Afrika Mapping

The United Nations recently voted overwhelmingly -- over the predictably pathetic objection of the United States -- to endorse the wider use of equal-area maps for most purposes. This is a subject that was cogently addressed in a fictional (and better) West Wing back in November, 2000. 

Comparisons such as this one from The True Size help to illustrate the point that the UN was making: the 1569 Mercator projection was absolutely the correct choice for navigation but it is not good for representation. One could say that is was an essential tool of colonialism that has had the (mostly) unintended side effect of supporting post-colonial thinking. 

The disparity in the relative size of Argentina and Greenland is probably the example geographers cite the most. Until the obsession of the current president of the United States with the Danish colony, this has not been a very consequential example. More important and pervasive has been the tendency of the Mercator projection to minimize the size of Africa in the mental maps of many of us. 

I used the online tool The True Size to make the corrective example above, and I recommend the site to anybody seeking to compare the size of regions. I often use it when I want to help students (or myself) think about unfamiliar places in terms of more familiar places.

This is all by way of prelude to a number of maps of the African contient itself that I have found recently.. The map of national boundaries is both unfamiliar to many non-African viewers and also itself an inadequate representation of the continent. That is to say, the boundaries are merely a starting point, given that they obscure many important geographic patterns. In fact, many of the dire challenges facing the continent have to do with the imposition of these boundaries. 

Perhaps the best example of this is a map depicting 2010 (pre-South Sudan) boundaries superimposed on a map of language families. I discuss this -- and a North America comparison -- in my 2012 post Immigrants Should Learn the Language.

All of this is by way of prelude to sharing a few maps that have come across the (digital) transom in the past couple of weeks. Each of which is an opportunity to look at Africa in terms other than (or in addition to) the colonial.

The first is a more detailed approximation of the language geography hinted at above, in a map that identifies a few dozen languages in a half-dozen language families. No one map can capture all of the continent's linguistic diversity, but the Wikimedia Languages of Africa provides a bit more insight, as do the accompanying Wikipedia Languages of Africa article and its various citations. 

All maps are selective -- this one takes the unusual step of including a notation to that effect -- at least five times as many languages could be shown. The shortfall is much greater in some areas, particularly Nigeria with its 500 languages. I noticed one of the citations in this article with interest, but will spare readers a long journey down that particular rabbit hole and will just say that the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) is both a highly respected academic organization and a close partner of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. I have been to one of their jointly operated base camps in the Braziian Amazon; they share headquarters in Texas.

Whenever I think of the linguistic diversity of the continent, I am reminded of one of my favorite musicians: Angélique Kidjo of Benin (not far from Nigeria). She is fluent in two colonial languages and three regional languages: Fon, French, Yorùbá, Gen (Mina) and English. And in the one listed last in her biography, she is more fluent than most English speakers I have known. 

Another linguistic map that caught my attention recently describes the extent to which Amazigh languages are spoken across the nothern part of the continent, and the variety of languages in that family, which are perhaps better known as Berber languages.

Apologies: the only citation I have for this map is a
general reference to the Facebook page GeoPolice.

Another map that caught my attention is a bit of cartographic humor that shows just how arbitrary colonial land-taking could be. Nobody in these three countries wanted the absurd eastward extension of Namibia, but residents of all three countries must contend with it more than a century after the fact. The Geo All Day page includes a brief explanation of the 1890 Caprivi Strip.

The Fabric Map of Africa points to another important facet of cultural identity -- of which language, food, and religion are more commonly-noticed examples. It puts me in mind of impressive exhibits of art from the continent that I was lucky enough to see in Annapois and Baltimore in 2019. As with the lingusitc maps above, these fabrics represent much greater textile variety present in real life.

The other really cool map that came to my attention recently is about biogeography, though human movement seems also to be part of this story. 

The range of the super-cute African crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata) is quite unusually disjointed, comprising three or four isolated regions at great distances from each other. The distance is what suggests the involvement of human trade or migration in getting the critters so far apart. 

Knowing something of the geography of the continent's climates and biomes makes the adaptability of this plucky mammal even more remarkable. It is found in areas suitable for grapes and olives in the north, lowland rain forests in the west, and coffee-growing cloud forests in the east. 

