Finally — a practical, symbolic fix to a subtle but powerful bias. The article rightly points out that Mercator was a brilliant tool for 16th‑century navigation, but its continued dominance has a cost: it shrinks equatorial regions on our mental maps and inflates northern ones, reinforcing a skewed worldview that echoes colonial and economic hierarchies. Adopting the Equal Earth projection at the UN is the sort of small, commonsense reform that can help correct how people — students, policymakers, investors — perceive size, importance and resource potential. That said, the piece is also correct to remind us there’s no perfect projection: every map makes tradeoffs. The point isn’t to pretend one map solves everything, but to stop letting a Eurocentric default shape our assumptions. We should push for textbooks, newsrooms, tech platforms and classrooms to use more accurate projections and to teach map literacy so people understand what maps do and don’t show. And we should center voices from the Global South in those conversations — it’s not just about cartography, it’s about correcting longstanding imbalances in how the world is seen and governed.
