Weller, Claire Hoch, and Chieh Huang, Atlas for the End of the World.Īlong with maps showing dire ecological data-threatened mammals and land degradation, for example-the atlas charts how some 422 cities are threatening some of the 36 areas where biodiversity, once rich, is now under threat. Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania. World Map Biodiversity, created by Richard Weller, Claire Hoch, and Chieh Huang. “The poetics are not lodged in each drawing, the poetics exist in the overarching project of the atlas.” As a piece of visual culture, the atlas “keeps a straight face,” as Weller puts it. “We were keenly aware for the need for things to be beautiful and well-crafted, but also legible,” Weller says. Weller, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. While an aesthetic object in its own right, the project-which was produced over the course of three years-is inherently fact- and research-driven, said its creator, Richard J. Almost 450 years and one industrial revolution later, a team of academics has responded to Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum with “Atlas for the End of the World.” The online project is a collection of 44 maps and dozens of data visualizations that soberly depict the bloody but often hidden conflicts between the planet’s growing population of humans and its increasingly threatened and limited biodiversity.Ĭontemporary artists from Olafur Eliasson to Julian Charrière have long made climate change the subject of their conceptually-charged work. In 1570, cartographer Abraham Ortelius published the first modern atlas, charting a mostly unexplored world populated by a just a few hundred million humans. Close your eyes and picture the end of the world.
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