Lagniappe: A Speech

A very timely surprise came as I spent a few days writing this post. Cabo Verde Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho's turn to speak at the UN General Assembly came on Saturday morning, September 26. He took the opportunity to speak in Kriolu (Cape Verdean Creole) -- and the UN video player allows viewers to choose "original" as one of its eight audio tracks. This came a few weeks after the International Day of the Mother Tongue, and was apparently the first time that a Cape Verdean leader used the Cape Verdean language rather than Portuguese in this setting. Side note: the first two heads of state to speak were the president of Brazil and the president of the United States, which is the usual order. This is because at the first UN General Assembly, nobody wanted to go first, and the then-president of Brazil finally offered to do so. Brazil has been first ever since, followed by the United States as host. I have no idea how the rest of the order is set.

The content of PM Carvalho's address is, of course, as important as the language he used. He joined many (maybe all?) African leaders in using this opportunity to call for passage of a resolution that would give the continent -- and its 1.6 billion people -- a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The fifteen seats on the Council rotate in such a way that Africa is always represented. But importantly, it is only the five "permanent" members who have veto authority,  That short list is decades overdue for a reshuffle.

Ranger Ryan

Ranger Ryan is not shown in this iconic photograph, but he was narrating when I took it. 

He is the latest in a long series of NPS rangers who have helped my students and me to learn from National Parks -- and I know from past experience that some of these students might follow a similar career path. 

I often ask rangers about exactly that -- how they came to be rangers. I was particularly interested in Ranger Ryan's story. Like me, he went to college in Ohio. His university had a partnership that allowed him to work at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, his only NPS posting before moving to Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller this year. His deep appreciation and careful reading of history helped him to shed new light on this already-familiar view.

For many years, I have been aware of the environmental saga of the Cuyahoga River -- the lower reaches of which famously caught fire in the 1960s, contributing to the passage of the Clean Water Act under that environmental radical Richard Nixon. I eventually learned that the Cuyahoga was not the only river to catch fire, nor was its most famous fire its first. 

It was not until a 2023 road trip with my son that I learned about the significance of the upper reaches of the river, where the National Park site is focused.  He introduced me to the park at the same time he introduced me to the indispensable podcast National Park After Dark. Its tagline is "A podcast for the MORBID outdoor enthusiast." Episode 62 was my introduction. Entitlted "Abandon. National Park Ghost Towns" it tells the fascinating and complicated story of industrial pollution and. land siezures in this most unusual park. 

There are a few ways to pronounce, Cuyahoga, by the way, with that of Akron native Chrissie Hynde being the most important.

More photos

My 2023 Chicago to Fairhaven folder includes several images of the Cuyahoga, including some taken near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where Hynde is a reluctant honoree. Our 2026 MABI folder includes a few photos taken by me, but most taken by students on my umpteenth field trip to Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller. They include some images that I discussed recently on this blog in the Yosemite by Way of Vermont and New Bedford post.

Lagniappe

I could not mention National Parks in general -- nor its rangers in particular -- without mentioning the March 2025 NPAD episode entitled A Love Worth Fighting For. Cassie and Danielle speak directly with some of the rangers and other land protectors who were fired by DOGE, Elon Musk's dastardly attack on our government and public servants.

Walls of Stone

Since moving to New England in 1997, I have learned to pay attention to stone walls. They feature prominently in my Land Protection course. Protecting open spaces -- whether field or forest or both -- requires understanding how those spaces change, and walls are a big part of that understanding. 

I am fortunate that rangers and ecologists at Harvard Forest and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park have been very generous in sharing the lessons of stone walls with my students and me. As a result, we notice the walls differently and I even follow a nerdy stone-wall page or two online.

This recent post on that site is as good a summary as I have seen of the importance of stone walls in New England.

There is a stone wall running through the woods somewhere near you right now, and it is standing in the middle of what used to be an open field.

New England holds something on the order of a hundred thousand miles of dry laid stone wall, and almost none of it was built to be looked at. Farmers clearing land in the 1700s and 1800s hit glacial till, which is what the ice sheet left behind: soil absolutely packed with rock. Every single spring the frost pushed a fresh crop of stones up to the surface. You had to put them somewhere. The wall was the somewhere.

Which means these walls are property lines and pasture boundaries from a landscape that no longer exists. At the peak in the mid 1800s, big stretches of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont were something like seventy to eighty percent cleared. Photographs from that period look nearly treeless. Then the Erie Canal opened, better farmland opened up out west, the mills pulled families into the cities, and the hill farms were abandoned in enormous numbers. The forest came back entirely on its own.

So when you are walking in the Litchfield Hills, or almost anywhere else in New England, and a wall comes out of nowhere and runs dead straight through hundred year old oaks, you are not looking at a wall in the woods. You are looking at woods that grew up inside somebody's pasture after they gave up and left.

Is there a stone wall on land you know well, and do you know whose field it used to be?

