West Wing Clip

In the West Wing clip on the Peter's map, they make some pretty good points about why the Mercator map is wrong and the Peter's projection map should be used in all public schools in America. The first point they make is how the map has been creating a European bias on third world countries because the original creator of the map was German. It was used for navigation tools for European sailors and to make it easy for them, he enlarged everything to make straight lines so they can cross the oceans. This distorts the relative size of all of the nations. For example, on the Mercator map, Greenland looks about the same size as Africa, but in reality Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland. Also, Europe appears to be larger than South America, but South America, at 6.9 million square miles, has almost double the size of Europe's 3.8 million square miles. The OCSE members then explained that nothing is where we think it is on the map. They talk about how we unconsciously equate size with importance and power. We stress the importance of Western civilization and when the Northern Hemisphere is put on the top and the Southern Hemisphere, with third world countries, and put on the bottom of the map, the world adopts top and bottom attitudes.