Page 12 RAIN Jan./Feb. 1984 EXPLORING THE GLOBE: A 1:8,000,000 Replica of Planet Earth by Than James As ]oel Schatz observes (see "Bridging Hemispheres" elseivhere in this issue), people-to-people communication through high technology is an important key to "quietly and rapidly rendering international frontiers less important." But ifioe are to fully realize our vision ofa borderless world in which peace has "broken out," we must also learn to understand the world itself better. In particular, we must recognize how thoroughly our thinking about essential human and ecological interconnections has been hampered by misleading I will never forget the time I saw those first photographs of the earth taken by the early astronauts. They stimulated my fascination with the earth and provoked me to question the conception we have of our planet. These images particularly struck me because they were so unlike the earth as I had been taught to see it. I knew lines ofseparation on brightly colored maps and globes. Than fames, our intern from College of the Atlantic, could find no globe that provided ivhat he felt to be "an honest representation of the earth." He resolved tocreatehis own globe, and set out on an adventure that taught him to see a small and fragile world where our human-imposed borders and most of the fruits of our civilization are invisible, but where the natural features that have always served to connect and divide us are very much in evidence. —JF the earth of maps and globes—covered with highways and cities, divided by political boundaries, and neatly partitioned by latitude and longitude. It did not occur to me at that time that from space there is little visible evidence of humankind on the face of the earth. In these photographs I saw my planet drifting alone in a seemingly desolate universe, alive and evolving as though it were a single living organism. As Lewis Thomas describes it, "The earth, viewed from the distance of the moon, has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun." Each continent had a unique and diverse set of geographical features, yet every aspect of the planet I saw was thoroughly integrated w'ith its surroundings. From this perspective I realized that I could learn a great deal about the biology and evolution of the planet, as well as how these natural features have driven human populations together and apart. This was the beginning of my exploration of earth and a journey upon the planet. I began to search for a globe that gave an honest representation of the earth, one on which I could view the visible patterns of terrain, climate, and vegetation, unobstructed by our imaginary political boundaries, time zones, and labels. Each of the many globes that I found served as an important and useful interpretation of our planet, but none of them gave a realistic view. , Finally, I resolved to create a globe myself. The replica of the earth that I envisioned would not
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