UKC

Aside from having a gloriously sunny day of impromptu scrambling on Tryfan today I was also wondering what do we consider to be natural as opposed to artificial.

some would say that anything made by humans (except other humans) is artificial, whereas anything non human is natural. I really dont get this at all as we are part of the earth and are as natural as any other creature on it.
Birds make nests, beavers make dams, termites, bees, wasps, ants make colonies out of various materials, ants even farm fungus. im sure there are plenty of other examples of non human creatures making structures or tools, why arent they considered artificial?

I can understand when it comes to food additives the artificial colours or artificial sweeteners which are made from scratch from other compounds, but ultimately everything is made from something on the earth or sunlight.

Some interesting musings I hope we can share thoughts once more..... over to you.

In reply to Pesda potato:
Natural as in not man made.
I.e a genetically modified tomato is not natural.

In reply to Pesda potato:

Anything which is the product of intelligent design (as opposed to random chance) isn't a natural thing.

The natural world is a wonderful thing...........

In reply to Pesda potato:



That's a bit simple when it comes to the environment, Snowdonia is hugely impacted by man, its an artificial environment compared to what it should look like, say the adirondacks or white mountains are what it would 'naturally' like, with trees up to most summits and possibly grass and shrubs for the last 500-1000feet.. by your definition theyd probably be classed as artificial?

Similarly the peak and the heather

But I think both would class as natural..

In reply to Martin not maisie:



So by that Snowdonia would probably be artificial?

In reply to Pesda potato:

But is intelligent design not part of nature as we are a product of the world.
Problem is what are we defining intelligence by - ant compared to an amoeba is vastly more intelligent

In reply to Roadrunner5:
I would disagree.

Fundamentally the Peak/Lakes soils are natural, as are the mosses, the heather, the birch trees and the birds, butterflies and bees that flutter amongst it all.

Broadly speaking and looking from afar (on top of Stanage etc.) the environment is completely unnatural and has been 'managed' for one reason or another for thousands of years so I would say it is unnatural/artificial.

I regularly confuse myself with this idea and have yet to answer it conclusively.

The White Peak (again broadly speaking) is frustratingly, is as artificial as it gets, but natural doesn't pay wages.

However, an artificial environment creates the amazing biodiversity we in the UK are blessed with.

In reply to Roadrunner5:


The topography of Snowdonia is, true to the definition of the word, a mix of the natural and the artificial. I'm not sure that this is a controversial statement, but fill your boots.

Plus, it's all patently made by ggggggggooooooooooooodddddd anyway.

"Stands back, knowing that despite the ridiculously unsophisticated troll, there'll be somebody, somewhere, actively seeking the bait."

Bugger, probably scared them off. Bicyclists deserve to be run over? TPS really is E1?

In reply to greylag:

I thought the White peak was grasses because that's what grows when it's kept at a sub-climax level? I can't remember my geology/geography but I thought the differences between the White and the dark peak were to do with the soils which develop on the bedrock...

Dark peak is pretty amazing though, when the heathers in full bloom, artificial or not, it's a stunning place.

In reply to greylag:

It's all over grazed to death by sheep, we've removed the native predators like wolves so deer etc. over graze and we've introduced new species of deer. The landscape looks nothing like it would if it was left to nature in the first place. Heather; it's grown and burnt deliberately to feed/provide cover for birds to shoot, natural?


nope it hasn't, man has and is reducing species at an unprecedented rate, through our management of this environment. Species increase when man sets land aside and stops turning it into mono cultures.

In reply to summo:


Are sure that we've had adequate time to get this theory.

At the end of the day we are a part of nature and the natural environment. Maybe anything that we do is "natural" How many other species share our obsession with preserving other species over and above their own selfish ends?

In reply to timjones:


yes, you can argue that we are natural, so any actions of our own are natural too. There are of course many examples of host species but nothing like us. Bacteria and Fungi would best fit your model, they need other living species, but none of us would live without them either.

But, if we remove a predator, there is an impact. The same if we remove an environment. Look at the lakes and North wales, the 'natural' or perhaps 'historical habit' is a better term, is the enclosed native woodlands, where stock can't get in. But it does of course depend at what point in time who want to stop the clock and use as your reference point. Obviously just after the last age, diversity in the UK was more limited, now it's better comparatively, but declining relative to just a few thousand years.

