew I could use it to influence stewardship practices within NPS, but I didn’t know how to go beyond that. Now I’m slowly but surely transforming the two primary elements of the NPS mission: stewardship and environmental education. We’re creating the space to inspire nearly 300 million visitors into action. The next step is to work outside the park boundaries, through NPS employees engaging in community activities outside parks and, more importantly, through our volunteers. NPS has just over 20,000 employees and more than 200,000 volunteers across the US—people who are so deeply committed to our parks and our mission that they are willing to contribute years of their time for little or no compensation. This is the level of enthusiasm and commitment that arises when we connect to our deepest selves and take action sourced from that space.

The Tortoise Wins the Race

Bristlecone pines are remarkable because they are among the longest living organisms on Earth and live under adverse growing conditions. In fact, it seems one secret to their longevity is the harsh environment in which most bristlecone pines slowly grow.

With the GAIA Framework, our measurable results and system shifts are sourced from our inner wisdom, our deepest values and our commitments. The articulation of these values and commitments is truly empowering and it inspires me to be more courageous in my actions, enables me to use the strength of my convictions, and to be more deliberate in empowering those around me. I ensure that my actions are sourced from my commitments, so I build integrity within myself and can ensure that my work serves all beings. For me, this is probably the most inspiring aspect of the GAIA Framework. Embodying this level of integrity empowers those around us to use their strengths to deliver results. Now I can create synergy between people to create truly engaged, effective, creative teams by linking their commitments to our NPS mission and creating a space for exploring possibility and taking risks. In a recent series of meetings I held with my staff, they reported that they are excited to come to work for the first time in many years and they see possibilities they never saw before because they always had their head down, focused on the crisis de jour. They moved from crunching numbers to facilitating stewardship of our treasured park resources.

Small successes create the confidence to take risks, expand the scope of projects, or initiate larger projects. Nurturing transformational work within the National Park Service takes considerable effort, but gets easier every day thanks to the ripple effect of empowering others to use their strengths to create new possibilities. I’m also working with monitoring staff of the other federal land management agencies in the US to incorporate transformational products to shift from management to true stewardship of federal lands.

Ultimately, I would like to see a set of environmental ‘vital signs’ that are monitored around the world. These vital signs would be tied to the environment’s ability to support life, our livelihoods, and evaluate whether natural processes are sufficiently intact to continue to support humans and all other life. The vital signs related to supporting life would include monitoring air quality, water quality, and attributes related to food production, such as soil quality and availability of seeds. This information will help us understand whether or not conditions will support human survival.

Because of my commitment to living in a way that benefits Earth and all her inhabitants, survival isn’t enough. I want to see people and nature thrive. Therefore, we also need to measure whether the systems we have in place to deliver water and food support thriving people and communities. Time spent in nature nourishes our spirit, whether it’s watching otters play or a beautiful sunrise or gazing at the stars. Connecting these moments with our values and commitments make our actions more powerful. It’s also important to measure these less tangible but life-enriching qualities of nature and humanity because they make the difference between surviving and thriving. Measuring the immeasurable is both an art and a science and will require creative thinking to develop new indices and proxies. One measure might be how much time people spend engaging in outdoor activities such as hiking or gardening relative to time spent watching TV or surfing the Internet. In my view, this is a measure of engaging in life versus checking out of it.

A number of national parks are also designated World Heritage Sites or Biosphere Reserves, so I will use this avenue to begin working globally. Although monitoring isn’t sexy and we frequently prefer to avoid doing it, it’s also true that we instinctively monitor everything we value. Our lives and livelihoods depend on the health of the environment. Consequently, it’s critically important that we monitor environmental health broadly and consistently. What we measure, we move.

Specific Combinations of Patterns Create Unique Results

White Sands National Monument encompasses a portion of the world’s largest field of gypsum sand dunes. These dunes exist in only three places in the world because a specific combination of geology, precipitation and wind patterns is required for their formation. Our families, culture and experiences make each of us who we are. What unique set of ingredients do you bring for everyday transformation?

