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Legion. An amalgamated journal.

Ode to the Map

Came across this interesting graphic showing the spatial distribution of job creation and job loss over the past five years in the US.  Watch as Katrina hits New Orleans, cities wax and wane, and red blossoms across the map in this latest financial downturn.  It’s pretty powerful stuff, albeit—in my humble opinion— a bit alarmist.  It makes me think the environmental movement would do well to create similar easily-understood graphics that show the magnitude of our environmental impacts as a way of inspiring cultural change.  (Maybe something like this?  A little hokey, but …)

Spring Greeney

May 28th, 2009 at 9:09 pm

But perhaps you disagree

One response so far

  • [ # ] joel hanesJun 27, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    I’m afraid that easily-understood graphics to explain the threats to the environment will not be enough — at least in America, the mass of people have forgotten or unlearned that we are dependent on the natural world, and no longer see the a healthy environment as essential.

    As Mark Slouka put it:

    … Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged “information”. We worried about our equity.

    We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn’t know pretending to be living lives that were not their own.

    The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper-wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun — these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other — an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn’t work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs.

    Wonder? What was there to wonder at ?

    “Eclogue On the rich sin of meddling” Mark Slouka
    Harper’s July 2009 p47