Throughout history, maps have not just changed our understanding of the world, they have transformed our engagement with it.
The first Greek maps identified water sources. In China, they located logging areas and administrative regions. European maritime explorers opened up entire continents for trade and resource extraction with their cartography.
Now, however, thanks to new technology and thinking, there is a growing trend for maps to be used to pinpoint environmental problems and how they can be tackled.
Many are in China, where campaigners have mapped “cancer villages” associated with toxic chemical plants and named and shamed the dirtiest cities and companies in the country with air and water pollution maps.
The latest campaign cartography, however, is a truly global undertaking. The Environmental Justice Atlas is a map of environmental struggles across the world. According to the coordinator of the project, Leah Temper, it includes land wars in India, anti-mining activities in Latin America, a legal fight against oil pollution in the Amazon and park protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina. So far, the atlas documents 1,400 conflicts, but this will grow as more information comes in about areas that are little reported on.
The project is supported by a coalition of green groups and social movements – such as Grain, the World Rainforest Movement, Oilwatch International, OCMAL, the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts – and moderated by researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
This is a positive step forward and hopefully only the start. I’d like to see a global environmental map that allows people across the world to post images and stories of dump sites, chemical spills, cancer clusters, deforestation and major sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It should be searchable, filterable and have a Wikipedia-like system of verification. This could be a very useful tool for policymakers and activists, as well as reminding the rest of us what we are doing to our planet.
Environmental conflict is only likely to grow as populations increase, resources become scarcer and climate change takes its toll. Mitigating or fighting these problems will require a greater understanding of where they originate. No such battle can be fought without a map.
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