While it’s extremely important to see patterns, operate strategically, and engage others for support, the power of the GAIA Framework is the connection to our deepest values and commitments because these values and commitments emerge from who we are deep inside and what we stand for. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for equality and his words and actions were deliberately chosen to manifest equality. Mother Theresa stood for compassion, which she manifested through her daily activities. I stand for oneness with Earth and all beings. It’s currently not possible to live as a global citizen in a manner that doesn’t harm people or the environment, and that doesn’t work for me. Therefore, I endeavor to create health and well-being for all with every action I take. Declaring our stand and taking action on a daily basis to manifest that stand lights a fire in our bellies that cannot be extinguished. It’s time to stand for change so we stop being passive observers, helplessly watching the destruction of the world around us.

What do you stand for? What is it that you are uniquely qualified to deliver? We often think that leadership is reserved for presidents or generals or CEOs. Not true. Everyone can take responsibility and assume leadership in their daily experience, regardless of how big or small it is. What’s possible for you? Start where you are on something small that holds meaning for you. Transformation doesn’t occur only through new projects or new initiatives. It can start with our day-to-day, routine activities. Sometimes our daily activities are the best place to start because the change isn’t so scary or risky. When the ocean tide comes in, nothing can hold it back. When you unleash your power and potential, nothing can hold you back.

Elements of Transformational Monitoring

Status monitoring.

Purpose: Assess current status of a situation or issue, provide baseline for reference. Questions : 1. What is the current status of this situation? Gather relevant facts, figures and statistics. 2. How is the current status created and maintained? Consider physical/biological elements, cultural attitudes, laws/policies, social and political systems. 3. What is the gap between the current status and the desired status (derived from our values and commitments)?

Trend Monitoring

Purpose : Measure how the situation is changing or what is changing with the issue. Questions : 1. How has the status of the situation changed? 2. Did it change in the direction we wanted, consistent with our values/commitments? 3. What factors contributed to the change (from Status Monitoring points 2 and 3, above)? 4. Are the systems that supported the former status shifting to maintain the desired status?

Implementation Monitoring

Purpose : Determine whether we implemented what we intended to in our action plans. Questions : 1. Did we do what we intended to based on our plan? 2. Were we efficient in our actions? 3. Did we create what we wanted to create? Reference outcomes and impacts in the transformational results chain; see M. Sharma’s article in this issue. 4. Did we create transformational spaces in routine activities?

Effectiveness Monitoring

Purpose : Evaluate the effectiveness of our actions. Questions : 1. Are our results consistent with our commitment? 2. Are our results serving everyone and everything? 3. Do we have congruence at all levels (values/commitments, actions, results)? 4. Did we have any unintended consequences? 5. What’s shifting or becoming possible because of our work?

May I use this opportunity to request your assistance for this young whose finances were dealt a blow by Covid-19 to finish her education. Please donate whatever your heart moves you to. Thanks in advance. https://gogetfunding.com/please-help-me-finish-my-education-3/

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• School Education /

Essay on Life for Students in English: 100 Words, 200 Words, 350 Words

• Updated on  
• Apr 12, 2024

Life is a culmination of moments, a blend of laughter and tears, victory and challenges. From the moment we take our first breath to the day, we draw our last. It is a journey filled with countless experiences, lessons, and emotions. From the tiniest of creatures to the tallest of trees, every living being is a part of this incredible journey. In this blog, we will explore the multifaceted essence of life through three unique essays.

Also Read : Essay on My Aim in Life

Table of Contents

• 1 Sample Essay on Life in 100 words
• 2 Sample Essay on Life in 200 words
• 3 Sample Essay on Life in 350 words

Sample Essay on Life in 100 words

Life is a collection of stories etched in time, each page filled with lessons that have been learned. The journey of life is a rollercoaster, with peaks of joy and valleys of despair. It teaches us self-reliance, adaptability, and the importance of cherishing every passing second.

As we navigate through unknown paths, we discover the true essence of our being – the passions that fuel us and the relationships that sustain us. Life is a gift, a canvas upon which we paint our purpose. Let us embrace each passing day, for they collectively make the masterpiece that is our life.

Sample Essay on Life in 200 words

Life is a river that flows with an ever-changing current, carrying us through seasons of growth and moments of introspection. It presents us with opportunities to evolve, to change ourselves, and emerge as a new. Life is a precious gift that surrounds us with wonders every day. We wake up to the warmth of the sun, the chirping of birds, and the love of our family. Each moment teaches us something valuable – to be kind, to learn, and to grow. 

