What Is Nature?
Ask most people what nature is, and they will describe a bird. Perhaps a fox, a woodland, a coral reef. This is not wrong, but it is the answer of someone looking at the surface of a pond and describing the pond as “wet.” Nature is not primarily the animals and plants we can point a camera at. It is the deep architecture beneath and around them: the rock the soil sits on, the chemistry and microbes that move through that soil, the water and nutrients cycling above and below it, the air whose composition was itself manufactured by life over billions of years, and the relationships binding all of it into something that behaves less like a collection of objects and more like a single, self-maintaining system. This essay tries to give nature its full dimension, the one the word deserves before anyone starts arguing about how to value or protect it. You cannot put a sensible price, or a sensible policy in place, on something you have only half described.
Life, the universe and everything… manLife is more than a story about this planet. The universe took energy and coalesced it into matter. Through star formation, supernovae, and the collisions of neutron stars, that matter eventually found its way here. When the Solar System formed, it was a stellar fractionating column, placing the elements needed for life on the third rock from the Sun. The process repeated when our planet formed: it built a vast, nuclear-fuelled fractionating column within the magma and continental plates. That column dragged minerals into close proximity, and this was the crucible in which life could take shape, the precursors to life brought together. Then, in the form of clay, a microstructure became a template onto which life could form; those minerals in the primordial soup catalysed the first self-replicating nucleotides and the peptides they encoded.. The spark of life was upon us. So the atomic, subatomic, and cosmic forces are as much a part of life as anything else in this essay. Rock and rollThe rocks beneath any landscape are not a fixed backdrop. They are the slowest-moving part of a cycle of what is life: igneous rock crystallising from magma, weathering into sediment, sediment compacting into new rock, and that rock eventually subducted, melted and recycled back into magma over tens or hundreds of millions of years. James Hutton, working in Scotland in the late eighteenth century, was the first to grasp that this rock cycle had no natural starting point and no natural end visible within it, a conclusion he summarised in one of the most quietly radical sentences in the history of science: geological time shows “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”1 Hutton’s uniformitarianism, the idea that the same slow processes we observe today, erosion, deposition, uplift, have always operated and will always operate, is the foundation stone of modern geology, and what “natural” timescales actually mean. A hedgerow removed this afternoon is nothing against a timescale in which mountain ranges are temporary. Plate tectonics, established as a coherent theory only in the 1960s, gives Hutton’s cycle its engine.2 Continents are not fixed. They are rafts on convecting mantle rock, colliding, splitting, and dragging entire climate systems with them as they move. The position of a continent relative to the equator determines its weathering rate, its rainfall, and ultimately the chemistry of the ocean it sheds sediment into. Geography, in other words, is not scenery. It is an active input into planetary chemistry, operating on a clock measured in tens of millions of years. The geochemistry of GaiaGeochemistry is where rock, air, water and life stop being separate subjects and become one system. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur do not sit still. They cycle between rock, atmosphere, ocean and living tissue in loops of wildly different length, and understanding nature means understanding that these loops are nested inside one another like gears of different sizes turning at different speeds. The fast carbon cycle, plant photosynthesis pulling carbon dioxide from the air and respiration or decay returning it, turns over in years to decades. The slow carbon cycle, carbon dioxide dissolving in rainwater to weather silicate rock, the weathering products washing to the sea, and marine organisms locking that carbon into calcium carbonate shells that eventually become limestone, turns over across hundreds of thousands to millions of years.3 This slow cycle acts as the planet’s thermostat: warmer temperatures speed up silicate weathering, weathering draws down more carbon dioxide, and the drawdown eventually cools the climate back down, a negative feedback loop first modelled in detail by geochemists working on long-run climate stability in the late twentieth century.3 Nature, understood this way, is not a static inventory of species. It is a chemical control system with a response time measured in geological epochs, and it has kept the planet’s temperature within a survivable range for most of the last four billion years despite the sun itself growing steadily brighter over that period, a puzzle known as the “faint young sun paradox.”4 Nitrogen and phosphorus cycle on shorter loops but are no less structural. The Redfield ratio, the strikingly consistent proportion of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus found in marine plankton across the world’s oceans, first documented by the oceanographer Alfred Redfield in the 1930s, revealed that ocean chemistry and ocean biology are not two separate things reacting to one another but a single co-regulated system, each shaping the composition of the other over time.5 While the dominant scientific view holds that plate tectonics and its minerals enabled life-supplying nutrients, catalysing organic reactions at hydrothermal vents, and providing clay templates for molecular assembly, there is growing evidence of a two-way feedback. Once life emerged, it began reshaping the geochemical landscape that sustains tectonics: biological weathering, driven