I can't seem to combine them. What I want to try to do is use or refer to landscape in the same way early American writers did, like Melville and Hawthorne. The forest was, to them, a symbol of something tangled and wild and passionate. And Melville used the sea as an entity that people respond to. I think it's easy to do in the Catskills, where I live.
People go out in the morning and the first thing they do is look at the sky and discuss the weather.
As far as landscapes in science fiction - I've crossed a few deserts in my life, but I don't want to put those deserts in my head in the places that they were in life. I don't want to put the Tucson desert around Tucson. I want to stick it on another planet. You have to spend so much time being this for one person, being that for another. But what I wanted to do before was always move forward.