As we play, study, and share, we make memories that become the colours of our life’s canvas. Life is about enjoying the little things – a smile, a hug, a blooming flower. The challenges we face are sometimes difficult but are also stepping stones that move and motivate us toward self-discovery. Life’s journey is not about reaching a destination, but about following the purpose and the richness of the path itself.

Also Read: Essay on My Hobby

Sample Essay on Life in 350 words

Life is a journey of discovery, where we encounter moments both big and small that shape our identity. From the joyful laughter of childhood to the trials of adolescence, each phase of life imparts unique lessons.

Each chapter unveils a new facet of our identity, inviting us to delve deeper into the essence of who we are. As we grow, we learn that life isn’t just about happiness; it’s about resilience in the face of difficulties. Challenges, like puzzles, help us develop problem-solving skills and the ability to adapt. Friends and family accompany us on this journey, providing companionship, support, and love.

Life, a masterpiece painted by time, is about making choices, experiences, and opportunities. In the early years, life is a playground of curiosity, where we explore the world with wonder-filled eyes. Learning becomes our companion, and mistakes are stepping stones to growth. 

Adolescence brings a whirlwind of change – physical, emotional, and psychological. It’s a time of self-discovery, as we unfold our passions, talents, and values. Amidst this transformation, friendships blossom, leaving an indelible mark on our hearts. Responsibilities increase, and we navigate through the maze of choices, from careers to relationships. Life becomes full of ambitions , dreams, setbacks, and achievements. Failures and successes become part of our narrative, driving us to strive harder and reach higher. 

In the sunset years, life’s pace may slow, but its essence deepens. Memories become treasures, and experiences turn into life lessons. Family becomes a stronghold of support, and the wisdom garnered over the years becomes a guiding light. Reflection becomes a companion, and gratitude fills our hearts as we look back on the incredible journey we’ve travelled.

In conclusion, life is a journey that encompasses the spectrum of human existence. From the innocence of childhood to the wisdom of old age, every phase contributes to our growth and understanding. Through challenges and triumphs, connections, and solitude, we weave a tale unique to ours. So, let’s embrace life’s twists and turns, for they shape us into the individuals we are meant to be.

Also Read: 100+ Rumi Quotes on Love, Life, Nature & the Universe

Ans. When children and students write a life essay, they have the opportunity to contemplate the wonder and significance of their being.

Ans. The pursuit of happiness is so connected in entirety that it is woven into our life, as we seek fulfillment. It is in the phase of low that we often find the strength to rise, and in the quiet moments of being ourselves, we hear our truest desires. 

Ans. A life story is a valuable personal account of both personal and professional experiences that are shared by the individual.

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Rajshree Lahoty

Meet Rajshree Lahoty, the writer behind insightful blogs on study abroad adventures and general knowledge trivia. Armed with a pen mightier than the sword (and a keyboard!), she navigates through the lanes of knowledge with a dash of research and a sprinkle of information. Join her escapades in solving the mysteries of the world!

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Student Essays

Essay On Nature | Its Role & Importance of Save Nature For Students

Nature & all environment around us is like our mother. The beautiful nature is a blessing for human being. Essays & Speeches on Nature, its benefits, role, importance and need to save and conserve nature for human being.

These essays are detailed, persuasive, inspirational, long and short, with quotes, examples, outline, heading, introduction for easy, simple read for students. The essays are simple, short, easy to understand and are meant for class 1 KG students to class 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 class students.

Nature; Meaning, Essence, Importance in Life | Essays & Paragraphs on Nature, Its Role & Importance

The Nature is an important part and parcel of our environment. In fact, the nature adds meaning and life to this planet earth. The nature is the treasure house of every important element that sustains life on this mother earth. The following paragraphs talk about nature, its beauty, role and importance in our life.

1. Essay on Nature & Its Beauty For Students

Nature is everything around us. It provides the beauty to our environment. Without the amazing gifts of nature the human life would have dull and meaningless. Nature is one of the best, precious and noblest gift of God on this planet.

The beauty of nature is always matchless. Nature has placed everything useful, with order and purpose in our life. The examples of nature in lives are; the glowing rivers, the beautiful valleys, wonderful mountains, beautifully singing birds, the oceans, the blue sky, the changes of seasons, the rain, the beautiful moonlight etc. In fact, we can’t count the blessing of nature on human being.

