The moon slows down the rotation of the earth, the sun accelerates it. And humans can destroy the blue planet.
Foto: picture alliance/dpa/EurekAlert | Kevin M. Gill
Graphic novels can vividly implement fictional, and sometimes real, stories. Atlases for non-fiction topics can perform a similar function. The hybrid format of map, graphic and text legend combines many advantages, is particularly suitable for representing complex processes and, if done well, can be an excellent didactic tool. Christian Grataloup, a geological history specialist and professor at the University of Paris-Cité, offers one.
The Légendes Cartographiques agency, which also regularly supplies the magazine “L’Histoire”, has developed the impressive map material for this. In nine chronological chapters, scientists from various disciplines provide a multifaceted picture from the Big Bang to our alarming present, which is straining and overburdening our planet.
It is up to us whether this wonderful blue planet is also habitable.
Findings from astrophysics and geophysics, paleontology, biology, geography and topography were incorporated here. The development of species in the plant and animal world is presented, and the influences of humans on their environment are shown. This atlas avoids the danger of an excessive, incomprehensible amount of information, an overload of facts, by an almost ingenious limitation to exemplary and essential information that corresponds to the current state of research. In the early GDR there was the book “Space, Earth, Man,” which was often given away as a gift for young people, and sold around four million copies; it was, so to speak, the “socialist counterpart” to this atlas.
Everyone has heard about the weather-determining El Niño heard. Here readers learn how the ocean and the atmosphere interact in the tropical Pacific and what effects the Southern Oscillation triggers. A double page deals with the “Flood” in the Bible and the Koran, whereby speculation about a transgression, an overflow of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, as a starting point for these stories in the holy books is discussed. This is followed by the admission: “We don’t know.”
We also learn how people in Rome ate 2000 years ago. And that there are a whopping 260,076 trees per square kilometer in German forests and that there are over 318 billion trees in Canada. It is shocking to see how vast, once plant-rich, fertile areas in Vietnam were stripped of their leaves during the war in the 1960s by the nearly 75 million liters of the weed killer Agent Orange sprayed by the US military. A map reveals the enormous density of nuclear reactors in the USA, China and France. Another informs that the production capacity created for renewable energies in China is around seven times as high as in Germany.
“The interwoven stories of the Earth in this atlas show us different horizons and remind us of our responsibility as humans on this planet,” writes Christian Grataloup at the end of this demanding and insightful volume, which should not only be read as an informative history of the Earth , but at the same time as an admonition to humanity to come to their senses, to rethink and to reorient themselves. It is in our hands whether this wonderful blue planet will continue to be habitable for future generations.
Christian Grataloup: The History of the Earth. An atlas. With collaborators v. Charlotte Becquart-Rousset, Léna Hespel and Héloise Kolebka. A.d. Francis v. Frank Sievers, Martin Bayer, Nele Boysen and Jens Hagestedt. C. H. Beck, 320 pages, hardcover, 300 maps and graphics, €38.