What’s natural?

I had a theory before I moved to New York that people needed to get a certain amount of sunlight, a certain amount of time to trees, and just an overall exposure to nature on a regular basis. I thought that if people didn’t get this time amongst nature they wouldn’t be as happy and healthy as they actually could be. Since moving here I think more people have things such as seasonal depression and anxiety, though I’m still not sure if it’s a legitimate theory. Either way, it had swirled in the back of my mind for awhile and just last week my Cognitive Neuro professor asked me to spit ball a cognitive theory at him. I figured that would be a great time to see if my idea had any traction and I threw it out there. Strangely enough, he neither accepted nor denied my hypothesis, but instead challenged my idea of nature. He told me that we were in nature that very minute. I was confused, it was most definitely the Lang building. He tapped at the wall and scuffed at the floor, and he asked me what I thought made up this building. Various materials for construction, of course. He asked me where humans got all this material for buildings. He explained to me that even if we deem things “man-made” and create things in ways only humans can, at it’s source it’s still a product of it’s source environment, nature. The idea still sits a bit abstract in my mind, but I think I better understand what he means now. He doesn’t see the towering skyscrapers and wall to wall cement as a capitalist structure far removed from any natural essence, but rather he sees each building as relocated parts of nature, almost like wide scale nature installations. My idea of happiness being tied with nature might still be valid, but I’m now more eager to test people’s perceptions of nature within cityscapes more so than anything else.