Field margins versus mono cultures in the remainder of a field. The diverse areas have become the minority, not the majority.

Although, there are opposite problems. I've had a few heated discussions with conservationist bodies that are preserving a couple of different pieces of land because of rare plants mainly. But, these plants are only growing there because of the way the land was managed for the last few hundred years, perhaps longer. They now believe to protect them they should prevent any working of the land, which also includes clearing of drainage, bushes, trees etc. so these former fields are slowly turning to marsh, scattered with trees that struggle to grow with their roots swamped for most of the year etc. We even have historical photos that show what the land looked like, but you can't get past their 'zero human action' blinkers.

surprised no ones introduced the terms 'semi-natural' & 'cultural landscape's yet, both widely used by ecologists & appropriate to much of the British landscape

In reply to Pesda potato:

Blast you and your OP!

I had an idylic 12 mile walk over Walland Marsh, part of Romney Marsh, at the weekend revelling in the wonders of nature. A big blue sky, green fields stretching to the horizon, new born lambs everywhere, frogs jumping into the dykes, sky larks singing and marsh harriers circling over the lonely ancient little Marsh churches. *

You've gone and spoilt it all now by reminding me that it is all artificial, because without the dykes built by Dutch engineers centuries ago it would all have been sea!

* Actually there are two 20th and 21st century intrusions I conveniently ignored - the brooding presence of Dungeness nuclear power station squatting on the horizon and the field of 26 wind turbines dominating the view to the south and east.

In reply to Roadrunner5:

The White Peak minus a few areas, has generally been improved and reseeded with rye grasses which is about as diverse as a carpet! In fact a carpet may have more life in it!

Species increase when man sets land aside and stops turning it into mono cultures;

I'm not sure on the evidence for this - I'm not confronting you, just personally not sure! - but I would disagree.

At the moment (it may change with time and attitudes) semi-natural grasslands for example are managed for their fungal, moss, plant diversity which is afforded SSSI, BAP habitat status etc. If you left this to scrub over with gorse, birch etc. woodland would develop and the more important habitat (IMO) would be lost. Unfortunately we don't have large herbivores roaming anymore, maintaining an equilibrium, and eventually the UK would be one large woodland which I predict would have less species richness than is currently present within the UK.

Management, call it irreparable damage if you like, has occurred and we as people who care, probably do the best we can to maintain/reverse biodiversity trends.

As for humans being natural, and the natural thing for us to do what we're doing that's beyond my remit!

In reply to Doug:

Semi natural; where only a modest percentage of former species have been wiped out and can not exist. Or the slow acceptance that man made land is the new natural.
Cultural; land ruined by industrialisation, but that's history. Although many brown field sites are more diverse than most people's gardens.

In reply to greylag:



I see your point, but isn't that still man controlling diversity and not really natural? The UK was pure forest once and yes less diverse, but that's as much to do with the timeline since that last ice age as anything else.

In reply to summo:






It's a fascinating and complex topic.

TBH I'm far from convinced that we can claim any ability to reliably gauge short term trends in biodiversity over any more than the last couple of hundred years

In reply to summo:
Don't know where you found those definitions, they're not the usually accepted definitions

semi-natural refers to habitats/plant communities formed by species native to the area but modified by human activity, often steps in the succession to forest which have been halted by man so with 'natural' counterparts.

Cultural landscapes are usually taken to be landscapes resulting from many years, often centuries, of management, and its usually used for areas produced by extensive farming or sylviculture so not exactly 'ruined by industrialisation' in most instances.

ps - the UK has never been entirely forest, even when forest was at its maximum there would have been grasslands & heaths above the tree line and large areas of wetlands (now mostly drained). If people like Frans Vera are correct, there would also have been extensive forest clearings/very open forest.

In reply to Doug:

I interpreted them perhaps a little differently to some.

farming and forestry are often carried out industrially, the qualifications for PEFC,FSC are minimal.

there will always be place that are too wet for native trees, or too cold and windy for most. But I suspect that the trees would have spread further up the hillside since the last ice age, had man not started chopping them down and grazing. Pines survive much higher up the hills in the Nordics than in Scotland.
I doubt there was much pure grassland, scrub, gorse, low lying stuff yes, as these would prevent tree getting established. The opposite is also true after storms, when the lower level plants get a window of opportunity or light.

