Mountains aren't mountains and river's aren't rivers

Behold O. W. Gray's 1783 masterpiece of anti-ecological data visualization, "Mountains and Rivers"! The squiggly lines are the world's longest rivers, suspended like snakeskins. The mountains of the several continents (color coded) are arranged below - note the red flares marking volcanoes! Check out the fine details here. 

 

For a contemporary folly, here someone shows the magnitude of the world's great river systems by imagining them flowing out into space!

Why am I showing these to you, you may wonder? Because one of next semester's classes is a reprise of "Religion and Ecology," which I've promised will focus on "Buddhist perspectives," most especially Dogen's "Mountains and Rivers Sutra." This has in turn reconnected me to some of the excitement of the "Sacred Mountains" course I taught eight years ago. Gray's is of course the absolute antithesis of Dogen's "mountains and rivers" but perhaps useful on our way to recognizing that mountains are not mountains, rivers not rivers, although mountains are mountains, rivers rivers!