On Skomer, more than on the mainland, it is possible to become aware of a nature reserve as a whole, an entity where natural history and social history are cognate. Accidental individualities and essential variations which make Skomer a unique place simply cannot be deduced from ideas alone.  In other words nature on Skomer describes a story. Its present appearance cannot be understood without pursuing an historical narrative of natural history, through countless ages.  For present and past are reciprocally incorporated, as it were, with one another, and the island named Skomer is perceived as 'nature' through the unity of its historical composition.  In short, one can't sit in a laboratory and deduce what the island looks like: one must get up and go there.

Skomer as 'nature' comprises abiotic factors (air, water, rocks, energy) and biotic factors (plants, animals, and microorganisms). The Earth’s biosphere, includes the air (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere) , and  land ( lithosphere), and constitutes a feedback or cybernetic system that reflects what Rene Dubos referred to as "a co- evolutionary process" between living things and their physical and chemical environments.  Nature has come to be defined as shorthand for all the places where plants and animals can get the food, water, shelter and space they need to live with minimum disturbance by humankind. 

Nature study is the unravelling of many ecosystems interlocked through cycles of energy, water, gases and minerals. This is the work of observation and intellect, of eye and mind, in which a visitor becomes a participant observer to testify to the beauty and order of the island as a microcosm.  These are ideas intrinsic to humanity.  The world is known to us only through our mind, and our mind is known to us only as we engage the world: the two form a phenomenal unity. If this world is a universe it is described as a cosmos; if it is a place within the cosmos it is called a microcosm.

The internal workings of the ecosystems that hold the cosmos and its microcosms together are determined by natural science not natural history, because whether natural history consists of a description of nature (eg. taxonomy) or a history of nature (ie. a systematic presentation of natural things in different times and in different places), neither could be derived according to the internal scientific principles by which the manifold objects of nature cohere into a whole. For example, Newton's Principia exemplifies science; a complete historical description of Skomer would not.  ‘Skomer’ as a place exists as a harmoniously ordered ecological whole apart from humanity. It exists without us, but it exists as a microcosm only through our minds. Our only access to the world is through the mind, and we unify the external world almost unconsciously to ourselves with our ideas and feelings. Only in the interplay of world and mind, object and subject, does Skomer as a unique place on the planet come into being.