Another quote from the ever adroit Robert MacFarlane on maps that I’ve been pondering lately.

“Before it was a field science, cartography was an art: this was the first thing I had understood. We are now used to regarding cartography as an endeavor of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the representation of a given place. Such a presumption is hard to set aside, for we are accustomed to trust maps to invest confidently in the data with which they present us. But in its pre-modern expressions, map making was a pursuit that mingled knowledge and supposition. that told stories about places, that admitted fear, love, memory, and amazement into its projections.

….

“The grid map has proved an exceptionally efficient method for converting place into resource, and for devising large scale approaches to a landscape. It is a technique which has brought uncountable benefits and advances with it. But so authoritative is the grid method, so apparently irrefutable the knowledge that it dispenses about a place, that it has all but eliminated our sense of the worth of map-as-story, of cartography that is self made, felt, sensuous. The grid’s rigorous geometry celebrates precision, and suppresses touch, feel, and provisionality.

….

“We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps-and the road map is first among them-encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.”

Robert MacFarlane – The Wild Places