Unfortunately, I was absent for the Counter-Cartographies Collective event in class on Wednesday about the power of mapping due to my travels in Uganda. While I was away, though, I took some time to contemplate the power of maps, and found myself creating my own map related to what I experienced while I was away. While there, I found out that Rwanda does not allow plastic bags into their country, which I thought was incredibly interesting and an incredible act of activism and effort towards reducing plastic waste in the country. Something, I noted, that any of the states in the U.S. were far from implementing. I was surprised when I was in Uganda to read several placards at restaurants and hostels which reported about the business’ green intentions and environmental focuses. Considering environmental impact was the expectation for various companies and people while I was abroad in Africa, not the exception (which I feel is the opposite for the United States).
I was frustrated when thinking about how privileged the United States can be when we consider global warming and the fact that many of the harms of global warming will affect developing countries before it impacts developed countries like the U.S. Unfairly, developed countries are the places that are releasing the most greenhouse gases and truly spiraling the environment downwards. I was frustrated to see this firsthand during my travels.
When on the plane back from Uganda and while I was reading the articles about the power of mapping, I was imagining and mentally creating a map that would plot all the places that are truly making a conscious environmental decision to reduce their emissions and impact on the environment and how this matches up to a plotting of developing/developed countries. I read Counter-Cartographies’ statements about why they are mapping and I realized this map I imagined aligns particularly well with their intentions. When I mentioned my idea in class, Professor Gould played devil’s advocate and asked me what I meant by “progress” and how that can truly be measured in a map. I hadn’t considered how progress can be so subjective depending on both political affiliation and moral values in life. Then, in class on Friday we also discussed the fact that maps are, in many ways, universally accepted knowledge. When one looks at a map, they don’t at first question the validity of the map, which is one of the ways maps can be so powerful. Part of me was frustrated that my hypothetically created map had the flaw of being biased, and another part of me was inclined to create the map even more because I thought about how I could secretly expose people who don’t believe in global warming to my map and how it could possibly not be questioned but rather just accepted. I realized that while this isn’t necessarily fair, I wished this for a number of topics and theories which center around political disagreements. The readings and discussions from this week made me realize the potential for education and data collection through mapping, and made me excited to see this develop.
