The UN General Assembly often underperforms its potential, in no small part because blocs devoted to selfish interests manage to manipulate the proceedings. But the assembly’s overwhelming vote in favor of displacing the Mercator map projection with the “Equal Earth” projection is a rare move that won over almost every country present.
■ The Mercator projection may be useful for navigation, but it’s terrible as a flat representation of a round Earth. The distortions involved are massive, particularly around the relative sizes of different landmasses. The “Equal Earth” design is intended to replicate the basic familiar look of a world map but with the landmass sizes corrected and standardized. This makes Africa look much larger and Greenland much smaller, among other things. The US delegation opposed the change.
■ But why? In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “We must face the facts as they are.” And the fact is that the Mercator map doesn’t usefully represent the facts of the globe.
■ A principled objection is raised by Ukraine, which opposes the way some of its territory is represented in one of the versions of the map. That objection is sound. But the broad principle that a map should try to reflect a usefully accurate view of the world is one worth supporting.