|  I
grew up in Durham the North-East of England. I didn't go 'down south'
to London until I was 13 but my Dad worked in London and I knew
where it was. When I pictured where it was, I visualised myself
standing in Durham, looking south with Wales on my right with Cornwall
further beyond, far right, Scotland behind and London and the South
East far ahead and left. France was way off in the distance, beyond
the horizon.
It's an interesting way to see the
country and makes total sense. My internal map of the country was
what it looks like when you are looking in the direction you are
go ing in. But that's not the 'map' that we're familiar with. In
fact, many people would say that it's just plain wrong to view the
country 'upside down'. But what makes it upside down? 'North and
South!' I hear you cry... but what does that mean?
A compass will let us know magnetic
north - but that's way off from the Earth's axis upon which it spins.
But why should we align the globe with the axis vertical? As the
Earth moves through the Solar System it is not vertical, it's not
perpendicular to the rotation around the sun, it's on a considerable
tilt. Anyway, who knows if we're picturing the Solar System upside
down or not? Why put north at the top and not at the bottom? Why
picture the Earth as a spinning top and not like a wheel with a
horizontal axle instead of a vertical axis, with the equator vertical?
Why not do that?
There's no worthwhile reason at all
really.
Until recently the BBC weather map
of Britain was not aligned north-south. It was til ted to make the
shape of the British Isles sit up square on the map. Why did they
do that? Convenience, that's why.
Why is Europe in the centre of most
maps of the World (known as the Mercator map)? It the same reason
that modern maps in America have America at the centre of the map:
convenience. If you're sailing off from the coast of Spain you want
to be able to see you're route clearly so you put Spain in the middle.
This is all very well from the perspective
of Spain, but by choosing one way of seeing the world, having only
one 'convenient' perspective is always going to mean that you're
going to miss something. For example, the World is a globe, not
a flat map. Try getting orange peel to lie flat, or try papering
a football. The curvature will cause distortion which is sort of
overlooked when you come to draw your map. That's why Antarctica
looks like a really wide territory at the bottom of the World map.
But it has other effects too.
By cente ring the map on the countries
of the northern hemisphere it has given us a distorted view of the
scale of countries in the southern hemisphere such as Africa. Poorer
countries suffer enough without being made to look artificially
small (and therefore less important?) on a map. In the 1970s the
Peters map was produced which showed the continents to scale but
they looked unfamiliar and stretched. Both maps are entirely wrong
as well as being completely correct, each from a certain perspective.
We couldn't live our lives if we couldn't
take most things for granted, but now and again it is extremely
useful to question why we think a certain way, why a thing is done
a certain way and why we look at the world the way we do. Whom does
it serve to have things the way they are?
If you want to think new thoughts,
new ideas and create new possibilities your perspective in some
area must change. Look at the world differently, get your information
from a different source, consider other points of view and find
that alternative perspective.
Oxfam have produced a fascinating
and fun web resource which explores the concepts of how we see the
world.
Have a look at www.oxfam.org.uk/coolplanet/mappingourworld |
