Essay on We May Brave Human Laws but Cannot Resist Natural Laws

“We may brave human laws but cannot resist natural laws” appeared as Topic 7 in Section B of the UPSC Civil Services Mains Essay paper held on 28 October 2017. A single line of borrowed wisdom — long attributed to Jules Verne — and three hours to weigh it. This guide unpacks the topic the way it should be tackled inside the examination hall: first the meaning, then the angles, then the time map, then the paragraph-by-paragraph plan, and finally a complete 1,200-word model essay you can study, dissect and adapt for any related prompt.

When this was asked and what UPSC is really testing

The topic was set in UPSC CSE Mains 2017, Essay paper, Section B. Three hours, two essays, one from each section, roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words each, 125 marks per essay. “We may brave human laws but cannot resist natural laws” is a philosophical-scientific prompt — the kind UPSC has used repeatedly since 2014 to pull aspirants away from rote GS material into a more reflective register.

UPSC is checking four things at once. One, can you decode a binary metaphor — human laws versus natural laws — and convert it into a clear thesis rather than two parallel lectures. Two, can you draw substance from at least three domains: jurisprudence, physical and biological science, and Indian philosophy. Three, can you discipline a sprawling subject — climate, ecology, pandemic, technology, ethics — into 1,200 words without listing. Four, can you end with a way forward that is realistic and rooted, not preachy. The aspirant who handles all four scores in the 130s. The one who writes a climate-change GS answer dressed as an essay scores in the 80s.

Five angles that unlock “We may brave human laws but cannot resist natural laws”

A binary topic invites either a dull symmetry or a sharp synthesis. The trap is to write 500 words on human laws, 500 on natural laws, and a polite conclusion that says both matter. The mark-pulling essay instead identifies several lenses, names them, and weaves them. Here are the five most defensible readings of the proposition. You do not need all five — three, treated well, is the sweet spot. But you should know all five so your choice is conscious.

1. The jurisprudential distinction — the literal reading. Human laws are positive law: written, enforced, breakable, and amendable. Natural laws are the regularities of the physical and biological world — gravity, thermodynamics, ecology, evolution — that exist whether or not we acknowledge them. The first can be defied; the second only obeyed or paid for.
2. The climate angle — the most contemporary reading. We legislated the Paris Agreement, drafted Climate Change Acts, ran twenty-eight Conferences of the Parties. Nature’s energy balance simply tallies the additional carbon and returns it as heat waves, glacial retreat and disordered monsoons. Treaties are negotiable; the second law of thermodynamics is not.
3. The Indian philosophical anchor — the Vedic rta, the cosmic order; dharma as ethical conformity to that order; Buddhist pratityasamutpada or dependent origination, which says every effect rides on its causes whether the actor wishes it or not. Indian thought collapsed the gap between natural and moral law long before Western jurisprudence opened it.
4. The pandemic and ecology lesson — COVID-19, water-table collapse, soil exhaustion, landslides. The pandemic crossed every passport line; viruses follow biology, not paperwork. Punjab’s paddy MSP is a human price signal; the falling aquifer is a natural verdict. Joshimath’s subsidence and Wayanad’s landslides read the bill aloud.
5. The counter-current — humans have bent natural laws by working with them: powered flight, vaccines, IVF, gene editing, agriculture itself. The proposition is metaphor more than absolute. What truly matters is whether human institutions align with natural constraints or against them.

A strong essay picks angles 1, 2 and 3 as its backbone (jurisprudence, climate, Indian philosophy), uses 4 as the contemporary evidence, and brings in 5 as the counter-argument before closing. That sequence gives the essay rhythm — distinction, complication, resolution — instead of a list.

A time map for the 1,500-second window

One essay deserves about 75 to 90 minutes inside the three-hour paper. Spending more on Essay 1 starves Essay 2. The single biggest source of below-100 essay scores is poor time discipline — beautiful introductions, panicked conclusions. Use a rough breakdown like this:

Notice what is not on the list: rewriting the introduction halfway, hunting for the perfect quote, fancy diagrams, decorative underlining. None of that earns marks. Discipline does.

