Where Is Nature?

When someone says they are going to be in "nature", what do you usually think of? Is it a community park, a national park, or the middle of nowhere? A forest, prairie, mountain range, or ocean? Within 10 miles of human civilization, 100 miles of human civilization, or 1000 miles of human civilization?

I want to investigate this question of what constitutes nature through geography.  I am more interested in where I can find nature, whatever it might be.  Erase from your mind the image of your fantasy nature conjured up in the first paragraph.   Now imagine what places that already exist that would be called nature?

Through my own, personal thought experiments, I found that I tend to associate nature with the human frontier.  Places that were more "nature-ey" to me were places that human civilization was just starting to creep its way in to.  The "Wild West" of America is one of the first images that pops into my mind when I think of nature.  A lone log cabin dots the scenery as the only blotch of human interference within this snapshot of nature.  No coincidence that Westward Expansion was also the epitome of "the frontier".  From when I was a kid, stories like Little House on the Prairie have imprinted a certain vision of what constitutes nature into my mind.

This brings me to wonder what nature is like to societies that didn't have "frontier".  The Japanese have pretty much inhabited the same islands for the past few thousand years.  Could nature be the ocean to them?  What about Arabs?  Can something as lifeless as the desert be considered nature?  Comment on your own ideas about nature below.  

Not Quite Flat Yet

In 2005, Thomas Friedman's Book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century was published.  This painted a view of our rapidly globalizing world as one that is becoming "flat".  By this he meant that geography was increasingly becoming irrelevant.  For the average high school student, this viewpoint is easy to grasp as we spend a ridiculous amount of time on the internet accessing information that would otherwise be separated from us by thousands of miles of terrain.  In Glenview, I can watch a video of the war in Syria, experiencing the realities of the conflict.  Previously, I would have to traverse half the globe in order to find that experience.

However, the world isn't as flat as it seems.  Geography isn't dead quite yet.  The recent political flare up over the Senkaku Islands reveals that underlying globalization and technological innovation are natural resources and trade routes (which are shaped by and are subject to the interests of certain countries as a result of geography).  The island that are the subject of the dispute are basically glorified rocks.  They are uninhabited.

However, in the region supposedly lies a substantial reserve of hydrocarbons.  In addition, the Senkaku's lie on a major trading route. Control over the islands offers significant geopolitical advantages.  This issue doesn't only spark tensions between the big two, China and Japan, but have also brought Taiwan into the mix.  Taiwan isn't too fond of the Chinese or the Japanese, but have tended to work with Japan and the US (we are officially "neutral", but it is assumed we are on the Japanese side) in order to help contain Chinese expansion.  It is interesting to see how Taiwan is actually backlashing against Japan on this issue, further showing how vital to national interests geography is, even in the 21st century.  Thankfully, the conflict hasn't escalated militarily, yet.  Most anger has been expressed in passive aggressive moves that mirror how a moody teenager would fight with a sibling.  From Super Soaker fights to redrawing maps on passports, both sides are doing everything short of war to gain the strategic advantage in the East China Sea.