The Map Room

On a visit to a close friend the other evening, I was pleased to see the gift of a satellite image of The Great Lakes, weather-worn and time-faded, still being used as a coffee table top. I imagine it doubles as decoration and travel-planning tool. It brought back memories of the time in my life when I was publishing and marketing maps as Map Appeal with my then business partner Arlene. 

For twenty five years prior to converting to organic farming in mid-life, I was swept up as a cartographer in the world of maps, the map trade, annual shows at the Frankfurt Book Fair and other shows, notably in Dublin Castle, in Heidelberg, Denver and Seattle. Those days saw frequent trips to Santa Monica to negotiate rights to satellite image data and source new material. Acting on a lead sent me by my dear Mum, I hopped on an Alaskan Air plane from Toronto to Los Angeles and returned home with publishing rights for Map Appeal to the first ever composite view of the whole Earth from Space. Tom Van Sant was the gracious and effervescent author using satellite data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Rights were for Canada, oh, and Europe too.

Months later, the first print run of 30,000 had to be added to, thanks to the astonishing response to a multi-page article on the GeoSphere image, The Earth From Space which appeared as cover story of the London Sunday Times on the day the first Gulf War broke out. Michael Marten of Science Photo Library and owned media rights "was sitting in the bath and had this idea...": a poster offer tagged on to the end of the story. Owning the publishing rights, our tiny company set about the logistics of printing, shipping, warehousing, fulfilling and delivering 23,000 poster orders. Versions in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, even Greek followed, thanks to similar offers in other news magazines.

So, a warm fuzzy glow resulted from renewing my passion for this Great lakes image print. It remains a favourite, reminding me of the special part of the world we call home. My map room downstairs is still filled with poster prints, among them The Great Lakes, Canada, the United States, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, even Northumberland County! 

All views of our Earth from Space are humbling and act as snapshots revealing the accentuated fragility of our planet and all its eco-systems and environments as climate change tightens its stranglehold. For a brief moment in history, the first views of the Earth from Space, seen naked and exposed without borders, filled us with wonder. A few decades later, it is time to wake up from our daydream and seriously get to grips with preserving what we have, under mortal threat as it is. We must switch over fully to clean, renewable resources like the sun, the wind, waters and geo-thermal energy allied to state-of-the-art technology and quit our fatal addiction to fossil fuels. We must speed up the transition exponentially, to 100% by 2050. 

For inspiration, just take another look at this wondrous home Planet.