Why do we map the land?

"How little there is on an ordinary map! How little, I mean, that concerns the walker and the lover of nature. Between those lines indicating roads is a plain blank space in the form of a square or triangle or polygon or segment of a circle, and there is naught to distinguish this from another area of similar size and form. Yet the one may be covered, in fact, with a primitive oak wood, like that of Boxboro, waving and creaking in the wind, such as may have the reputation of a county, while the other is a stretching plane with scarcely a tree on it. The waving woods, the dells and glades and green banks and smiling fields, the huge boulders, etc., etc., are not on the map, nor to be inferred from the map."

--Thoreau's journal; November 10, 1860

     If Thoreau, one of America's most notable land surveyors and pioneers for human connections with the environment, had qualms about his own cartography, why did he make maps? What use does a map have for travelers and geographers who recognize areas as places of subjective importance? I think that Thoreau was such a successful observer and recorder of the environment because of the way he, as Buell points out, "buil[t] on a counterpoint between a surveyor's deference to verifiable truth and a denizen's sense of place as subjectively felt" (Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination,  278). From Buell's analysis, it is clear that Thoreau's Walden captures the the duality of previously uncharted place; Walden pond could be considered an apparently stagnant location that must be explored so that civilized communities can attribute a public or private function for the area that benefits human development in terms of economic and population growth, yet it could also be appreciated as a sort of natural museum, a wealth of evidence of deterioration, growth, and change over the course of history and a haven for flora and fauna and beauty that can not be defined on a map. 
     Although the map illustration of Walden Pond that Thoreau inserted in his book was not always taken seriously by readers and fellow geographers, and I was surprised to learn that the romantic writer had such a dedication to examining the land through scientific approaches, after the mapping from memory exercise we did in class, I felt differently about maps in general. Just because directional symbols and labels are practical and objective does not mean that they do not express imagination. Maps are more than aids; they are evidence of how humans view an area, and this evidence is something that can be understood universally and immediately. Not even language or music has such an easy time crossing cultural boundaries, but the innate way that humans navigate the world through the use of visual landmarks and cardinal directions is not only accessible, but truly beautiful. Some cultures rely more on longitude and latitude coordinates than roads and streams, but this difference is negligible, since we all share the same earth with the same moon and stars to tell us how much time has passed and where we are in relation to home. When maps are coupled with meticulous descriptions and the affective quality of transcendental forces that transpire from a place, we can experience a place completely as if we were there. Creative non-fiction writing and maps can go even further than human perception, as Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams demonstrates through "chapters [devoted to] muskoxen, polar bears, and narwhals, and in them tries to get inside the creature's heads and reconstruct how its range looks from its own standpoint" (Buell 271). The power of maps and writing together as a means to express a sense of place are seemingly limitless. 

Here Thoreau's map of Walden Pond, the only image present in Walden: