Isn’t there something magnificent about a map, dear reader? Recall the pleasure of opening a large atlas — with ‘traditional cartography’ — and poring over its glorious depictions of Earth, massive continents set amidst swirling blue oceans, precisely-bounded nation states, majestic mountains, expansive deserts, thick knots of jungle, handkerchief-sized islands, interlinked by networks of trade, rail, air and shipping lines, all the way down to public transport tracks which carry us to and from places of busy productivity. Such maps also reveal tremendous earthly riches — where diamonds, gold and silver lie, which nations farm billowy, glittering wheat, whose strata covers depths of oil, coal and peat — and who controls these.
Traditional cartography, drawn over centuries, intensifying as colonialism grew, thirsting for more and more sources of capital to exploit, is grand — but it misses the everyday points of our lives. And that is important for more than the sentiments of our hearts for our lives are, in fact, girded and gridded along histories, many of which are still alive. Consider how millions of people communicate in English worldwide, use the dollar, harness fossil fuels and abet speciesism and resource extraction unthinkingly.