There are various concepts of Nature, and approaches towards it. Here I go into a chronicle of a couple of them.
A handy quote to start is this examination of various definitions by 17th century Englishman, Boyle.
For sometimes we use the word nature for that Author of nature whom the schoolmen, harshly enough, call natura naturans, as when it is said that nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the quiddity of a thing, namely, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is, whether the thing be corporeal or not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angle, or of a triangle, or of a fluid body, as such. Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion, as when we say that a stone let fall in the air is by nature carried towards the centre of the earth, and, on the contrary, that fire or flame does naturally move upwards toward firmament. Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things, as when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day, nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men. Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body, especially a living one, as when physicians say that nature is strong or weak or spent, or that in such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure. Sometimes we take nature for the universe, or system of the corporeal works of God, as when it is said of a phoenix, or a chimera, that there is no such thing in nature, i.e. in the world. And sometimes too, and that most commonly, we would express by nature a semi-deity or other strange kind of being, such as this discourse examines the notion of.
And besides these more absolute acceptions, if I may so call them, of the word nature, it has divers others (more relative), as nature is wont to be set or in opposition or contradistinction to other things, as when we say of a stone when it falls downwards that it does it by a natural motion, but that if it be thrown upwards its motion that way is violent. So chemists distinguish vitriol into natural and fictitious, or made by art, i.e. by the intervention of human power or skill; so it is said that water, kept suspended in a sucking pump, is not in its natural place, as that is which is stagnant in the well. We say also that wicked men are still in the state of nature, but the regenerate in a state of grace; that cures wrought by medicines are natural operations; but the miraculous ones wrought by Christ and his apostles were supernatural.
— Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature
Read more here.
Model zero - Humans in unity with Nature
When a tribe lives for a long time in one place they search the strategy space of survivial and economic production. At these earliest stages the hunter-prey relations are elaborated, and tribe - ecosystem relations are the determinant of subjective wellbeing. The exceptions are the increasingly common warfare between tribes. By Bronze age intergroup conflict became much more of a determinant. Of course, floodings of plains were key economic factors in Mesopotapia and Egypt, but distruptions of these were divine-ordained supply shocks and the whole enterpreise was centrally administered. They weren't the main focus of everyday life.
Stewardship
First we have the Christian stewardship model. You shouldn't play God, genetic engineering of catgirls is a no-no. The feelings towards nature are positive, but only slightly. Theology of Nature is varied in Christianity, but often God's energy or messages in forces of Nature.
1 Kings 19:11-13
New King James Version
God’s Revelation to Elijah 11 Then He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire [a]a still small voice.
13 So it was, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. Suddenly a voice came to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
There's the meaning of nature-of-particular-thing, which used to be considered both corporeal and incorporeal. It is distinct from the Nature as realm, but the realm variant can be reconstructed by pooling together all the essences into one collection.
Still the theology of Nature is as fallen together with humans, so not perfect, just mostly right. Other monotheistic religions that practice circumcision make an implicit statement about the insufficient essence of Nature - it needs to be corrected.
Note that Nature is there not quite as a separate domain from Civilization, but all around us in the pattern of things created by God. Only direct experiences with other humans (including saints in many kinds of Christianity) and with God can be understood as without Nature as an intermediary.
That difference between domains got changed with the rise of Modernity.
Mastery
Second we have the high modernist extractionist model. Here Nature is contrasted with Civilization. Civilized area does not contain nature, be it Soviet grey blocks or clean-cut-grass Californian suburbs. It is not necessarily capitalistic, even though you often have movies about greedy capitalists chaining orcas or cutting down forests. There is nothing specifically capitalistic about this. Lookup the Soviet destruction of the Aral Sea. Cold war era was big on this in general, as a Zoomer I don't have direct experience of that, but the optimism portrayed in the Fallout series games is a about this. "The vaults will be safe. Emergent social control problems won't kill you. Technology is enough".
