Nature is a capacious concept that includes all the objects around us that are created without human involvement, although we, too, are part of it. From school textbooks, we have been used to dividing this concept into two separate categories: living and non-living nature. The differences between them are so striking that even preschoolers can distinguish one from the other.
What belongs to the living nature? It consists of animals, people, insects, fish, birds, all plants, that is, objects that can grow and reproduce, eat and breathe, drink and die. Over the course of their existence, they change their appearance, size, can be sick, suffer, and feel.
Inanimate nature are unchanging and permanent objects that do not need to eat and drink; they do not reproduce or grow. If any change occurs, it is over a long period, sometimes invisible to the human eye.
These two kinds of nature are so closely related to each other that they could hardly exist separately. After all, every living thing needs the heat and light of the sun, water to stay thirsty, air to breathe. Wind helps plants pollinate and reproduce with seeds. Soil gives nutrients to plants, which humans and animals then eat. Many ecological chains can be made up, each of which necessarily involves non-living nature. It is the basis of all life on Earth.
Basic attributes of nonliving nature
If we compare the objects of animate and inanimate nature, certain distinctive features are immediately evident, according to which we can give a clear definition of inanimate nature. These are the following properties:
Resilience to external change. Even after thousands of years, the ocean will remain the same blue, the rock will remain solid, and the tops of mountains will still prop up the firmament of the sky. Every day we see the sun over our heads during the day and the moon at night. Even if the landscape around us is changed by weathering or exposure to water, it does not happen in one day, but over many centuries.
They don’t need to be nourished.
They don’t need air to breathe.
They don’t reproduce.