A New Beginning Atlas For The End Of The World

The critical nexus the Atlas for the End of the World addresses is the global tension between food production, urbanisation and biodiversity

- Richard Weller

Seen from 28,000 miles away, the earth is a beautiful blue sphere. But its beauty is deceptive. We don’t see the five billion tons of surplus carbon we pump into the atmosphere every year. We don’t see our toxic waterways, waste, gutted forests and sprawling megacities.

Within vast monocultures of cattle and grain, the trained eye can just make out an archipelago of green islands — so-called “protected areas” into which the world’s genetic biodiversity is now huddled.

The most important of these areas are known as biodiversity hotspots. The 36 “hotspots” are regions agreed upon by the scientific and conservation communities as the most important and the most threatened biological places on earth. Hotspots are to biology what libraries are to culture. They are also regions of exceptional linguistic diversity, much of which is also predicted to disappear by the century’s end — suggesting that the fate of nature and the fate of culture is one and the same. Not all, but many of the hotspots are also bedevilled by poverty, violence and corruption. They are also parts of the world that get very little attention from the global design community. The Atlas for the End of the World is an ongoing research project that focuses on land use and urbanisation in these regions.

The world’s first atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World) was published in 1570 by the book collector and engraver from Antwerp, Abraham Ortelius. With his maps, Ortelius laid bare a world of healthy — we can now say “Holocene” — ecoregions ripe for colonisation and exploitation. Lauded for its accuracy, the Theatrum quickly became a bestseller.