The World Is Flat, Again

By MARK VANHOENACKER

Published: August 18, 2012 from the New York Times 

I’LL never forget my first globe. It was a basketball-size sphere with textured mountains and shining cerulean seas, but its crowning inner glory was a light bulb. Suspended in the darkness of my bedroom for most of the nights of my childhood, it served first as a night light unto my world. But night after night and year after year, it showed me the makings of things like nights and years and a permanently marvelous truth: We live on a sphere, turning in the light of a star.

I plotted many things on that globe, including my career as a pilot. I have two globes today (a light-up model and a mind-wringing Japanese jigsaw sphere). But while stylized images of globes still appear occasionally on Web sites, newscasts and logos, actual globes are increasingly rare. When did you last see a globe in an office, or a living room? American schools, too, have seen a decline. Officials for major school systems — including Chicago and Seattle — report that most classrooms no longer have them. The last globe you saw was probably in a child’s bedroom — a high-minded toy.

Not that they haven’t had a good run. The first globes were “celestial” models of the heavens — what Atlas shoulders (it’s the sky, after all, that seems round). The first “terrestrial” globe was made around 150 B.C. (by Crates of Mallus, in case you’re ever in a barroom brawl over what the Stoic grammarians ever did for us). The oldest Earth globe that survives today is from 1492. It was spectacularly ill timed, though a colorful cast of saints, mermen and Sciapods make up for the absent Americas.

Just across the Columbian divide is the Hunt-Lenox globe, circa 1510, which features portions of the Americas, and the weighty term “New World.” The globe also bears cartography’s only known deployment of “here be dragons” (in Southeast Asia). Elizabethans, in particular, loved globes — “the whole earth, a present for a prince,” was Queen Elizabeth’s awe-struck response to a gift of a globe — and then there is the name of a certain theater. In “The Comedy of Errors,” Dromio rudely maps the portly kitchen wench: England on the chin, France on the forehead, and just you guess about the Netherlands.

Such glorious history makes the decline of globes only more perplexing. Perhaps no four-billion-year-old design can escape the occasional hiccup in brand maintenance. But there are more likely culprits. As reference tools, home globes can’t compete with detailed, up-to-date online resources (though note the Wikipedia logo, an incomplete globe). The decline of globes in schools, according to Robert Chisholm, program director for history and social studies in Boston’s public schools, is also because of the squeeze of standardized math and English testing on subjects like geography.

It is the absence of globes in most professional environments, though, that reveals the most about us. Don Draper of “Mad Men” has an office globe. But none of the dozen or so executives I contacted could remember when they last saw one. The more global their work, the more they found the idea of a globe unappealing. Globalization is the alleged triumph of travel, trade and connectivity over the planet’s bricks-and-mortar (or rocks-and-water) limitations. It’s a measure of globalization’s success — and hubris, perhaps — that its original icon appears literal and unsophisticated.

What’s lost when we lose sight of globes? An accurate sense of home, to start. The view of a Roman street on Google Maps is wonderful — but only after a globe has shown you Italy. And no online or paper map has yet succeeded in stretching a round planet onto a flat surface. Choose your complicated failure: Mercator? Sinusoidal equal area? Equidistant conic? Only a globe is both simple and right — simple because it’s right.
Globes show why maps are imperfect — but also what maps even are. Susan Heffron, an education specialist with the Association of American Geographers, argues that online tools should never entirely displace school globes, particularly given the increasingly recognized importance of tactile, hands-on learning. Even for complex phenomena, like seasons and the length of days, a globe and flashlight work better than computer animations.

Indeed, whatever the irony of globalization’s making globes unworldly, it’s arguably made them more necessary. Dr. Heffron emphasizes that many environmental and geopolitical issues (thawing Arctic Sea routes, for instance) are more easily grasped on a globe. Mr. Chisholm, the Boston teacher, describes various lessons — students tracing the life cycle of a sneaker across the globalized modern economy, say — as hugely more effective when actual spheres turn under small fingers.

Every kid deserves a globe to ponder (and touch). What about adults — hunting, gathering and car-pooling in a world that most days looks flat? The best reason for adults to rediscover globes is that, for all but the most silicon-hearted among us, nothing so easily and beautifully conjures our small place in a big scheme. After all, we live not in but on a world, one so achingly beautiful that we can hardly imagine we are free to gaze or sit down upon it anytime we like. Your family and your living room deserve a convenient, all-in-one incarnation of the transcendence of the Earthrise image, the grammar of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and “The Tree of Life,” the forgotten romance of our common home and of all travel.

A home globe doesn’t have to look old-fashioned. There are clean, modern designs now. Find one you like, and put it where you’re likely to stand up and touch it, to feel under your fingers what’s under your feet. Spin it slowly around and think of Marilynne Robinson’s reminder in “Gilead,” that the sun’s “light is constant” — that there’s only ever been one day. Or, as my 7-year-old goddaughter sees it, “I like that there’s just one ocean.” A globe shows us that there’s only one of a lot of things — and that we’re all in it, and on it, together.

Mark Vanhoenacker is a writer and airline pilot based in New York.