Learning direct from Nature is the essence of what scientists do. Learning from Nature is important for humanity, because what we learn helps guide the way that we organize, build and change our values, economies, and societies. Learning from Nature is inspiring, because it shows that it is possible to add to the total store of humanity's collective knowledge. Scholarship is not merely the process of shuffling used ideas from one person to another. Scholarship is not a zero-sum game.
Progress is possible.
Learning from Nature is important for individuals because it helps us understand ourselves. Armed with an understanding of Nature at all her scales, a person can situate him or herself in between the small scale processes of which the human body is made, and the global processes within which humans have evolved and exist. Certain problems and processes function on a global scale. Many of these important global scale problems and processes span multiple disciplines of science, social sciences, and humanities. Such problems and processes cannot be solved or explained by understandings of Nature that are derived from biology alone, chemistry alone, economics alone, or any other discipline alone.