I can recommend two books on the topic. I have required David Foster's Thoreau's Country since I started teaching the Land Protection class mentioned above. Fortunately, it was published around the time I inherited the course. I have sometimes also required Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels in that same course. I have not met either author, but colleagues of each were early guides in my exploration of the properties mentioned above, and I learned a lot from them! 

Lagniappe

As the N.C. Wyeth painting below reminds us, every stone in every stone wall was placed by a human, mostly with no mechanized equipment. 

Barefooted Brooks Clark Building a Wall
by Newell Convers Wyeth
Originally published in "Men of Concord" in 1936
Shared in 2026 by The Thoreau Society 

Yosemite By Way of Vermont and New Bedford

 

Sunset in Yosemite Valley by William Bradford
Image: Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP on Flickr

Geography in general -- and environmental geography is both a natural science and a social science. I often add that it encompasses the humanities as well -- including literature, music, and visual arts.

The William Bradford painting Sunset in Yosemite Valley came to mind as I have been hearing about the most recent attack on Yosemite National Park, a 1,200 square-mile national treasure that became one of the first national parks in the world in 1916. For more background on the park, see Yosemite on Wikipedia.

I use the word "attack" for what some will prefer to describe as an application for a variance, but in the current regime, those of us who study public lands are skeptical about any such proposals. Specifically, the owner of the 83-acre Hazel Green Ranch is proposing to build a road through the national park to make his property more accessible to park visitors. The prior owner of the land had applied to do exactly the same thing. As reported by The Times of India, the new owner applied to do the same in 2024 and appears to hope for a different result.

What does all of this have to do with New England -- and with Vermont and New Bedford in particular? Art. 

That is to say that according to the film A Place in the Land, artists of the Hudson School helped to build the case for the protection of Yosemite Valley in particular and for the creation of Naitonal Parks in general. Frederick Billings was a gold-rush lawyer and developer of Western railroads who took an interest in Western lands and the art that helped to convince those in the East of their value. 

The original Sunset in Yosemite Valley by William Bradford is in the former home of Billings, along with the equally striking  Cathedral Rock by Albert Bierstadt. 

Both artists were from New Bedford, though Bierstadt spent most of his adult life in New York. They were both among the landscape painters featured in a 2022 exhibition at the New Bedford Whaling Museum entitled Re/Framing the View. As a member of the museum, I was grateful to be able to visit that exhibit several times. 

William Bradford (not to be confused by the Pilgrim-era preacher of the same name) went on to paint at least one more work from the Yosemite Valley, but he is better known for his maritime art, including some art depicting the New Bedford Harbor, where I spend a lot of my time. In fact, my favorite view of the harbor is from the intersection of Church & Main in Fairhaven, a few blocks from my house. I had been admiring the view there for years before I stopped to read this marker, which describes this corner as the site of Bradford's studio -- of which no trace remains. 

Billings' former home is more properly known as the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, Vermont. The park opened around the time I started teaching an advanced course in Land Protection and I have had the pleasure of taking more than 100 students there over the years.

The park is named for three of its most prominent residents. George Perkins Marsh was born on the property and went on to a career as a legislator, diplomat, and writer. His book Man and Nature established environmental geography by being the first work to examine the widespread impact of humans on natural systems. His brother sold the family property to Fredrick Billings, who acquired much of the art that remains in the mansion today. 

Billings' granddaughter Mary French married Lawrence Rockefeller in Woodstock, and they maintained it as a summer home until her passing, when it was given to the American people. I have had the good fortune of exploring the mansion, its neighboring farm, and its 600 acres of forest with some of its remarkable park rangers, including the one who had taken Lawrence Rockefeller on his first official tour of his own house! 

Lagniappe 

Unfortunately, the proposed land swap in Yosemite is not the current administration's first assault on Yosemite. In the aftermath of the DOGE debacle in which many NPS employees were fired simply for being new, many seasonal workers at Yosemite were put in a position of having to work without pay. 

Learn more about the widespread attacks on NPS workers by DOGE on A Love Worth Fighting For: Speaking Up For Our Public Lands. It is the March 3, 2025 episode of the absolutely essential podcast National Park After Dark. Cassie and Danielle speak with Yosemite Ranger Alex Wild (perfect aptronym) and other dedicated public servants about the Valentine's Day firing of 4,400 workers throughout the system. Many were hired back when the bros at DOGE were forced to recognize their error, but the damage was done. BTW, the link above describes the episode and provides additional resources, but BPOD episodes are not directly connected through the web site. They can be reached through various podcast services and also on the NPAD YouTube channel, which includes this episode.