What to add — and what to avoid at all costs

The essay paper rewards what most aspirants under-do and punishes what most aspirants over-do. Memorise this list before you walk into the hall.

Add liberally

• One precise thesis, stated by the end of paragraph two and not abandoned. “Human laws can be braved because they are negotiated; natural laws cannot, because they are not — and the maturity of a civilisation is measured by how early it accepts the second.”
• Concrete examples across three or four domains — one historical (the Soviet Aral Sea, the Dust Bowl), one Indian (Joshimath subsidence, Punjab aquifer decline, Chipko), one scientific (IPCC, second law of thermodynamics, R-naught) and one personal or literary (the Verne quote itself, the Mahabharata’s matsya nyaya).
• Two or three short, named quotes — Sunderlal Bahuguna on ecology as permanent economy, Vandana Shiva on the seed-soil-water cycle, the Isha Upanishad’s invocation to enjoy through renunciation. One per major section is enough.
• One Indian philosophical anchor. Rta, dharma, pratityasamutpada, the Gita’s prakriti. Examiners read 300 essays a day; an Indian anchor in an essay full of Western climate examples stands out.
• Counter-arguments handled briefly. “It might be argued that powered flight, vaccines and gene editing show humans bending natural laws…” — then resolved in two lines. Acknowledging the other side earns more marks than ignoring it.
• A clean conclusion that returns to the opening image — not a fresh argument, not a new example.

Avoid — even when tempted

• Restating the topic in the first sentence. “Human laws and natural laws are two important categories…” — this signals you have nothing to add. Open with a scene or a paradox.
• Writing a climate-change GS answer. The essay paper is not Paper III. A 1,200-word recitation of IPCC AR6 figures, with no philosophical spine, looks like a wasted opportunity.
• Unsourced statistics. “Sea level will rise 3 metres by 2050” — if you cannot name the source, do not write the number. Examiners cross-mark this.
• Naming current politicians or ruling-party leaders. The essay paper is graded across the ideological spectrum. Use the institution, the historical figure, the policy — not the personality.
• Doom-mongering. “Humanity is finished, civilisation is collapsing” earns no marks. Examination, not prophecy.
• Moralising. “We must all save the Earth” reads like a school speech. The essay paper rewards examination, not exhortation.

A paragraph-by-paragraph blueprint

Twelve paragraphs at roughly 95 words each gets you to 1,140. Thirteen at 90 each gets you to 1,170. Either works. What follows is a 13-paragraph plan that maps cleanly onto the model essay below. Each line is what that paragraph is doing, not what it is saying.

1. Opening image — a courtroom scene where a law is being overturned, juxtaposed with a glacier in retreat that no court can summon. No mention of the topic yet.
2. The pivot to thesis — name the proposition, attribute it to Verne, then state the thesis in one sentence.
3. Define the terms — what does “human law” mean (positive law, custom, convention) and what does “natural law” mean (physical, biological, ecological regularities).
4. Angle 1 — Jurisprudence — human law as amendable, struck down, repealed; natural law as a constant that no court can summon or stay.
5. Indian philosophical anchor — Vedic rta, dharma, the Gita on prakriti; the older insight that natural and moral order are one fabric.
6. Angle 2 — Climate — the gap between treaties and thermodynamics, the rising temperature record, India’s 2022 heat waves, Himalayan glacier retreat.
7. The pandemic lesson — COVID-19 ignored passports, lockdown laws, vaccine wealth; viruses follow biology.
8. Indian ecology evidence — Punjab paddy MSP versus aquifer collapse; Joshimath subsidence; Wayanad landslides; Chipko’s older warning.
9. Counter-argument — vaccines, powered flight, gene editing — yes, humans bend natural laws by working with them, not against.
10. Synthesis — the proposition is a discipline, not an absolute; mature civilisations align human law with natural constraint early.
11. Way forward — institutional — natural-capital accounting, agroecology, circular economy, climate-resilient infrastructure, water pricing.
12. Way forward — ethical — reverence-based environmental ethics; the older Indian habit of treating rivers and forests as kin, not stock.
13. Closing image — return to the courtroom and the glacier, close with one resonant line.

