Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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The Peters map has been widely adopted elsewhere, but remains a curiosity in the United States. Why is this? Among related factors are these: (1) our resistance to join the rest of the world on the metric system (even the British have changed from inches and fahrenheit to centimeters and celsius), (2) national surveys showing U.S. schoolchildren have among the lowest levels of geography awareness of all developed nations, and (3) many professional cartographers have resented the "politicization" of their field. Arno Peters was one of the first to assert that maps are unavoidably political.
Peters himself
Philosophers, astronomers, historians, popes and mathematicians have all drawn global maps long before cartographers as such existed. Cartographers appeared in the "Age of Discovery", which developed into the Age of European Conquest and Exploitation and took over the task of making maps.By the authority of their profession they have hindered its development. Since Mercator produced his global map over four hundred years ago for the age of Europeans world domination, cartographers have clung to it despite its having been long outdated by events. They have sought to render it topical by cosmetic corrections.
...The European world concept, as the last expression of a subjective global view of primitive peoples, must give way to an objective global concept.
The cartographic profession is, by its retention of old precepts based on the Eurocentric global concept, incapable of developing this egalitarian world map which alone can demonstrate the parity of all peoples of the earth.
Peters The New Cartography 1983
Those might be valid reasons to champion the Peters Projection except for one minor detail. It's a lousy map projection that does a worse job than dozens of better projections.
Peters and his advocates are right about one thing. Maps are inherently social constructs. That means they address the practical concerns of their users. World maps for Western audiences are centered around 90 west (American emphasis) or 0 west (Good for emphasizing America and Europe). But there are practical reasons for some of the "biases" in maps. Any global map has to split the earth someplace and the two most convenient places are around 180 degrees, where only a piece of Siberia is cut, or mid-Atlantic. Those are the only two places to make a north-south cut on the earth without transecting densely populated land masses.
There's a good reason why the Mercator Projection generally has the equator well south of the mid-line. The northern tip of Greenland is nearly at 84 north. Antarctica, of course, goes to the South Pole, but it is nearly uninhabited (a few thousand people in the austral summer and a few hundred in the winter, and no permanent inhabitants). Cape Horn, the southernmost point on an inhabited land mass, is at 56 south. Generally Mercator maps cut off about 65 or 70 south, far enough to include the Antarctic Circle and show the Antarctic coast except for the southernmost Ross and Weddell Seas.
By long convention, north is at the top of most maps. This is harmless for maps of small regions but leads to "boreocentrism" when universally applied to world maps. Not surprisingly, there have been attempts to publish maps challenging the standard orientation. One of the most charming and whimsical is put out by the Wizard of New Zealand, and it's a Mercator map with south up. The Northern Hemisphere is labeled "Down Under" and the Southern Hemisphere is "Up Over." The map is centered on 180 degrees, putting New Zealand near the central meridian. The official center of space-time is defined as 50 S, 180.
Peters Projection activists frequently speak as if the projection were the only one that showed the developed and less developed nations in their correct relative sizes, but that simply isn't so. The Peters Projection is just one of a very large family of maps called equal area because all areas on the globe are shown equally on the map.
Limiting ourselves to world maps centered on the equator, one obvious possibility is to wrap a cylinder around the earth and project areas from the earth onto the map. These maps are called, logically enough, cylindrical equal area projections. Since circles of latitude get shorter near the poles, they have to be stretched out on the map, meaning that areas get severely compressed in a north-south direction. We can pick a given latitude to define the scale of the map. Areas along that latitude are shown in their correct shape. Areas to the north are flattened north-south and areas to the south are stretched north-south.
If the standard latitude is the equator, the projection is the Lambert Cylindrical Equal Area Projection. Regions within about 30 degrees of the equator are shown nearly in their correct shapes, regions to about 45 north are distorted but tolerable, and polar regions are extremely distorted. If the standard latitude is 30 degrees, we have the rather infrequently used Behrmann Projection. Areas along the equator are stretched north-south, but only moderately, and distortion remains tolerable up to perhaps 55 or 60 degrees, but is still severe in the polar regions.
The Peters Projection has a standard latitude of 45 degrees (some sources say 44 18') and is virtually identical to one described by James Gall in 1855. It shows the most industrialized part of the world in fairly undistorted form but areas along the equator are seriously distorted north-south (by about 30%, twice as much as the Behrmann Projection). The irony of distorting the regions the map purports to champion while presenting the developed world fairly accurately has not been lost on critics of the map.
The problem with purely cylindrical maps is that parallels of latitude near the poles have to be stretched out to the length of the equator, making serious distortions of high latitudes inevitable. The answer to that problem is to allow meridians to converge away from the equator, permitting the north-south distortion to diminish. Almost any convergence scheme can be used.
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Created 08 February, 2003, Last Update 24 May, 2020
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