Why We Need to Go Wild in Nature

Cities make men ferocious, because they corrupt them. Mountains, seas and forests make them wild. They develop only that wildness, without destroying what is human. The poet Tao Yuanming wrote: After so long in the cage, I'm back to nature again. "Nature" here has two meanings. The first is the physical natural environment. I often play a game called Cities: Skylines. In that virtual world I'm the mayor, and I have to keep watching my citizens' happiness. Among all the variables that affect that number, the coverage of parks in residential areas matters a great deal. At first I didn't get it. Why would the designers set up a rule like that? Later I turned my gaze back to the real world, and it clicked. For city dwellers, parks seem to be the only crack through which you can touch anything of nature. Without parks, all you see is a jungle of steel and concrete. No groves of trees, no birdsong. The richness of the ecosystem is zeroed out, and our sense of nature dries up with it. Why must people walk into nature? A few days ago, at the foot of Mount Emei, as evening was coming on, I took a lot of photos. The frame was full of vegetation and rushing streams. In those pictures, people and the buildings they make were just tiny touches of decoration. It makes for a curious inversion. In the city, parks are decoration on a skeleton of steel and concrete. Among great mountains and rivers, people become the decoration on nature. When we're in a world this vast, no longer disciplined by zebra crossings, no longer stopped by traffic lights, no longer bound by morning alarms and access cards, a long-lost ease rises up on its own. This is the second layer in what Tao Yuanming meant by "nature": to follow your own nature, and stop living twisted out of shape. The sound of running water at the foot of Mount Emei was pleasant at first. Listening closely, it felt strange. We've been in the city so long that the sound of water in our ears has long since been replaced by industrial products. It became white noise in sleep apps, a pricey luxury. Those electronically synthesized sounds are fake in the end. They can't give us real comfort. Only when we actually walk to where the water ends and sit to watch the clouds rise will the senses in our bodies wake up. People often say nature is a great place to recharge. That's true. But I think going out to play isn't just about resting. It's about finding, among those wild mountains, seas and forests, the humanity we've been slowly losing in city civilization.