Suffice to say a skeptical case against the modernist mastery of nature has been made many times, at the deepest in the deep ecology movement.
Submission - Deep ecology
Distrust of the human ingenuity and misanthropy lead to sad endeavours, such as Voluntary Human Exitinction Movement.
There like in mainstream Modernism, humans are seen outside of Nature, or maybe as a cancerous part of it (murky terrtiry). Regardless the moral focus in on the biosphere in general, not on agents with power. Overall the goal of saving the biosphere could be achieved easily in space with space habitats with separated ecosystems, so it's a skill issue really.
The bold, technical approach of Modernists that Deep Ecology rejects was celebrated in lots of fiction, like Julius Verne. The sci-fi tradition led to the rise of transhumanism.
Transcendence
If Modernist Mastery was about making Nature subservient to us in delivering our creature comforts, Transhumanist approach is for a change in these comforts themselves. Be it adding new senses, creating new genetic creatures or living forever, the change is deep, and lauded as such.
Here Nature is most commonly referenced as 'Human Nature', as that's what resisted the Modern Change the most, unlike the economic and technological systems. God is forgotten, Man is supposed to become one.
One of the most radical movements under the umbrella of transhumanism is Xenofeminism: 'if Nature is unjust, change nature'.
Here that can be taken to mean the immediate human nature, such as physical sex differences. We can interpret this even deeper. How much the Universe can be changed to suit us apes?
Defying reality
What if we could change the physical constants of the Universe? Anti-gravity? Are there things that couldn't be changed? Perhaps Maths, if it's not discovered. If we live in a simulation perhaps we could influence the universe above, find a glitch and give ourselves infinite energy?
(There was a fiction short story in the LessWrong sphere, probably be Eliezer Yudkowsky that I can't find now.)
What about the limits of perception? Could we imagine a new shade of blue? Change the Dunbar number? Transhumanism does attempt new sensory experiences, but is there a limit to what a creature can feel?
Let's go back to the topic of Christianity.
Supernatural
Another binary in which Nature participates is the Nature - Supernature one, first made by Aquinas. He divided miracles into: above, beyond and against Nature. I will not delve into that right now. This theme of separation of Nature as a separate entity is shared with the approaches above. Now what did Hume say to this? He changed the notion of Nature, saying that any miracle is just Nature that we don't know of.
Hume upsets the picture - Nature as inescapable
The Nature-as-separate concept says that there is some distribution of *things*, be it plants in a forest, or attitudes in humans (human nature), or some normalcy in reality. Humean Nature-as-totality is deflationary, anything is Nature. Just like his scepticism towards causation, that is is only an empirical pattern that we happen to observe and cannot be sure of completely, he says that relatively we might see some things to be outside of our usual distribution of things, but we can't be sure that the two distributions are truly different if our sample size increases.
Under the Humean view, Nature is inescapable. We find a similar notion in Kipling's 'Gods of copybook headings'
That approach takes the modernist separation-and-mastery view upside down, saying that all these attempts are futile. We can break down barriers that appear before us, but any barrier taken down is not the ultimate barrier. Moreover, there are hidden feedback loops that can punish us for breaking the previous equilibria. A good real life example of this is the advent of the Cold War and the considerations of Oppenheimer. Progress in physical sciences upset the game-theory of world politics and warfare, as well as individual approaches. I feel some boomers still haven't recovered from the threat of nuclear destruction, and that increased risk-taking might have taken place.
In this view, Nature has the hard laws, which could be coded in the simulation, but also a plethora of emerging laws. Emergent laws are predictive, and have most commonly to do with the rationality and mass phenomena of agents in environment.
Entropy, value function conflicts and Shannon's source coding theorem sound like things all agents needs to deal with, no matter the universe.
How to call this view of Nature? Deep Nature? 'Ultimate Reality' has a different ring to it, like a topmost world in a simulation tree.
Some call it Gnon and want to submit fully to it.
Would you submit?