There is a difference between clearings and open forest. You can have widely spaced pines, which are long lived, wind hardy etc.. so they can dominate for centuries... but open grass will get colonised by something.

In reply to timjones:

I agree, most inclusive records only began after man realised things were being damaged. Pollen records and the like from core samples only tell a very small part of a big story. People can infer things, if X existed in the fossil record, it must have eaten Y etc. but there is plenty of scope for error in such methods.

In reply to Pesda potato:

To me "natural" is the state that comes about once things are left alone by man. It's possible for completely man made environments to return to nature if they are just left alone for long enough.

Of course we've had such an impact on our environment, it's hard to say what is natural or not any more. If it wasn't for man most of the UK would still be covered in forest, and places like the lakes for example, would look very different.

Even our woodlands etc are "managed" now which always baffles me. I'm sure most natural areas can manage perfectly well without man's help. In fact it amuses me that many of the best spots for rare insects and things are places like abandoned industrial sites and motorway embankments, because despite their total artifical creation they are places now totally left alone by man.

In reply to Pesda potato:

so far the responses seem to be confirming my notion that most people seperate humans from the Earth, which is still an odd concept to me.

In reply to Pesda potato:

Natural? Anything that happens. As opposed to supernatural, which is stuff that never happens.

In reply to Doug:


Aha, the Vera hypothesis.

In reply to DoctorYoghourt:


Surely you can't rest with that definition? Natural means: anything that can be explained by natural i.e physical and chemical processes. Supernatural: any (respectably reported) phenomenon that cannot be explained by science as we yet understand it. In this category of course are ghosts, telepathy and all kinds of extrasensory perception. Of course, a lot/most of these can probably be explained naturally as various kinds of mental derangement on the part of the observer, but there are hundreds of thousands of such things that have never had a satisfactory explanation.

One of the most extraordinary ones I know of in the climbing world is the story of Lady Douglas on July 14, 1865 hearing in the late afternoon in their house in London someone calling her name, using the very intimate nickname that only the closest members of her family used. (Something like 'Bibi' - I haven't got the story in front of me). She called her house keeper and said, 'Did you call me?' 'No, ma'am.' Exactly the same thing happened twice more that evening, and each time the house keeper denied that she had called her. A few days later Lady Douglas discovered that her son had died on the first ascent of the Matterhorn on July 14, and much later they found out that the reason his body was never found at the bottom of the mountain was that it had almost certainly become wedged in a crevice a couple of hundred feet below the shoulder on the north face, about 400 feet below the point where they'd fallen, and that he'd probably survived there for many hours in an extremely badly injured state. Several guides/ eye witnesses later testified at the enquiry that they'd seen vultures circling around the shoulder for several days after the accident ...

A grisly story, but what makes it so chilling is that the housekeeper was able to corroborate that Lady Douglas had indeed summoned her three times that evening to ask her why she'd called for her, when she'd never said a thing.

All this is and much, much more in the extremely detailed, scholarly work on the Matterhorn disaster, 'The First Descent of the Matterhorn'.

In reply to Trangia:

Which intrusion is the more problematic long term...... the fissile Dungeness or the passively rotating turbines ?

In reply to Pesda potato:

define natural

Hirsute and saggy.

In reply to Pesda potato:
A further to my mind confused aspect of trying to define the natural = the native/non-native debate and the belief in some mystical 'natural ballance'

For example the argument re. 'natural' red squirrels vs 'non-natural' greys.

As Chris Peckham puts it:

".. when it comes to the emotive issue of immigration plenty of people ... are hell bent on cleaning up all the ‘non-native' scum and making Britain's countryside pure again, just like it was in the good old days. The thing is, when were the ‘good old days', when did they start and end? After all if we have to try and live in some sort of idealised time we must at least have some sort of programme to work to, however artificial. I've tried asking around but got no joy, the common perception still seems to be that everything living here when the land bridge to mainland Europe was inundated at the end of the last ice age is native, everything else non .... Pity that, because it immediately makes forty eight percent of our terrestrial mammal fauna non-natives"

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/do/ecco.py/view_item?listid=2&listcatid=11&lis...