by bacteria and early terrestrial organisms, erodes rock and delivers water-rich sediment into subduction zones, hydrating the mantle and potentially accelerating the continental growth that plate tectonics depends on. In this sense, the minerals that helped create life were themselves altered by it, and the atomic, subatomic, and cosmic forces that assembled the elements of life remain entangled with the geological processes that continue to shape our planet. Earth’s mineralogical richness is itself a product of life. Mars, Venus and Mercury, lacking both plate tectonics and a persistent biosphere, have remained largely frozen at the early stages of mineral evolution. Their surfaces preserve perhaps a few hundred mineral species, dominated by basalts, clays and iron oxides. Earth, by contrast, hosts over 5,000 known minerals, roughly an order of magnitude more than any other rocky planet in the Solar System. That gap is not merely a matter of size or age. It reflects a cascade of feedbacks that only a living planet can sustain. The Great Oxidation Event alone, driven by oxygenic photosynthesis, produced more than 2,000 new oxide and hydroxide minerals by shifting the redox state of the surface environment. Microbial metabolisms further pushed geochemical systems far from equilibrium, enabling elements to occupy multiple oxidation states and combine in ways that abiotic processes rarely achieve. The result is a self-reinforcing loop of diversity: life alters geochemistry, geochemistry generates novel mineral environments, and those environments in turn offer new niches and catalytic surfaces for biological innovation. Whether this loop is bounded or open-ended remains a matter of debate, with some suggesting that Earth may be approaching the maximum chemical complexity available to natural mineral systems, but the correlation is unmistakable: mineral diversity and biological complexity have risen together across four billion years, each amplifying the evolutionary potential of the other. This is the basis of the Gaia Hypothesis: not a spiritual claim but a complex, self-reinforcing system of biological and geochemical feedbacks. In its mature form, the hypothesis proposes that organisms and their material environment evolve as a single coupled system, from which emerges the sustained self-regulation of climate and chemistry at a habitable state. It describes a complex entity involving the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil, the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system. The idea was initially resisted, dismissed as teleological and untestable, and its proponents were forced to clarify that any biotic regulation must be automatic and unconscious, not purposeful. Yet the discoveries have largely moved in its favour: the biological production of methane stabilising oxygen levels, plankton blooms drawing down carbon dioxide as the sun warmed, the tight coupling of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in marine ecosystems. At the point where science becomes metaphysical, the Gaia Hypothesis remains a boundary object, a theory that is difficult to falsify in its strong form, yet one whose central intuition, that life and its planetary home are locked in a single, self-shaping embrace, has proven to enable discovery, rather than be merely speculative. An atmosphere built by the organisms breathing itThe air itself is not a neutral backdrop against which life happens. It is largely a product of life, and its history is one of the more startling facts in earth science. For roughly the first two billion years of Earth’s existence, free oxygen was essentially absent from the atmosphere. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria began producing oxygen as a metabolic waste product, and for a long period that oxygen was absorbed almost as fast as it was made, principally by reacting with dissolved iron in the oceans, laying down the vast banded iron formations that are mined today for steel production. Only once the oceanic iron sinks were largely exhausted did oxygen begin accumulating in the atmosphere in earnest, an event geologists call the Great Oxidation Event, beginning around 2.4 billion years ago.6 That single biologically driven shift in atmospheric chemistry was, by some readings, the largest pollution event and the largest extinction event in the planet’s history, since it was lethal to the anaerobic organisms that had dominated until then, and it is also the precondition for every subsequent form of complex, oxygen-breathing life, humans included.6 The lesson is not a piece of historical trivia. It is that the atmosphere, like the rock cycle and the carbon cycle, is not fixed. It is an ongoing biochemical negotiation, and the composition we currently depend on for breathing is a snapshot of a process still running, one we are now actively perturbing at a speed the slow carbon cycle cannot match. Soil, the impossibly thin skin of lifeBetween rock and air sits a layer usually no more than a metre deep that receives almost none of the attention its function deserves. Soil is not crushed rock with plants stuck in it. It is a living structure, arguably the most biologically dense environment on the planet, with a teaspoon of healthy soil containing more microorganisms than there are humans alive today. Charles Darwin, in the last book he published, spent decades studying a creature most naturalists considered beneath serious attention: the earthworm. He calculated that earthworms in an ordinary English field could turn over enough soil to bury a layer of stones several inches deep within a matter of years, continuously reworking soil structure, aerating it, and mixing organic matter through it.7 Darwin’s conclusion, that the entire fertile soil layer of England had passed through the gut of an earthworm and would continue to do so indefinitely, was treated in his own lifetime as a charming eccentricity from a man better known for other work. It is now understood as one of the earliest correct descriptions of what soil science calls “bioturbation,” the continuous biological reworking that keeps soil structure, drainage and fertility functioning at all. Beneath the earthworms lies a further layer of structure: mycorrhizal fungal networks that connect the roots of different plants, sometimes of different species, into a shared underground system through which carbon, water and nutrients are exchanged, a relationship increasingly documented across temperate and tropical forests alike.8 A wood is not usefully understood as a set of individual trees any more than a body is usefully understood as a set of individual cells. Remove the fungal network, through compaction, chemical disruption or simple sterilisation of the topsoil, and the wood above ground loses a resilience mechanism that took centuries to establish, even while every tree in it still appears, to the eye, to be standing. More in this article: Water, moving everything else aroundHydrology ties the rock, chemistry and soil together by moving all of it. Rain falling on high ground infiltrates through soil into underlying rock, dissolving minerals as it goes, feeding aquifers that in chalk landscapes, can take decades to move a few kilometres underground before re-emerging as a spring. A chalk stream, of which England holds the majority of the world’s supply, is not simply “water in a channel.” It is the visible outlet of a groundwater system that has been filtering and mineralising that water for years before it reaches daylight, supporting a specific, narrow-tolerance ecology of invertebrates and fish adapted to stable, cool, mineral-rich flow.9 Over-abstraction of groundwater from a borehole miles from the nearest chalk stream can dry that stream out just as effectively as diverting the channel itself, because the system that connects them is invisible and operates on a delay of years, exactly the kind of delayed, distributed cause and effect that market transactions are structurally unable to register. Relationships, not objectsOnce rock, chemistry, atmosphere, soil and water are in view, the ecological relationships that usually stand in for the whole of “nature” in public conversation finally make sense as what they are: the fastest-moving, most visible layer of a much slower and deeper system, not a separate subject in their own right. The relationship between a wild boar and an oak tree is a single instance of a general pattern ecologists call a keystone interaction: a relationship whose removal collapses function far beyond the two species directly involved.10 Sea otters keeping urchin populations in check to preserve kelp forests, wolves altering the browsing behaviour of deer enough to change the course of rivers through reduced streambank erosion in Yellowstone, elephants opening dense scrub into savanna that dozens of other species depend on: in every documented case, the relationship is doing more ecological work than any single species could do alone, and in every case the relationship is invisible to a valuation exercise that only looks at the species being counted, not the interaction connecting them.11 Nature as a system, not an inventoryPut all of this together, rock cycling on tens of millions of years, carbon cycling on scales from years to hundreds of thousands of years, an atmosphere built and maintained by the very organisms that depend on it, soil silently rebuilt by organisms nobody bothers to protect by name, water threading decades-long journeys underground before it becomes visible, and ecological relationships doing structural work invisible to a species count, and the definition of nature that emerges is nothing like “the birds and the bees.” It is closer to what the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, and later the atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and the biologist Lynn Margulis, described as a single coupled system of rock, air, water and life regulating its own conditions across geological time, a framework that remains contested in its strongest forms but whose basic empirical claim, that life has profoundly and continuously reshaped the chemistry of the planet it inhabits, is by now uncontroversial.4,12 This matters for anything built on top of the definition, including the argument I make on taxation and land value. A system that operates on cycles of years, centuries and millions of years simultaneously cannot be adequately represented by a single spot valuation, because a spot valuation is a snapshot of one layer of the system at one moment, while the damage worth worrying about is almost always happening at a slower layer underneath, out of sight, and out of the market’s reach until it is too late to reverse. Nature, properly defined, is not a resource sitting on a shelf waiting for a price tag. It is a set of nested clocks, geological, chemical, biological and hydrological, running at different speeds, each dependent on the others continuing to run. Any economic intervention to protect nature has to be built to match that structure, not to flatten it into a single number and call the job done. Human ecology & economics are still part of natureOnce nature is understood as a set of nested clocks rather than an inventory of objects, we must now look into how humans play a role in life and how the rules of human society destroy nature and can protect it. Resource depletion and biodiversity loss stop looking like separate problems and start looking like the same problem, seen in its true light. We can now begin to measure and mitigate humanity’s role in nature. A negative externality, in the standard economic definition, is a cost imposed on a third party who was not party to the transaction that created it.13 The concept is old and uncontroversial in principle. What is less often said is that almost every category of ecological damage is a textbook externality, and the reason it persists at scale is not that economics lacks the tools to describe it, but that the institutions responsible for pricing it have never been built to operate and enclose this cost into every transaction in the free market.
