内容摘要：“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.

“I think I must have been to more than 10 or 15 of these forest gatherings,” Vallejo recalls. Other times, they met in churches. No records of these exist.

A heated, centuries-long debate resurfacesCartographers as far back as the early 20th century knew the Mercator projection was problematic.

Developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1599, the projection was one of the first ever to represent arched, imaginary sailing courses as visible, straight lines. Its simplicity for sea navigation cemented its popularity at the time, but its huge errors soon became hard to ignore.“It preserves shapes and angles, and that’s good for navigation, but it’s terrible for scale,” geography professor Lindsay Frederick Braun of the University of Oregon said of the Mercator map. The map is most suitable for local area mapping and is used by digital platforms like Google Maps.When enlarged into a world map, though, Mercator becomes problematic, Braun said. The map’s mistakes were not likely to be a conspiracy against Africa or the Global South, but its continued use, he added, is inherently political.

“Part of the reason Mercator got wide use is because it was widely available for nautical charts, but also because it rings true as a vision of the world to the people who were looking at it, the people whose countries are a little bigger.”Several map projections over time have tried to fill Mercator’s gaps, but all of them compromise on one or more factors. That has made it hard for social justice crusaders looking to support a projection that better represents the Global South.

One cartographer’s claims, though, shook the cartography world in 1973, causing an outpouring of condemnation on the one hand, and on the other, a loyal cult following.

German activist Arno Peters declared his Peters Projection as the “only” precise map, and the true alternative to the Mercator model.“The model of aid distribution proposed by Israel does not align with core humanitarian principles,” Lazzarini said on Wednesday.

“It will deprive a large part of Gaza, the highly vulnerable people, of desperately needed assistance,” he said.He added, “We used to have, before, 400 distribution places, centres in Gaza. With this new system, we are talking about three to four, maximum, distribution places.

“So it’s also a way to incite people to be forcibly displaced to get humanitarian assistance,” he said.As a trickle of aid has resumed, Israeli forces – now in control of wide areas of Gaza – have kept up their offensive, killing 3,901 Palestinians since a short ceasefire collapsed in mid-March, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.