As a kid, I pored over my children's world atlas. I'd trace my fingers across continents and learned to associate the cartoon depictions with a geographic name and location. To an eight-year-old me: Geishas dominated Japan, Canadians loved their maple syrup, and Africa remained an exotic savanna of elephants and lions. That's what I learned from my atlas: regional stereotypes.
As a source of knowledge, maps reinforce geographic conceptions. The accuracy of such conceptions, of course, is for the audience to determine.
This California Cartoon Map, from Toon Maps, positively highlights California's tourist attractions and resources. The state is filled with fun activities and sights. In the north, tourists can ski, hike through the forests of Yosemite, taste wine in Napa Valley, ride a trolley in San Francisco, and marvel at the technological wonders of Silicon Valley. In the south, tourists can surf, sail, explore the urban jungle of Los Angeles, catch a glimpse of Hollywood stars, and play in Disneyland, Seaworld, and San Diego Zoo. I thought it was amusing how the artist chose to include Las Vegas in the map, as if California (through proximity) has tourism claims over it. Contrasted with Nevada's hostile desert environment, California shines with its smiling cactus and lizard. The marketing angle of this map obviously neglects the realities of California: the expansive (and apparently boring) agriculture in Central Valley, the burgeoning homeless population, the coastline pollution, and the gridlock traffic.
Then again, who wants to know about those?
MAD Magazine offers a satirical view of tourism. For better resolution, I cropped MAD's California Map (left) off MAD's full USA Map (1980), which I obtained from Mappery. Unlike the traditional tourist maps, MAD illustrates tree-chopping in Yosemite, toxic fumes from traffic-backed freeways, and a non-romantic view of wine-making (and possible remarks about immigrant exploitation) with a foot-powered grape press. I appreciated the magazine's attempts to include California's bitter realities. Satirizing tourists, MAD also shows zoo-goers terrorizing the animals, a broke and barrel-wearing Vegas gambler, drunk American sailors in Mexico, and a miserable groom marrying his pregnant bride-to-be in Vegas. In a world of endless advertisements, it's refreshing to see a satirical spin that highlights the negative stereotypes of a location (in a non-offensive manner).
My last map takes a different tone and relates to the core of undergraduate studies. The above map, Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions (2000) from Worldmapper, depicts each country's size in proportion to their total carbon dioxide emissions in 2000. In 2000, North American territories accounted for 28% of global carbon dioxide emissions, yet only compose 5% of the global population. This map shows environmental injustice as its finest. The industrialized countries, most notably the United States, emit the most carbon dioxide and have the most resources to grapple with climate change. The developing nations all along the equator and in the Southern Hemisphere emit comparably minuscule amounts of carbon dioxide, yet are the ones predicted to suffer the most from climate change. Water scarcity, rising sea levels, and shifting ecosystems are already global problems, but will disproportionately affect the poorer nations with the most force.