Resource depletion is the clearest case. The collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery off Newfoundland in 1992 is the standard teaching example: catches looked healthy for decades even as the underlying stock was being fished down, because the fish that remained became easier to catch as fleets adopted better sonar and larger nets, masking the decline in the numbers that mattered until the population fell below the threshold needed to recover at all.14 The market signal, price and catch volume, was telling fishers the resource was fine almost up to the moment it collapsed and failed to return. This is the general pattern of a stock externality: the visible flow, fish landed, timber felled, water abstracted or polluted can remain stable or even rise right up until the underlying stock that generates the flow passes a threshold from which it does not recover on any timescale relevant to policy. Biodiversity loss compounds this with a further delay economists call extinction debt: the interval between a habitat being degraded or fragmented and the local extinctions that degradation has already made inevitable.15 A hedgerow network removed today does not immediately kill the species that depended on it for connectivity between fragments of remaining habitat. It removes the population’s ability to disperse, recolonise after a bad year, or maintain genetic diversity, the same mechanism as the wild boar and the oak discussed earlier in this essay. The local extinctions that follow can take decades to show up in any survey, by which point the cause is politically and administratively invisible, attributed if anything to whatever pressure happens to be visible at the time the population finally crosses zero. The Living Planet Index, compiled by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, has tracked an average decline of over two-thirds in monitored vertebrate population sizes since 1970, and the 2019 global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services put around one million species at risk of extinction, many within decades.16,17 Both figures describe the same underlying phenomenon documented throughout this essay: a system operating on decades-to-centuries feedback loops being drawn down by economic activity operating on quarterly and annual feedback loops, with no mechanism connecting the two clocks until the slower one has broken. The triumph of the commons - history and economics guide us in how we can protect such diversityCurrent legal protection is not doing its job. If we genuinely wish to bequeath the diversity of nature to future generations, we must add two elements to current policy that are presently missing. My argument is this. First, we must price the loss of nature into every economic transaction, so that the true cost of depletion, extraction and destruction is reflected in the market and people are given a genuine economic incentive to protect what remains. At present, nature is treated as free and infinite, which is precisely why it is being liquidated. If its depletion carried a price, the free market itself would begin to work in nature’s favour rather than against it. Second, and more fundamentally, we need the wisdom of communities to make such decisions. We must return to the idea that nature is a common treasury for all, and that the rules governing the extraction of resources must be guided by a system of deep wisdom rooted in how we have held things in common in the past. Such wisdom is not the property of economists or legislators alone. It lives in communities who have long understood the land, its limits and its cycles. The proceeds of destroying life’s complexity must therefore be returned to the community that suffers the loss, and that community must play a genuine role in governing what is lost. Protection cannot be imposed from above, nor can it be reduced to a transaction between distant parties. It must be rooted in the places and peoples who bear the consequences, and who hold the knowledge of what is at stake. Only then can law, market and community work together to leave nature intact for those who come after us. This is where the standard reference point, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay on the tragedy of the commons, gets the mechanism backwards.18 Hardin described herders sharing an unowned pasture, each rationally adding one more animal because the gain is private and the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone, and concluded that shared ownership itself was the cause of ruin. What Hardin was actually describing was an open-access regime: a resource with no ownership and no rules governing its use at all. That is not what “the commons” meant for most of the centuries the word was in use. A commons, historically, was a resource held collectively under a specific, locally enforced set of rules: who could graze how many animals, on which fields, in which season, policed by the community that depended on the resource lasting. Hardin described herders sharing an unowned pasture, each rationally adding one more animal because the gain is private and the cost of overgrazing is spread across everyone, and concluded that shared ownership itself was the cause of ruin. What Hardin was actually describing was an open-access regime: a resource with no ownership and no rules governing its use at all. That is not what “the commons” meant for most of the centuries the word was in use. A commons, historically, was a resource held collectively under a specific, locally enforced set of rules: who could graze how many animals, on which fields, in which season, policed by the community that depended on the resource lasting. Elinor Ostrom spent decades documenting these systems empirically, work that later won her the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the first awarded to a woman. She catalogued common-pool resource regimes, Swiss