Is the Adirondacks a place to play?

I kept asking myself that during class today. In the nature essays, Emerson says “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” This makes me think that once man has interfered, it is no longer nature. At the very beginning of this reading, Emerson poses the solution to “culture” as nature. How can man experience this without interfering and therefore, interrupting or depleting nature?

Later, Emerson writes:

All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

Here Emerson makes nature sound like something beneath human beings, something that works or exists for men (people). But again, how does this not break away from his original definition of nature? Does nature stop being nature once it comes in contact with man? This passage made it seem like nature existed merely for the sake of man.

I am not sure I agree with the entirety of these sentiments.  Emerson’s last quote suggests that people are not a part of nature, rather nature serves people. But I feel as though people are also part of nature and we, like any other animal, affect it, just as Ed Kanze says the in the book we read over the summer.

Emerson writes:

The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole.

Emerson brings up these circuits and circles and I can’t help but think that we are a part of them. His poem is mostly about him being a boy in the Adirondacks with other boys. There are little to no “transcendental qualities” in it.

This made me wonder what Emerson would answer to the question posed: Is the Adirondacks a place to play? He seemed to really like playing in the Adirondacks, I wonder how his answer would coincide with his definition of nature and man’s relation to it.