Our view of the world is distorted – so our worldview is distorted

A big thank you to Black History Studies and Mark Simpson, Director of Operations, for the title of this piece and for his insight into the ways different world maps have been put together and how they affect our view of the world.

On the first evening of the Introduction to Black Studies course Mark showed us how the Mercator Projection – the standard world map for navigation and the one most widely used in Northern Hemisphere classrooms and atlases since 1569 – is inaccurate. The square mileage and relative size of the world’s continents and countries is wrong. For instance, Greenland appears larger than Africa but it’s actually fourteen times smaller. The Mercator Projection looks like this … it’s very familiar. It’s the map we all know, use and recognise.

Image from https://www.theguardian.com/global/gallery/2009/apr/17/world-maps-mercator-goode-robinson-peters-hammer

But it’s wrong.

There are other, different and more accurate, projections. In April 2009, the Guardian printed a series of WorldFactFile booklets which included world maps. The most accurate of which is the Peters Projection, a 1973 projection I’d never heard of until Mark told us about it, but a projection that presents continents and countries in their true proportion, their true relationship to each other. It looks like this:

Image from: https://www.theguardian.com/global/gallery/2009/apr/17/world-maps-mercator-goode-robinson-peters-hammer

Very different, isn’t it?

The North is 18.9 million square miles; the South is 38.6 million square miles, twice the size. But in the Mercator Projection the North looks bigger. That larger North is a mercatorial and psychological projection that’s informed our knowledge of the relative sizes of the parts of the planet we inhabit. But it’s wrong.

It’s time to think differently. Time to recognise how a map projection can inform our psychological and emotional projections onto the peoples of the world. Time to change our distorted world view. Time to think hard about the (Mercator-projected) lie of the land.