The nature has beautiful varieties on this planet. There are thousands of creatures living on this planet. They all are serving a defined purpose on this planet. No creature is useless or out of value. Every creature, though crawling on earth or flying into the sky, is the beauty of nature.

Mankind is dependent on nature. In fact, it is the nature that has made the life possible over here on earth. We use nature in varying in our life. We are dependent on season, rivers, mountains, birds, tree, plants, fountains, etc in varying ways of our life.

Nature has social, psychological, economical and political value in our life. The mountains protect us, the river feed us, the plants give us the food to live by, the earth sustains us etc. In fact, every creature of nature is very useful for human being.

Nature is our best friend. It has made human life sustainable over here on this planet earth. As an earth, nature is our mother. It is our best teacher.

Apart from other value, nature is the best human cure as well. It helps us getting relaxed and entertained. A walk into the nature, in green forest with birds singing and sweet breeze around, touches our spirit.

It is quite heartening to note that, despite this matchless value of nature, she is being abused by human being. The nature has been repeatedly abused, threatened and destroyed by varying human activities for past a hundred years or more.

We are witnessing the nature is falling back due to angry, greedy and lustful actions of human being that are harming the nature. The conservation of beautiful is what we need today in order to maintain the beauty of nature in our life. We need to spread knowledge and awareness to halt the ongoing process of destroying nature. We need to understand the importance and value of nature. Only in the way of conservation of nature we can assure good future to our coming generation.

2. Essay on Nature & Its Role in Our Life

Nature is one of the amazing gifts that the planet earth is blessed with. It is the matchless beauty of planet earth. Nature the sweet singing of birds, change of season, blessed morning and evenings, glowing of rivers, thunderstorms, rains, glaciers, mountains etc.

In fact, mankind can never count the variety and blessing of nature. The nature is in fact a sustaining element of human life here. The nature has a great value and importance in human life. We need the water, fresh air and earth to maintain our life.

The life of mankind is entirely dependent on nature. The sun gives the daylight and other benefits to humans. The rivers and canals feed the human life.

The earth help grow the food for almost every creature on this planet earth. The mountains protect us in different ways. In fact, every single thing of nature is of great value and importance for us.

Nature is our best teacher, mother and a friend. Unfortunately, the nature has suffered a lot at the hands of human being. During the a hundred years or more, mankind has been harming and destroying nature in varying ways. The industrial and technological progress of mankind has badly hit the flow and rhythm of nature.

We have been excessively misusing nature and its resources for our material gains without acknowledging the fact that its destruction would end the human life.

The nature provides us the best environment. Everything that we use in our life is given by nature. In fact the scientific and industrial progress of today’s world is made possible by using the natural resources given by the nature. It is the treasure house of many precious things that are useful for our life.

Unfortunately, mankind has little realized the value of nature. He has been misusing nature and its resources mindlessly. With the help of modern technology mankind has been disproportionately misusing the natural resources.

The excessive use of many natural resources like coal, petroleum, mineral resources etc has proved fatalistic for our environment earth and ultimately for nature as well. The current human culture of greed and monopoly has proved disastrous for nature as well as for human life.

It is the time that we realize the value and importance of our mother nature. The extinction of nature is our collective issue. In order to address it effectively we need to plan and act accordingly. We need to save nature to save our future generations.

3. Essay on Save Nature Save Life For Students

The nature is an important element of human life on this planet earth. It is the single most element that connects all the living creatures and provides means of living for them. Without the nature the life on this plant is unthinkable.

The conservation of nature refers to important human efforts to save nature from being lost. It refers to thinking of mankind where he is concerned about the safety and survival of nature.

Nature has countless blessing on human being. All the things that make life going on this planet like water, light, seasons, atmosphere, trees and plants and other countless other things.

Since his birth, mankind has been using nature as his single mean of survival. In fact, what mankind has achieved today is made possible because of using nature and its resources. Nature has been the main reason behind the scientific and industrial progress of human being till today. Mankind has exploited all natural resources like oceans, waters, mountains, petroleum and other resources for his own benefit.

The world is progressing at very fast speed. In this craze of progress and development, mankind has been misusing nature and its resources. The excessive use of of natural resources has badly disturbed the ecosystem of life here on this earth. Reluctantly, we are facing a host of issues that, if not stopped, would end human life here.

The earth is like our dear mother. It holds us and keeps us hale and healthy. Unfortunately, mankind has been very ungrateful to the earth. Mankind, over the course of times, has been destroying the nature.

