Where's Nature?

A thing I noticed again and again in Copenhagen was how the Dane's concept of "nature" or "ecology" differed so much from ours.  We all commented on how few trees there seemed to be in the city, and in our meetings with various designers, whenever a question of the "ecological benefits" of a design was raised, the concept seemed alien to them.  Aren't these supposed to be fundamental values for landscape architects?  I was really intrigued by this weird difference, and I though about it a lot, and decided to do some exploring.  On my days off, I would hop on my bike and tour-de-france it straight out of town, determined to find those "green fingers" everyone talks about.  It wasn't too hard, I found "nature" a couple of times after a twenty or thirty minute bike ride in a couple directions, and what I found really differed from the forest we might find outside of an American city.  It was very very controlled, it was nature in human hands, it was "allowed" to be there, it had paths through it, it was maintained.  It was the result of humans inhabiting the same country for thousands of years, using every square inch of it, and conciously deciding that there should be "landscape", land that looks unused, deliberate anti-city.  In the United States, we started with a vast wilderness and are basically still carving into it.  We worry about conservation, and we think about the "ecological benefits" of things we design.  In Denmark, the virgin wilderness was obliterated centuries ago, and the whole land is shaped by human hands.  So we end up with a really different mindset in Denmark.  They don't have forests that just "grew on their own", every inch of land is claimed by humans.  Sometimes the humans built buildings, sometimes the humans planted plants, and sometimes the humans created some kind of mix.  But the whole Danish landscape is very much a designed landscape.  I think it might offer a healthy opportunity to blur our dichotomized view of "nature" vs "civilization", since wild things and human things coexist everywhere throughout Denmark.
-Dan Shaw