OCSE's Points

The segment starts off with the OCSE (Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality) speaking with some of the white house staff on why the President needs to change the standard map to the Peters projection. The first point one of the OCSE members presents is that the map promotes European imperialism and creates an ethnic bias against the third world. This may be because Europe is bigger than it should be and so are many other areas. Personally to me this is just an error Mercator had when designing his map, but may also be positively intentional. Mercator didn't have the best of data when he created the map and he created it to be designed for sailors to use. It's simpler and makes continents and areas bigger so that they are easier to know where they are. We may never know if he had a negative intent when creating the map but it's most likely that he didn't. They also state that the areas at the poles are expanded to create equal lines to make it easier to cross an ocean. They just answered their own problem. The map was designed to help sailors not create an ethnic bias. I can understand their reasoning but it's always the simpler answer than it's a discriminatory map. The OCSE members then insist that it can be interpreted that the top is better than the bottom and that bigger is better. So the Peters projection shows North and South lines parallel with East and West lines creating right angles. They also insist that we flip the map upside down so that instead the southern hemisphere is on top instead of the bottom. While these may create "equality" for the countries that were once in the southern hemisphere you can then argue that the countries and people in the north are now lesser than the south. Instead of solving the problem you just create a new one. Both maps are wrongly proportioned. You can never properly proportion a sphere (like the Earth) onto a flat plane like a map. Mercator's map just makes it easier to spot things because they are larger. Maybe instead of changing the map we should change the way we perceive it.