This is the 1981 edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World. It is one of several fine atlases I have by the NGS. I keep mine on a bookshelf in my kitchen because it isn’t a Ruth Family Dinner unless we bring a reference book to the table. When my sons lived at home, that book was usually the dictionary; now that it’s just me and my map-making husband, it’s often a map or an atlas.
We are sticklers for a good map key—the explanation of the symbols used on a map. Keys usually appear in a little box in one of the corners of the map. The key to this particular atlas was printed on a single separate card (5 x 16.5 inches)— that works with each map and doesn’t take up space on the maps themselves. The card fell out of the atlas a few weeks ago. I studied it. I have looked at it every day since. And it is heartbreaking given how much the world has changed in 40 years.
Here are the three of the sections of the key and my notes, with all due respect to the NGS editors and cartographers who knew the world back then.
Prolonged drought and global warming has lead to ice-cap melting, coral reefs bleaching, intermittent lakes vanishing. The new limits of drift ice has stranded polar bears; the limit of unnavigable polar ice is shrinking and opening up new passageways. The pale blue color we use to symbolize water is turning green with algal blooms. Global ocean currents are moving in strange ways.
In the forty years since this atlas was published, so many boundaries have shifted or disappeared. We have lost so much of our Tundra, Ice Shelves, and Glaciers. And though Tree Line is associated with elevation or latitude, its is hard not to see these little red trees as symbols of trees lost to wildfires. Below Sea Level is used to be just a matter of elevation of land. Why did it take us so long to think about the social equity and racial justice component of sea-level rise? Our focus should have been on the elevation of human beings,
To list Oil Fields, Oil Pipelines, and Oil Pumping Stations as Culture seems wrong. Other than Parks, there seems to be no culture in the world at all. “Site” has promise but it hardly hints at Culture, especially when listed at the very bottom of the key with Ruins and Battles. Wouldn’t it be great if the battles to save our planet (perhaps symbolized by a green tree or a happy face), should cover the pages future atlases.