The cutting of trees , burning of fossil fuels, the contamination of land, water and environment etc has badly disturbed the ecosystem of our life. The nature is at the great risk.

The nature is experiencing decline by the passage of every year, due to various unchecked harmful activities of mankind. The atmosphere is being polluted by the release of contaminating and hazardous elements into it. We are witnessing the changes in the climate patterns.

The torrential rains, floods, droughts, earthquakes, landslides and depletion of glaciers etc are the living testimony to this fact. The conservation of nature is very important for our future generation. Because it is the time we need to act upon to save nature to save future. The preservation of nature is a collective issue of humanity.

There are needed concrete action from all. It is the responsibility of all the countries around the world to act meaningfully on the preservation of nature.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is nature in simple words.

In simple words nature consists of beauty all around that is visible on earth. The beauty of nature include green forests, trees, variety of birds, mountains, valleys, green meadows, oceans, glaciers, blue sky, rains, storms, sun, stars, moon etc.

These all are the part of nature. They all play a designed and dedicated role with commitment and dedication. Nature has created many pleasant things for human-being. The lovely mornings, raining nights, sunny days, beautiful evenings etc all are the part of nature

2. How is Mother Nature?

The Nature is in fact our mother. It has provided every mean of human survival here on earth. Without the role and support of nature the life could never have been made possible on this earth.

3. What is the importance of the nature?

Nature with all its components is vital part of life cycle here on earth. All the components of nature like days and nights, sun, moon, rains, green forests, trees, crops etc are a part of living eco system. The entire life of human being is dependent on nature. In fact, mankind is thankful to nature who has provided each and every mean of survival here on earth.

4. How can we save nature?

The conservation of nature is an important need of the times today. Regrettably, mankind has been tarnishing nature mindlessly. The nature can still be saved with dedicated and collective steps of mankind.

The nature saving steps include; cutting carbon, fossil fuels emission, reversing climate change, planting more and more trees, stopping use of plastic in all forms, preventing deforestation, using green energy, preventing water and soil pollution in all forms etc. By taking all of these steps we can surely conserve nature for life.

5. What can nature teach us?

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Personal Philosophy — My Personal Philosophy of Life

My Personal Philosophy of Life

• Categories: Personal Philosophy

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

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This is why water is essential for life on Earth... and perhaps the rest of the Universe

When we look for extra-terrestrial life, we look for planets with liquid water. But are we overlooking places where life could thrive?

Tom Ireland

Water, and specifically liquid water, is deemed so important to the creation and sustenance of life that few scientists entertain the possibility of life existing on worlds without it. The search for extra-terrestrial life by organisations like NASA often boils down to one simple strategy: “follow the water”.

So why is water so important? Well, there are several reasons, but they all hinge on water’s unique chemical properties. The chemical known as H 2 0 is a simple molecule composed of two small positively charged hydrogen atoms and one large, negatively charged oxygen atom. This gives each molecule, and the substance itself, what is called ‘polarity’.

The opposing charges mean the different bits of nearby water molecules stick to each other, but it also means that water interacts with the charged elements of other molecules, often helping to break them apart and dissolve them.

For the thousands of chemical reactions going on in our cells to happen quickly and efficiently, the molecules involved need to be able to mix freely – they need to be dissolved in something. Water is so good at dissolving substances that it is known as the ‘universal solvent’. While other substances have similar dissolving power to water, they do not have its chemical stability and its ability to neutralise strong acids and bases.

The polarity of water also helps the formation of the delicate membranes that encapsulate all living cells. In water, special fats called lipids line up with their water-loving ends facing outwards and water-hating ends facing inwards, forming a continuous but flexible two-layer film, like the outside of a soap bubble. These lipid membranes play a fundamental role in keeping the complexity of life concentrated in one place, creating individual entities separate from each other and their environment.

The polarity of water also helps water molecules to stick to each other, giving water another useful property called cohesion. This means water will get drawn through very thin tubes, even against the pull of gravity, enabling water to flow hundreds of feet from the ground to the tops of tall trees. Handily, H 2 0 also helps transport nutrients, clean away waste, and provides pressure for structural support.

Anything else? Ah yes: photosynthesis, the process in plants that creates sugars from sunlight, and which creates the food that feeds the planet’s entire food chain, requires – you guessed it – water.

