The State of the World Atlas [ff]. Dan Smith

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of the institutions we

      have developed to regulate our affairs. We need new ones. There is energy

      available that has not yet been harnessed and connected to engines of

      change. The old power formats are creaking but the new ones have not yet

      emerged.

      KNOWING THE WORLD

      Getting things more or less right on these five issues will be done by

      international agreement or not at all, for no single government can handle –

      or should even dream of handling – the whole set of issues alone, and much

      of it will in turn be based on shared knowledge and understanding.

      Of course, knowledge is not the same as wisdom. You can know all the

      facts and still not be able to act wisely. But without knowledge, it is harder

      to be wise – even if what wisdom tells us is that knowledge is very often

      provisional and that we cannot wait to have certainty about every fact

      before we act.

      DAN SMITH

      LONDON, JULY 2012

      15

      THE PROBLEM WITH MAPS

      The aim of this atlas is to look at the world through the lens of world

      problems. That means mapping those issues onto the world – and there we

      encounter the standard problem of atlases. Because the world is virtually a

      sphere, it cannot be accurately depicted on a flat, rectangular piece of paper.

      Peel an orange and flatten out the skin and the problem is immediately

      understandable. Choices and compromises must accordingly be made –

      choices, essentially, about how to be inaccurate. These choices are packaged

      into the projection of the world that is utilised in drawing the map.

      The most widely seen world maps use projections that retain the shapes

      of the continents and islands, and therefore wildly distort their size. The

      first and most famous of these projections is the one developed by the

      16th-century Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator. Using that projection,

      the sizes of regions far from the equator are exaggerated. Thus Europe looks

      bigger than it is, while China and India look smaller. The most notorious

      distortion of area in Mercator is that Greenland looks similar in size to

      Africa, which is actually 14 times bigger than Greenland. Mercator’s choice of

      projection was determined in part by his wish, as the sub-title of the original

      atlas put it, to produce an aid for navigators. Navigation was at the forefront

      of Europe’s advance into the world from the 15th through the 18th centuries.

      It was the scientific precondition for sailing to far-flung destinations for trade

      and conquest.

      There have been numerous attempts over succeeding centuries to correct the

      illustrative weakness in the Mercator projection. The best known today is the

      one proposed in 1973 by Arno Peters, drawing on work in the 19th century

      by a Scottish clergyman, James Gall. The Peters or Gall-Peters projection

      is more accurate on the size of different regions but distorts the world’s

      appearance in other ways. There are geographers who believe the depiction

      of the world on rectangular pieces of paper should be stopped.

      The projection employed in this atlas makes a different set of choices and

      compromises. It is the Winkel’s Tripel, first used in 1913, compromising

      between the three elements of area, direction, and distance. Distortion is

      not completely eliminated but is minimized. The curved lines of latitude and

      longitude make the projection

      useless for navigators, but the

      result is fairer and reasonably

      familiar, especially since it was

      adopted by the US National

      Geographic Society in 1998.

      Below: Myriad's

      world map based

      on the Winkel

      Tripel projection,

      and a cartogram

      based on

      population size.

      16

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      The atlas is the work of a team. Jannet King has been the editor, assiduous

      and detailed in her work, and respectful of a wayward author’s prerogatives.

      Isabelle Lewis provides the basic cartographic design work without which

      the whole atlas approach would be impossible, and throughout showed her

      talent for coming up with innovative ways of displaying the information.

      The overall look and feel of the atlas is down to the design coordination of

      Corinne Pearlman. Candida Lacey ran and coordinated the Myriad team and

      was always a joy to work with. Elizabeth Sarney was an extremely diligent

      research assistant without whom the basic research for the atlas could not

      have been done; she also offered insightful comment on the draft layouts for

      displaying the data. Nicolle Nguyen made sure I stayed up to par on my day

      job and was another source

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