IN THIS COMPELLING NEW BOOK, The Nature of Nature—Why We Need the Wild, Enric Sala takes us on a guided tour of Earth’s marine environment, this time not only its aesthetic power but also the life-giving products of Earth’s majority living cover. The health of the sea, no less than the health of the land, is ultimately responsible for every morsel we put in our mouths, every breath of air we take. We cannot create the land and sea, but we can destroy them.
It is fortunate that we humans can fully appreciate nature, even though through science we have only begun to understand her. What exactly is she, this Mother Nature, that we should give her almost divine status? I have devoted a large part of my life as an ecologist to the scientific study of nature, yet a definition of it in words still escapes me and most others I challenge. Nature evokes a feeling as much as a physical image. So let me try a definition that is more poetry than science.
Nature, sometimes called Mother Nature, is the metaphorical goddess of everything in the universe beyond human control, from the sweet descent of her sunsets to the tantrums of her thunderstorms; from the explosive brilliance of her ecosystems to the black void of her empty space.
Sala’s approach to marine biology, aside from the beauty of his photographs, lies in the clarity of his vision of marine ecology as a scientific vision comparable to that achieved by studies of terrestrial ecology. The convergence is especially striking in the origin and evolution of ecosystems to land habitats such as forest and grassland on the one hand and coral reefs and other marine habitats on the other. Ecosystems, with their enormous origami-like relationships, are among the most complex of all natural constructions. To understand the patterns and laws of their common origins is one of the most important challenges of science in the present century. The Nature of Nature can help us in that quest.
—Edward O. Wilson