Once, when I was 19, I found myself sitting in class, all fresh and high on college life in rural Vermont. The class was “landscape ethics” and our professor, a somewhat dreamy intellectual who left after his first year, had just asked where this correlation that “north is good” came from. I paused, struck with the truthfulness of the notion – when you are moving north, you feel like you are moving in the right direction. Going north somehow implies that you are going somewhere better, som... read more