Consider the following comments on nature.
Nature does nothing in vain.
Aristotle
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Proverb
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.
Richard Dawkins
We call it the natural world as if we were standing outside it.
What we romanticise as wilderness, someone hungrier than us calls a resource.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that our talk about nature reveals more about us than about nature, because we treat it as both sacred and as raw material depending on what we want from it. Begin by acknowledging the genuine moral pull, that the destruction of forests and species feels like a loss beyond mere economics. Then press the contradiction: the same societies that revere nature also depend on consuming it, and pretending otherwise is a comfortable evasion. A useful third move questions the very line between human and natural, since we are animals who build, and our cities are no less part of the world than a beehive. Caution: avoid romanticising nature as gentle or wise, which forgets that it is also indifferent to our survival.