Alexander Von Humboldt. Carl Ritter. Alfred Russel Wallace. Paul Vidal de La Blache. Jared Diamond. Yifu Tuan. David Harvey. Milton Santos.
All of these geographers spent the greater part of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, hopping about the planet, exploring, mapping, developing theories about cultural, social and political interactions with the environment. Apart from the fact that these men wandered and recorded at will, constructing the enduring fiction of place that has been a thorn in humanity’s side ever since, all of their lines and demarcations are as arbitrary as the cultural narratives that maintain them.
Now, I am the first one to pull up Google maps when trying to get from A to B. I will also use the navigation app to accompany me as I walk this distance, even if it is a straight line.
These Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are what allow us to travel the world virtually and keep those of us little gifted in the art of orienteering from wandering into the woods and never being seen again. Pre-GIS technology, I was the person who put the map on the ground and stood on it to orient myself. I followed Sat. Navs down roads where no roads existed. I have always known on a deeply intuitive level that maps were, at best, placeholders for the actual lived experience.
So it’s important to note this deep respect for geographers and cartographers in some respects.
However, these maps and depictions of the natural world are as illusory as the construct of time or money or any of the other fanciful human stories we tell ourselves to get a little comfort from the chaos of life.
Chickens don’t worry about boundaries or mortgages, whales are oblivious to international waters, goats barely even respect the laws of gravity, never mind boundaries and borders.
In the history of evolution, human-kind is a relatively new kid on the block, and yet our faith in our meta-narratives and social constructs is bordering on the obscene.
Maps are not the territory.
In fact, it may come as some surprise to learn that there is no entirely accurate map projection of the world in existence. Many of the representations of the globe that populated the walls of our childhood classroom are grossly distorted in terms of size and position of land masses, and depending on your age, may be entirely inaccurate in terms of land demarcation. Take, for example, the Yugoslavia on the maps of my youth.
The most accurate representation to date of our shared abode is the AuthaGraph Map, created in 1999 by Hajime Narukawa, and it looks nothing like the prota-map many of us hold in our mind’s eye. As with all meta narratives, without a circumspect interrogation of perspective, purpose, and omissions, maps can distort our view of reality and divide us.
These lines we draw across landscapes, labeling territories as if the earth itself recognises such boundaries, are but alpha attempts to create a sense of security and place.
But as we move towards a meta-humanity, our understanding of place and personhood must too evolve.
The rise of nationalism in the 20th century saw the revision of the lines we draw and the names we call the places we live. But it also witnessed some of the most shameful and heinous atrocities ever recorded too, atrocities that should have tempered the bile of nationalistic war mongering ever since. Rivers deep and mountains high care not a jot for sterile cartography. No map can stop and earthquake or volcano eruption.
Our maps split up bio regions and watersheds without concern for natural divisions. They slice through ecosystems, separating their deeply interconnected parts.
A forest knows no border, yet our maps would have us believe a tree in one spot belongs to a different place than its neighbour mere metres away. Animals roam freely across terrain, yet are expected to respect lines drawn on paper that mean nothing to their instincts.
Even the names we give locations are but fanciful notions, attempts to tame wildness and make it familiar.
The winds that whip the sense out of the West Coast of Ireland’s inhabitants will blow long after the lines that divide the North and South of my country have been forgotten.
Constantinople, The Ashanti Empire, The Kingdom of Scotland are nowhere to be found on any map projections in the 21st century, but they existed nonetheless. There are no maps for the moments in each life that are objectively more important than any line on any map in any time or space; those moments where time stops and a touch or a word or a smile is absorbed into the timeless fabric of memory forever. Our place names are as transient as the cultures that coined them, yet we act as if they reflect eternal truths about a landscape’s identity.
Which is rich, coming from the world’s biggest fan of the personal tour guide in my phone, I am the first to appreciate the irony.
But we must recognise the limitations of these lines drawn by people who did not always have the broadest perspective nor the foresight to understand the potential for harm these assignations of place could hold.
After all, maps are created by fallible humans with their own biases and agendas, whether nationalistic, commercial, or otherwise. Boundaries drawn for political convenience, with little regard for natural or cultural realities on the ground can be weaponised to the detriment of humanity as a whole.
So the next time you glance at a map, or Google sends you down a left hand turn where ostensibly you see nothing but a wall, take a beat. Look past the names and borders to appreciate the true glorious chaos that is our story of the world, told by a homo-sapien bipod, cursed with consciousness and anxiety.
Maps are but one of the greatest of human fictions, useful as guides but not reflections of deeper human truths. And certainly not reflective of the lives that occupy these very real territories that evade simple lines on paper.
Those deeper truths are the ones that will be told long after we are no more, and our maps from today have been forgotten in living memory. We must be careful not to wander down roads where no roads exist.
Just what is it for which we wish to be remembered?
