A German mapmaker says the Third World has suffered long enough from a distorted map.
The National Council of Churches (NCC) has begun distributing a map of the world that its designer says gives a true picture of the size of countries, unlike the maps we are accustomed to seeing.
Called the “Peters Projection” (after its creator, Arno Peters), the map attempts to show land masses in their correct sizes. To do so, it enlarges and elongates most Third World countries at the expense of the northern hemisphere, particularly Europe. That’s exactly what Peters, a historian from Bremen, West Germany, had in mind when he drew the map.
Another German, Gerhard Kramer, first drew the more familiar Mercator map in 1569. (Kramer Latinized his last name to “Mercator.”) His map produced severe size distortions in some countries because he located his own homeland, Germany, in the center of the map. It actually lies in the northern quarter of the globe. Countries in the southern hemisphere appear much smaller than they actually are.
Peters says the Euro-centered Mercator map contributed to colonialist thinking through the centuries. Peters’s map accords accurate size to all countries, although it distorts shapes in order to preserve accurate geographical relationships.
“In our epoch, relatively young nations of the world have cast off the colonial dependencies and now fight for equal rights,” he says. “It seems important to me that the developed nations are no longer placed at the center of the world, but are plotted according to their true size.” His work is perhaps more of a contribution to world politics than it is to cartography, since its shape distortion renders it unsuitable for use in navigation.
In correcting size distortions, Peters’s map renders a startlingly different view of the world to those accustomed to the Mercator map. No longer is the Soviet Union shown as twice the size of Africa, when Africa is actually a third larger. No longer is Greenland shown as larger than South America, when South America is nearly nine times as large.
Peters first presented his map in Germany 10 years ago, and its influence has been growing in schools and institutions there. Some European news outlets also have adopted it. The U.S. distribution marks the first time the map has been translated into English.
The NCC, with its penchant for involving itself in Third World political struggles, is distributing the map through Friendship Press, its publishing arm, and through Church World Service, its relief and development agency. Said Ward L. Kaiser, director of Friendship Press: “Because our world view as human beings is so largely dependent on our picture of the world, as long as our picture of the world presents us with distortions, our world view will be distorted.”
In Peters’s map, the United States appears to grow in comparison with the Soviet Union. Don’t forget, he says, that the United States was just another exploited territory at the time the Mercator map was developed.
