Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 4 – Americans, it has
sometimes been said, are prisoners of the Mercator projection because that
widely-used map, which shows the US in the middle of the world protected by two
large blue bodies of water, reinforces their views about the special standing
of their country and its relations to the rest of the world.
But Russians are equally prisoners
of the maps they use, according to Konstantin Ranks in a Slon.ru article the
portal has reposted from last summer -- although the implications of their “incarceration”
are different, reinforcing their “illusion” about the size of their country and
their belief that others want to seize part of their territory (slon.ru/world/karty_pretknoveniya_gde_nakhoditsya_rossiya-1119927.xhtml).
Ranks, a Latvian who has worked in
Russian media in Russia and most recently in northern Europe, says that his
reflections on this point were prompted by the decision of West Europeans
not to come to a Finnish auto festival
because it was “right next to the Donbas, and there a war is going on.”
For East Europeans, this sounds
absurd because the distance from Pori to Donetsk is roughly the same as from
Donetsk to Venice, something that anyone who takes the time to measure it will
find out but also something that is concealed rather than emphasized by the
maps many use.
For West Europeans, Ranks says, “our
side of Europe literally is combined into a single whole. This is completely
natural: for a Russian living in Moscow, it appears that Chita and Vladivostok
are right next to each other even though in fact there are almost 3000
kilometers between them,” about the distance from Karelia to the Caucasus.
A major source for these “geographic
illusions,” he continues, are the maps people use, maps which “create in our
consciousness a not always adequate image about the surrounding world, about
our place in it, and about the possibilities which this very place offers us.”
The earth is a sphere, and when the
things on a sphere are displayed on a flat map, distortions are
inevitable. Perhaps the greatest example
of these because of its use around the world is the Mercator projection, which
shows countries far from the equator to be far larger than they are relative to
those near the equator which are shown relatively smaller than they are.
Thus, he continues, on a Mercator
projection map, Greenland is shown larger than Latin America or Australia, even
though both are vastly larger than the frozen island. And the map shows Russia vastly larger than
Latin America even though the continent is “almost a million square kilometers
larger than the area of Russia.”
Google has come up
with an interactive game called “Guess Which Country,” Ranks says. It involves
moving a country from one place to another on the Mercator map and then seeing
how this changes its apparent size. Finland moved to the equator is half the
size of Nigeria, and Ukraine is “no larger than Ecuador,” while transposed on Europe,
“Australia covers it from Portugal to the Caucasus.”
Given these
distortions, many have tried to come up with alternative maps, but none is
entirely satisfactory, although one offered by Arno Peters in 1974 and welcomed
by many countries corrects most of them by introducing corrections in the size
of countries as shown by the Mercator projection.
(The Peters
projection is not without its problems either, the Latvian commentator says,
noting that it introduces distortions running away from two latitudes, 45
degrees north and 45 degrees south, while the Mercator projection has the distortions
running only from the equator to the poles.)
Drawn in this
way, he says, “Africa, Asia and South America became real giants,” while “Europe
declined in size, the US grew, and Russia began to look much more limited in
size.” The map also showed that Europe, “even together with Russia,” was large
only in the northern part of the globe and not across its full extent.
The only way to get a more or less
accurate understanding of the relative size of different places is to place
them at the same latitude and longitude.
If one does so, that leads to some interesting conclusions. For example,
the South China Sea is twice as large as the Sea of Okhotsk and bigger than all
of Sakha (Yakutia).
Ranks then
concludes: “Russians need to understand that foreign lands are in fact much
bigger than they appear to them, and rated by natural conditions, practically
everywhere is much more comfortable to live. [Consequently,] hardly anyone on
the planet would exchange their lands for Siberia, even with its reserves of
natural resources.”
And once they recognize
this, Russians will revisit their notion that “everyone on the planet wants to
seize Russia in order to shake with cold and mope about in unending dullness.”
Such ideas, they will see if they turn away from their maps, are “simply senseless.”
Russia’s neighbors will find it “much simpler just to buy from the Russians all
that they need.”
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