Both Lopez and Davidson are north-minded – and both are topographic humanists. They see landscape not as a static diorama against which human action plays itself out, but rather as an active and shaping force in our imagination, our ethics, and our relations with each other and the world. In the work of both, place invests consciousness and geography is inseparable from morality. Throughout their writings recurs the idea that certain landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them or live within them. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a
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