In fact, there are so many reasons why water is crucial to life that entire books have been dedicated to it.

Could there be strange forms of life out there that don’t require water? Of course – it is possible that there is life so different to ours on Earth that we can’t even imagine how it works. But it seems highly likely that if there is life out there, it will need a solvent to lubricate the chemical processes that create energy, movement and replication. And we know of no other substance that does that half as well as water.

Water’s importance as a supportive base substance led the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Albert von Szent-Györgyi to describe it as life’s “matrix, mother and medium”, while the science writer and physicist Philip Ball wrote this of biology: “You could be forgiven for concluding that the subject is all about proteins and genes, embodied in DNA. But this is only a form of shorthand; for biology is really all about the interactions of such molecules in and with water.”

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Essay on Life Is a Journey

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life Is a Journey 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 Life Is a Journey

The concept of life.

Life is often compared to a journey. Just like a journey, life has a beginning and an end. We are born, we grow, and we eventually pass away.

Paths in Life

In our life journey, we traverse different paths. Some paths are smooth, others are rocky. These paths represent the challenges and triumphs we face.

Travel Companions

On this journey, we are never alone. We meet people who become our companions. They help us navigate our path and make our journey worthwhile.

Lessons Learned

Life, like any journey, teaches us valuable lessons. These lessons shape us into who we are and guide us towards our destination.

250 Words Essay on Life Is a Journey

The metaphor of life.

Life is often compared to a journey, a metaphorical concept that demonstrates the progression of life from birth to death. This journey is not merely a physical one, but rather a voyage of self-discovery, personal growth, and understanding.

Unpredictability and Challenges

The unpredictability of life’s journey is what makes it thrilling and daunting at the same time. We encounter various challenges, obstacles, and detours that test our resilience. These obstacles can be seen as opportunities to learn, adapt, and grow, shaping our personalities and perspectives.

Companionship on the Journey

Life’s journey is also marked by the companions we meet along the way. These relationships, whether they last a lifetime or a fleeting moment, can have a profound impact on our journey. They provide us with valuable lessons about empathy, love, and the importance of connection.

Appreciating the Journey

The journey of life is not just about reaching a destination. It’s about appreciating the journey itself, the experiences, and the growth that comes with it. It’s about understanding that each step, each decision, and each experience, positive or negative, contributes to our overall journey.

In conclusion, life’s journey is a complex tapestry of experiences, lessons, and relationships. It is unpredictable, challenging, and filled with opportunities for growth. As we navigate through it, we must remember to appreciate the journey, the companions we meet, and the lessons we learn. After all, life is not just about the destination but the journey itself.

500 Words Essay on Life Is a Journey

The metaphor of life as a journey, stages of the journey.

The journey of life is composed of several stages. Each stage represents a unique phase of our life, marked by distinctive challenges and opportunities for growth. The stages begin with childhood, a time of innocence and discovery. This stage is followed by adolescence, a period of exploration and self-definition. Adulthood comes next, bringing with it the responsibilities of career, family, and society. Finally, old age is a time for reflection, wisdom, and acceptance.

Challenges and Growth

Just as any journey is fraught with obstacles and difficulties, so too is the journey of life. These challenges, however, should not be seen as deterrents but as opportunities for growth and self-improvement. They provide us with the chance to learn about our strengths and weaknesses, to develop resilience, and to cultivate empathy and understanding towards others. Each challenge we overcome makes us stronger and more capable, shaping us into the individuals we become.

The Importance of the Journey

The role of companionship.

No journey is meant to be undertaken alone. Companionship plays a crucial role in our life’s journey. Our companions – family, friends, mentors – provide us with support, guidance, and encouragement. They share in our joys and sorrows, help us navigate through difficulties, and enrich our journey with their presence. Companionship adds depth and meaning to our journey, making it all the more worthwhile.

Conclusion: The Journey Continues

In conclusion, life is a journey filled with stages, challenges, growth, and companionship. It is a voyage that provides us with countless opportunities to learn, evolve, and become better versions of ourselves. As we navigate through this journey, it is important to remember that the value lies not in the destination, but in the journey itself. As we continue on our path, let us cherish our experiences, learn from our challenges, appreciate our companions, and above all, enjoy the journey. Because, in the end, life is not about where we are going, but how we get there.

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