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.