alpine pastures held in common for over five hundred years, Japanese village-managed forests, Spanish and Filipino irrigation networks, that had sustained continuous use without collapse, precisely because the communities managing them had built durable rules of access, monitoring and graduated sanctions for anyone who broke them.19 Where these systems failed, the cause was rarely the commons structure itself. It was usually an external authority stripping the community of its right to set and enforce its own rules, most often to open the resource to private extraction, which converted a working commons into exactly the unowned, unruled free-for-all Hardin had mistakenly treated as the general case. The pattern that actually depletes a resource, the cod stock, the hedgerow network, the aquifer beneath a chalk stream, is not shared ownership. It is extraction carried out with no binding obligation to the resource’s long-term condition, whether that extraction happens under private title answerable to nobody or under a genuinely open-access regime with no rules at all. Well-governed commons survive for the opposite reason: the people extracting value from the resource are the same people who bear the cost of depleting it, and they have built rules, often unwritten and locally specific, that keep those two facts tied together. The lesson is not that nature needs privatising to be protected. It is that nature needs a structure, private or communal, in which whoever extracts value from it remains accountable, indefinitely, for what that extraction costs everyone else, which is the same rent-based principle at the centre of this project’s wider argument about land and resource taxation. None of this is abstract in the English case. Registered common land covers a little under 400,000 hectares, just over three per cent of England’s land area, and yet more than half of it, around 55 per cent, is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, against roughly 8 per cent of England as a whole.20 Land held under the oldest surviving system of collectively enforced grazing rights carries something close to seven times the concentration of statutory nature protection found across the rest of the country, the great majority of which has been privately enclosed since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history explains the pattern, and that protection came about because this was the land that held onto its biodiversity when privatised land was being destroyed for private profit. Around 5,200 parliamentary enclosure acts between 1604 and 1914 converted roughly a fifth of England from common to private holding, with the pace concentrated between 1750 and 1820, a period in which J. M. Neeson’s research found former occupiers dispossessed of use rights across some 30 per cent of the country’s agricultural land.21 Enclosure replaced land managed under customary stints, seasonal dates and rotation rules, drawn up by people who had grazed the same ground for generations and expected their children to graze it after them, with land managed under a single owner’s incentive to maximise short-run yield. The commons that survived mostly did so because they were upland, boggy or otherwise unprofitable enough that no landowner thought it worth the cost of a parliamentary act to acquire them, not because anyone set out to preserve them as nature reserves. They became accidental refuges by remaining the one category of English land where extraction stayed bound to rules answerable to a whole community, while the enclosed land around them was drained, ploughed, limed, sprayed and reseeded into some of the most biologically simplified ground in Europe, making the UK one of, if not the most, nature-depleted countries in the world. In ConclusionUnderstood this way, the definition of nature cannot start at the woodland edge, and it cannot stop at geochemistry either. It has to reach back to the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and to the generations of dying stars whose exotic nuclear fusion forged the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron now sitting in every leaf, every bone and every litre of seawater on Earth, a process of stellar nucleosynthesis first worked out in full by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle in 1957.22 It has to include the still unresolved transition, somewhere around four billion years ago, from ordinary chemistry into the first self-replicating cell, and everything that cell’s descendants have done since: building an atmosphere from nothing, regulating a climate against a brightening sun, and turning bare rock into the living skin of soil this essay has already described, the pattern James Lovelock spent a career trying to get taken seriously as a single coupled system rather than a coincidence.4 But a history that runs from the Big Bang to Lovelock still leaves out the part of the story now doing the most damage in the shortest time. For the last two centuries, one species has been drawing down four billion years of accumulated biological and geological capital faster than any process described above can replace it, and it has been doing so not through some new form of biology but through an entirely human invention: property and tax law. Understanding nature today means holding both halves of this story at once, the near-eternal machine of rock, air, water and life, and the two-hundred-year-old rulebook currently deciding how fast that machine breaks. The rulebook is not part of nature in the way an oak or an ocean current is. But it is now the single largest variable determining whether the rest of this essay’s subject matter survives the century, which is exactly why the economics of land and rent, not just the ecology of species and soil, belongs in any serious account of what nature is and how it can still be protected. Notes
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