How to make an examiner stop and read

An essay examiner reads several hundred scripts in a sitting. The first paragraph decides whether they read the second with attention or with autopilot. Four small habits separate the essays that get attention from the ones that get skimmed.

• Open with a scene, not a statement. A retreating glacier, a court overturning a colonial-era statute, a child watching a heatwave warning on television. Concrete images cost no marks and earn attention.
• Use the topic phrase itself two or three times across the essay. Once in the thesis, once at the turn, once at the close. It signals discipline and prevents drift.
• Vary sentence length. A short sentence after three long ones lands. Examiners feel rhythm before they parse meaning.
• End paragraphs with the takeaway, not with examples. Place the example mid-paragraph. Let the last sentence be the thought, so the reader carries it into the next paragraph.

The complete essay — “We may brave human laws but cannot resist natural laws”

What follows is a 1,200-word model essay built on the blueprint above. Read it twice — once for the argument, once for the moves. The moves are what you can carry into your own essay; the argument is one of many you could make.

In a courtroom in Delhi this winter, a colonial-era statute was set aside by a single judgment. Pages of printed law, almost a century and a half old, ceased to apply. A few hundred kilometres north, a Garhwal Himalayan glacier retreated by another twelve metres that season. No order can be served on the glacier. No bench can stay its withdrawal. The two events sit in the same republic, on the same week, and they remind us of an older division — that some laws can be argued with, and some cannot.

“We may brave human laws,” wrote Jules Verne, “but cannot resist natural laws.” The sentence is short enough to carve on a door, and stubborn enough to outlive every regime that has ignored it. Its claim is not that human laws do not matter; only that they belong to a different order of authority. Human law is consent and command, written and amendable. Natural law is regularity that runs whether we acknowledge it or not. The thesis of this essay is simple: civilisations that align their human laws with the older natural ones grow long; civilisations that defy them buy time, not safety.

Some definitions help. “Human laws” here means more than the statute book — positive law, judicial precedent, administrative regulation, social custom, the dense fabric of rules humans write for one another. “Natural laws” means the regularities of the physical and biological world: gravity, thermodynamics, the water cycle, evolution, ecology. The first set can be debated, repealed and revived. The second arrives without consultation and leaves without negotiation. Verne’s proposition is normative as much as descriptive: civilisations may pretend the two are on the same footing, but they are not.

The jurisprudential distinction has been visible to every legal tradition. Roman law called positive enactment lex and the deeper order ius. India’s Supreme Court, in the basic-structure doctrine of 1973, accepted that even a sovereign legislature cannot remake every part of the order it inherits. A Parliament can repeal sedition. It cannot repeal photosynthesis. Human law’s braveness is real — the dignity of a self-governing species — but its limits are not negotiable.

India saw this earlier than most. The Rigveda’s rta named the cosmic order and placed dharma, the moral law, inside it as a fold of the same fabric. The Bhagavad Gita’s instruction that even the embodied soul is bound by prakriti sits in the same intuition. The Buddha’s pratityasamutpada refused any escape from the chain of cause and effect. Long before Western jurisprudence opened a gap between natural and human law, Indian thought treated the gap as illusion. The modern world has rediscovered, at heavy cost, what the older Indian world considered self-evident.

The clearest evidence of that cost is the climate. The Earth has warmed by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, by the IPCC’s 2023 synthesis. Twenty-eight Conferences of the Parties have produced treaties and pledges, including the 2015 Paris Agreement aiming to hold the rise to 1.5 degrees. None of those papers alters the energy balance. They are negotiated; the second law of thermodynamics is not. India’s 2022 heat wave broke March temperature records across the northern plain; Himalayan glaciers have lost mass in every recent assessment. Each treaty is an exercise of bravery before human law. Each season is a reminder of the natural one.

