"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway, how does the setting develop the central idea?

It is with dialogue and setting that the minimalist Ernest
Hemingway skillfully creates his powerful tale of two people together, yet separated
ideologically. For instance, with her perception of the white hills as elephants, Jig's
preoccupation with her pregnancy becomes apparent. Also, her more sensitive nature and
intuitive mind are evinced in her remark,

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"They're lovely hills,...They don't really look
like white elephants.  I just meant the coloring of their skin through the
trees.

Her ability to
interpret nature allows Jig to internalize and perceive the operation as a life-changing
event. Considering what is involved, she looks around and
notices

fields
of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.  Far away, beyond the river, were
mountains.  The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river
through the trees.

Just as
she can observe nature and its movements, Jig can conceptualize the "simple" operation
of which the man speaks as a momentous, an act that will leave them not, as the man
argues, "just like before." Thus, in contrast to Jig, the man does not perceive the
hills as white elephants; and, even when he looks down the railway, he cannot see the
train. For, he reduces everything to a mechanical process as he thinks of things only in
steps toward an end.  He even admits to not thinking about the
future: 

"I
love it  now but I just can't think about it.  You know how I get when I
worry."

Considering only
the apparent facts, the man tells Jig that after the operation, they will be fine. 
After all, the "it's perfectly simple."  However, Jig knows that "once they take it
away, you never get it back."  Then, she "looked across at the hills on the dry side of
the valley."  But, the myopic man merely "looked at her and at the
table." 

As the time nears for the arrival of the train,
the man significantly says that he must take the bags "to the other side of the station"
as, indeed, he is on the other side of considering the abortion: Jig does not want to
have one.

In his essay, "Hills Like White Elephants":
"Hills Like White Elephants," Robert Johston states,

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With swift, sure strokes, without a wasted word
or motion, Hemingway creates a taut, tense story of conflict in a moral
wasteland.

This moral
wasteland is conveyed through Hemingway's skillful use of setting:  barren hills, dry,
deserted railways running through "the country [that] was
brown."