The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World

  • Denis Wood &
  • John Fels.
University of Chicago Press: 2008. 231 pp. $49 9780226906041 | ISBN: 978-0-2269-0604-1
The peak of Mount Everest, within touching distance. Credit: NG MAPS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION

I trace with my finger the ridgeline to the summit of Mount Everest. The beautiful, icy, white-, blue- and granite-coloured map on the cover of The Natures of Maps brings the peak easily within reach. Yet if I were to try to scale this mountain, it is likely I could die trying. In this sense, argue geographers Denis Wood and John Fels, this map puts nature in its place: under my thumb.

Although I know it is a representation of nature, and not the real thing, such representations are powerful. They affect how we think about the subjects they portray. And therein lies the utility of this terrific book. It uses the tools of cognitive linguistics to conduct a step-by-step analysis of how maps construct — in our minds — the versions of nature that dominate public discourse about the environment, ecology, conservation and the proper place of humans on our planet.

The authors identify eight versions of nature that are constructed by the arguments commonly embodied in maps. Nature may be awesome, a threat or a victim. It embodies a cornucopia, is collectable and an object of scientific study, yet it remains a mystery. Or it may be differentiated as a park, legally protected and codified, “a nature, ultimately, quietly put in its place”.

The book is a beautiful tour de force. Laid out like an art book with stunning reproductions of maps, it also contains a trenchant, practical analysis that is useful for anyone wanting to read maps more critically and construct better maps of nature.

Wood and Fels borrow their conceptual scaffold from cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who argue that language opens 'mental spaces' that can blend with other conceptual spaces in our minds to create new combinations. For example, the term computer virus is a powerful mix of two disparate ideas: one technological, the other biological. Wood and Fels analyse how a map similarly provides “a system of propositions” about nature that “get tied together into arguments about the world”.

These spatial arguments are constructed 'on the fly' in our minds, say Wood and Fels, presumably using the same kind of activated neuronal assemblies that are proposed to enable the conceptual blending of their linguistic counterparts. But this neuroscience black box distracts from their analysis of how “maps hoist themselves off the page into our brains, spawning world views” as we read the complex propositions posted on their flat surfaces.

The analyses of the eight natures commonly constructed by maps provide the book's greatest value. 'Threatened nature' is the most compelling, and Wood and Fels bring all their tools to bear in an incisive deconstruction of a map from National Geographic entitled 'Australia under siege'. They trace the argument being made in geographic terms as this standard, seemingly objective base map is blended — in the reader's mind — with colourful maps of Australia's land cover 200 years ago and today, showing the threats posed by fire, feral species, forestry, grazing and mining. Ultimately, they say, the map argues that the past equals nature, and no map of the future is needed: “the meaning (and the fear and anxiety) emergent in the blend is perfectly clear”.

The eight natures arguably encompass the most important currents in contemporary thought, save for one: nature is change. That is not just the nature that has been changed, as in Australia, but nature that is always dynamic. The omission of this dynamism is a weakness of this book, and in fairness, of most maps. It is a pity that the authors limit their analysis to static maps of nature when we are witnessing the proliferation of 'mash-ups' that link data sources to web-based applications, such as Google Earth, to create dynamic, interactive maps. Fortunately, the analytical tools that Wood and Fels demonstrate can help us understand how interactive maps work too.

Dynamic maps open up new mental spaces more quickly and readily than static maps, and can be generated by users who ask their own questions of data sources. Instead of going to pre-existing maps for answers about nature, we can create our own maps to query nature. Rather than relying on reified versions of idealized natures, maps can allow us to explore changing versions of the real, messy natures we live in.

The Natures of Maps should be read and put to use by anyone who makes or uses maps, whether they are scientists, conservationists or landowners. The constructs of nature that Wood and Fels identify inform the way maps are interpreted. And the analytical techniques that they deploy can be used to make new maps of science and nature that are better at helping us to ask important questions.

Maps are indeed arguments about our world, but the future also rides on maps. People use them to shape what we know and what becomes of the territory. As Wood and Fels argue so provocatively, “Pretending to be no more than scorekeepers, maps stand revealed as more like the ball, the very medium through which the game's moves are made.”