I spent this week on Table Mountain for Year in the Wild (http://www.yearinthewild.com). It’s the first of 31 nature reserves and national parks that I’ll be visiting during the coming year, taking photographs of our country’s awesome natural beauty and interviewing the people who work in conservation.

Table Mountain is actually a really appropriate place to start the journey, because it is symbolic of our country’s (and earth’s) environmental situation. There are 4,5 million people living nearby to Table Mountain National Park, most of them in the city of Cape Town. Houses, buildings, roads, factories, vineyards, farms, shopping malls and apartments surround the mountain, and every square inch of land that isn’t within the park’s boundary is being developed. The mountain and the national park itself is squeezed from all sides by what some people may call a human plague! We are indeed a very successful species (in terms of procreation and use of available resources).

Yet the mountain and the national park are so central to the city and to the lives of the people. Everyone claims the mountain as “their own”, and are fiercely proud and protective of this iconic and beautiful stretch of fynbos-clad mountain and peninsula. And for good reason: the dams on top of the mountain provides a lot of the fresh water for the city, and it’s presence and preservation brings in many of the tourists that make Cape Town one of the world’s most popular cities. It makes good business sense to look after Cape Town’s greatest asset. Also, it provides a home and refuge for many of the bees, beetles and other insects that pollinate our crops that supply the city with food.

But I think there is more to it. After spending a week sleeping in various tented camps on the mountain, I’ve come away thinking that people need natural, wild, pristine places for their own physical and mental and spiritual health. Humans didn’t evolve from shopping malls or freeways – we came from the mountains and the forests and the savannahs. The people of Cape Town needs the mountain to stay pristine, natural and wild, not just because it makes good practical sense, but because it forms part of our deep heritage. Perhaps without us realizing it, the mountain makes people happy and content – just to know that it’s there, and it’s still a wild, natural place.