Forget This Screen — The Real World Is Out There

If you haven’t started yet, you’re already behind. On March 1st, the Province of British Columbia opened up its campsite reservation system. The online hordes descended.

I was there too, credit card in hand. Fighting with my neighbors for a spot in the wild world. Because I miss it as much as they do. Our comfortable modern lives close us off from what we need most, the world we were made for. The natural world. Without it, sooner or later, we are all lost.

And maybe in among the forest trails, we are all hoping to find our way back to ourselves.

Finding space

It’s hard to wrap your head around the size of Canadian provinces. The provincial parks operated by the government of British Columbia cover 35 million acres. That’s bigger than the entire country of Greece. And that doesn’t include the national parks and municipal parks the province also contains.

Only five million people live in this gigantic place. Spread the residents of BC out evenly across the surface of the land, and we would each have seven acres, more than five football fields, to ourselves.

In 2018 to 2019 fiscal year, BC’s provincial parks received more than three million visits. And that was before the pandemic. Now, with foreign travel more or less off the table, BC residents are doubling down on what their home already has to offer. Suddenly, available camping spots have become as in-demand as places in a snooty school for the children of the rich.

Already, camping reservations are being resold online at a premium to people who weren’t quick enough to book a spot the moment the reservation system opened.

People want to go outside

Especially now, after a year of house arrest. We’re all climbing the walls.

But every time I go camping, I’m struck by the strangeness of it. I have a house with running water and a comfortable bed and a big TV that brings me entertainment from around the world. Yet at my wife’s urging, we’ll leave the house behind to go live in the woods like badgers for a couple of nights.

Not just us, either. Families. Groups of friends. Entire offices, coerced into temporary homelessness by some overenthusiastic HR teambuilding guru. We work our asses off to afford our overpriced homes, then ditch them the minute it stops raining to eat poorly-cooked food and shiver the night away in mildew-spotted tents.

There’s only one possible explanation: we need the wilderness. We need nature. We need the real world. The blinking screens are wonderfully distracting, but sooner or later, they leave us hollow.

Often, they leave us worse than that. They leave us enraged or saddened or disappointed, exposing us to everything that’s worst about the people around us. Disease and poverty and hatred and exploitation make up the background hum of the world, the sad music so familiar we barely even hear it anymore.

And then, out on the trails, people smile at one another. They say hello. Shedding the hard shells they grew in the city, they become a better version of themselves.

Because this is the real world.

Make no mistake. Your job, your home, your belongings. Your position in society. None of that is real. It’s all an artificial construction that has meaning only so far as we allow it to. And yet we work ourselves into early graves to maintain all of that, hoping that when the end finally does come for us, we won’t have the mental capacity to look back and wonder what it was all for.

Soldiers on the battlefield sometimes talk of this. Sailors on rough seas glimpse the ragged coattails of the sublime. The stray flakes of awe, the silence-streaked enormity of what’s been there the whole time while you studiously ignored it to make another couple of dollars.

The real world. The one every other animal lives in. The changing weather patterns that come upon us like ineluctable fate, and the forests that seem to know more than we do.

This year, millions of British Colombians will head out to the woods the first chance they get, heaving a sigh of relief as they leave behind the walls that have shut us in too long and encounter reality for the first time in months. Maybe years. Maybe ever.

Forgetting who we are

Our heads bent over screens, we see less and less of the world even as technology offers us more and more.

Already, authenticity has become a buzzword, another way to sell products to Millennials and Gen Zers who live an increasingly unreal existence.

From the way the campsites fill up around here, it doesn’t seem like it. But living in a place like British Columbia automatically selects people who appreciate the outdoors. Even people who never leave the province’s biggest city, Vancouver, can’t ignore the natural world.

The massive coastal rainforest of Stanley Park occupies a huge chunk of the downtown core of the city. In the winter, bald eagles sweep through the alleys where addicts sleep uneasily. Occasionally, pods of killer whales swim right into downtown.

It’s hard to forget about the wilderness when it frowns down at you from the white-veined mountains rising above the city.

But the city hasn’t been here long. Not long enough to kill off the animals and strip away the forests and push nature back like it’s something we hate. In other, older places, nature takes a little more work. You have to seek out the birds and their songs in the tiny pockets of resistance that are left.

The natural world gives us something the screens don’t. They give us back to ourselves. Our bodies remember. We have the same eyes and ears and hearts as our distant ancestors who lived in the world as they found as every other animal does.

I’ve lived in cities all my life, but that’s not where I am most profoundly myself.

What nature offers

The benefits of nature are many. A study from 2012 found that air pollution in heavily industrialized areas of Europe caused a loss of average life expectancy of up to 36 months. Forests clean the air, pumping out oxygen and sequestering carbon as they have done for millions of years. The same ancient action that made the planet habitable for us mammals in the first place.

There are no elevators in nature. Being outdoors forces you to get more physical exercise, with all the cardiovascular and mental health advantages that come from that.

Two hours per week spent in a natural environment has been shown to make people feel healthier and happier. As Richard Louv points out in his influential book Last Child in the Woods, contact with nature is especially important for children. What the author calls Nature Deficit Disorder is linked to obesity, attention disorders, anxiety, and depression.

You don’t need to be a scientist to know you need nature. You can feel it every time you take a breath of fresh air in the shade of tall trees or listen to the ocean washing against the shore.

In the tiny part of your primate brain that never left the forest, you know what’s real. You know what you need. A world you can’t control. A sky you can’t turn off. Stars that dance, but not for you.

This is the world you were born for, the one your body was made for. The one your heart still remembers. It’s easy to laugh at us suburbanites going camping in our cars as though we’re setting off into the untamed wilderness, instead of driving a few hours on a paved road to live in a temporary village of strangers. But even these managed encounters help us find ourselves.

Because that’s what nature gives us, along with the air we breathe and the food we eat, and the water we drink. It gives us back our souls. It restores the damage done by the million tiny drips of bitterness and envy and success and failure.

The world outside our doors is beautiful precisely because it doesn’t care about us. Because it demands that we adapt to it instead of it adapting to us.

I’m not an optimist

We, humans, have bright eyes but dark hearts, and an almost supernatural gift for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. We managed to build a world dedicated to our own desires, and we hate it here. We went all the way to the moon to find nothing but emptiness.

Our nature is to search, but not to find. To peer like gods into the mysteries of the universe and then wonder how we can use them to impress our fellow status-apes.

But as the campsites fill up already, millions of my neighbors risking rain and bears and a bad night’s sleep just to look at a lake or some trees or a choking campfire, I allow myself to grab a fistful of hope. The natural world gives us back to ourselves, freeing us from the self-built prison our lives have become. Making us human. Making us whole.

There’s that wild part of us that has never forgotten the forest, the ocean, the sky. The part that misses the real world and seeks it out, pushing aside screens and gates and the net of humming wires. Maybe that’s the part that can save us.