The pandemic of 2020 said the same thing in a louder voice. SARS-CoV-2 spread across passport lines and border fences in weeks. National lockdowns slowed it; vaccine wealth blunted it. Neither rewrote it. The basic reproduction number, the incubation period, the structure of the spike protein — none cared which currency the host carried. The lesson was not that human law is useless. It was that human law works best when it bows early to the natural one.

India’s own land tells the story in regional dialects. Punjab’s minimum support price for paddy is a sound human-law instrument; it has also helped pull the state’s groundwater table down by nearly a metre a year in many districts, a verdict the aquifer delivers without appeal. Joshimath’s subsidence in 2023 cracked homes built where geology had warned for decades. The 2024 Wayanad landslides washed away settlements perched on slopes the monsoon had been quietly preparing. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s Chipko movement had said the same thing in plainer words decades earlier: ecology is permanent economy.

It might be objected that human beings have not merely obeyed natural law — they have bent it. Powered flight, vaccines, in-vitro fertilisation, the green revolution, gene editing — each looks like a defiance of the natural order. The objection is partly right and entirely instructive. Humans bend natural law only by understanding it better, not by ignoring it. The aeroplane obeys Bernoulli; the vaccine obeys immunology; the dwarf wheat obeys genetics. Defiance and obedience here are the same act seen from different sides. Verne’s maxim is not a ban on ambition. It is a description of what ambition costs when it forgets its substrate.

The synthesis, then, is not pessimism. It is alignment. Mature civilisations write human laws that point in the same direction as natural ones — they tax what nature warns against, subsidise what it rewards, and reform when the warning sharpens. Immature civilisations write human laws that fight the natural ones and call the fight progress. We may brave human laws, Verne reminds us, because they were made to be debated. We cannot resist the natural ones because they were not. The discipline of statecraft is to tell the two apart early.

Practical alignment has a name and a list. Natural-capital accounting, so that forests and aquifers appear on the national balance sheet. Agroecology, so that soil is treated as an asset rather than a residual. Water pricing that signals scarcity before scarcity arrives. Circular-economy mandates that close material loops. Climate-resilient infrastructure — through bodies like the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure — designed for the climate of 2050, not 1990. Dense, transit-served cities that spend less energy moving people about. All are human laws written in the grammar of natural ones.

Beneath the policy list sits an older instinct — reverence. Vandana Shiva has argued for decades that seed, soil and water belong to a single living cycle, and that breaking the cycle to maximise one part eventually starves the rest. The Isha Upanishad opens with the line tena tyaktena bhunjithah — enjoy through renunciation. Indian tradition treats rivers and forests as kin rather than stock, and that grammar is itself a form of compliance with natural law. A republic that recovers that grammar will draft kinder statutes; one that loses it will keep writing braver ones, and pay the bill in heat, dust and water.

Return for a moment to the courtroom and the glacier with which we began. The court can repeal a statute by lunchtime; the glacier will take its decision over decades. The two timescales tell us where authority finally rests. We may brave human laws, and we should, when they fail justice. We cannot resist natural laws, and we should not pretend to, when they record our errors. The work of a wise republic is to ensure that the laws we brave and the laws we cannot resist begin to point, slowly and stubbornly, in the same direction.

Word count: approximately 1,200.

How to use this model essay

Do not memorise it. Memorised essays read like memorised essays, and examiners spot them in two paragraphs. Use the model the way a chess student uses a master game: study the opening move, the pivot from courtroom to glacier, the placement of the Indian philosophical anchor, the way the counter-argument about powered flight is brought up and then folded back into the thesis. Then take a related topic — try “Ecological considerations need not hamper development” or “Mindful manifesto is the catalyst to a tranquil self” — and write your own essay using the same blueprint. Repeat that exercise eight to ten times and the structure becomes muscle memory.

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