Читать книгу Geography For Dummies - Jerry T. Mitchell - Страница 93

If you’re under the impression that the world of map-making is rather staid and geeky, you’re right. In recent decades, however, a map known as the Peters projection has come along and stirred things up. An episode of the television series The West Wing showed just how geeky, wonky, and controversial map projections like Peters can be. Although this projection is controversial to some, it serves as an excellent example of why average citizens and novice geographers ought to know the facts about flat maps.

The Peters projection was introduced and subsequently promoted in 1972 by Arno Peters, a German historian (see Figure 4-8). It’s also the subject of his book The New Cartography (Die Neue Kartographie). As far as accurately showing the world is concerned, this map lies just like any other. The appearance of the continents has been likened to wet laundry hanging out to dry. The shape of land and water bodies is badly distorted, but size is maintained.

(© John Wiley & Sons Inc.)

FIGURE 4-8: The Peters projection.

This size issue is key for advocates of the Peters projection, saying that it renders an important measure of cartographic justice for tropical less-developed regions. They claim that by inflating the size of high-latitude regions relative to the tropics, the Mercator and some other projections present a Europe-centered view of the world that denigrates places in Asia, Africa, and South America. Proponents point out that the Peters projection is an equal area projection that shows tropical regions in their true size relative to, say, Europe and North America. As a result of such advocacy, several agencies with strong interests in these places have adopted the Peters projection as their official depiction of the world.

But is this projection really any better than the others? When you look at the facts of the matter, three things are obvious:

 First, the Peters projection terribly distorts shape (especially near the Poles and Equator) and distance.

 Second, there is a perfectly good alternative to the Peters that is an equal area map and depicts shape of tropical regions with considerable accuracy — the Goode’s projection.

 Third, there is nothing new about The New Cartography. The Peters projection is a knock-off of a projection that was developed by James Gall in 1885. As result, it is usually called the Gall-Peters projection nowadays.

So, is there one perfect world projection that lies flat without lying? No. Is there one perfect projection for all situations? Again, no. Representing Earth cartographically can be as crazy as all the physical and human features contained within it. Do your best!