US angry US no big
replyUS biggest! US #1!
I don't think this is a US only thing. Even in India, where I'm from, everyone I've spoken to or know tends to like this change.
replyYeah but does the Indian education system actually use Mercator projection on their wall maps and geography learning material? E.g. how much is the average Indian citizen actually confronted with highly distorted map projections in their daily life (unless their professional job is involved with navigating ships of course where Mercator projections makes sense).
replyFrom my side of the world (Europe), this whole "Mercator projection is associated with colonialism" drama seems to have originated a couple of years ago in the US and was mostly amplified by artificial social media outrage.
It's from longer ago than that. There was a West Wing "big block of cheese" episode that made it out to be a white supremacy issue, when the map is really just a useful map for navigation.
replyThe article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.
reply...which seems to have been an entirely US-centric debate (especially when it was brought up again in the late 2010s), which explains why Europeans seem kinda baffled by the discussion. But projections that preserve size much better than Mercator were common in education systems outside the US long before the 1970s - mostly a projection closer to Robinson which is a compromise between preserving relative size without distorting shape too much, while still mapped on a common (but not rectangular) 2D area.
replyI mean Peters himself was German.
replyBut my point is the "decolonization" bit. Fine, we work towards more accurate maps. Everbody (except the US government haha) wants that I guess. It's the identity politics part that still baffles me.
replyTrue, but he mainly seemed to have made a splash in the US with the colonialism angle. I don't think there was much of an outrage in either direction in Germany about that topic in the 1970s. I guess most people just shrugged and moved on because popular map projections already did balance relative size vs shape long before the 70s, and Peters-Gall was just a variation and not all that different to what was already established.
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