215 – Montana, the Gorgeous Mosaic

 

In its issue of 22 April 1996, the New Yorker Magazine published a parody map of Montana, by cartoonist Roz Chast. The state ranks 4th in surface (after Alaska, California and Texas), but 44th in population, giving it the 3rd lowest population density (before Wyoming and Alaska). This desolation, coupled with its great natural beauty, endowed Montana with several nicknames, such as the ‘Treasure State’, the ‘Land of Shining Mountains’ and ‘Big Sky Country’. Most interesting, because of its ambivalence, is the ‘Last Best Place’.

This reflects on Montana’s spectacular Rocky Mountain landscapes, but also could be interpreted as meaning that the 1 million or so Montanans see the outside world as the Big Bad Wolf. Which is one of the insinuations of this not over-friendly big-city view of rural Montana – the title is decidedly sarcastic. Montana is portrayed as a quilt of mini-states run by disgruntled marginals: 

• Obsessed environmentalists
• Obsessed anti-environmentalists
• UFO buffs
• Militia groups
• Organised tax-dodgers
• Mad bombers
• Right-wing religious fanatics
• Macho writers, their hippie wives and their hippie children
• Hollywood pseudo-cowboys in need of privacy, open air, and a full-time personal staff of forty

I don’t really know enough about Montana to say whether there is any truth in this, but I guess the asinine tone of the labels reflects the prejudices of the ‘liberal, intellectual cosmopolitan coastal elite’ at least as much as it indicates those of the alleged fringe groups portrayed here – if not more.

This map was suggested to me by Wil Grewe-Mullins and is found here on Pruned, a blog on landscape architecture and related fields. A few people there commented on the veracity of the stereotyping in this map, which makes me wonder whether the New Yorker cartoon didn’t get it just about right:

• “The pseudo-cowboys should be down by Bozeman and the environmentalists should be by Missoula.”

• “I think I-5 goes right thru ‘anti-environmentalists’ and ‘organized tax dodgers’ – and I can attest to the truth of it! Stopping for gas in anything other than an old truck starts to get scary after a while.”

• “I would say the label ‘Hollywood pseudo-cowboys’ is true for the area around Kalispell (say the eastern half of that section) and I’d label the west part asbestos country: When I grew up, it was in the anti-environmental group. Bumper stickers of ‘Save a logger, eat a spotted owl’ were common. Right-wing religious fanatics can be found anywhere.”

214 - The Blonde Map of Europe

 

Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree?
A: Wave

According to this map – and if you really believe that blondes have less brains –a nasty fall like that is more likely to happen in the central parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired, the highest figure in all of Europe.

This map, indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, shows how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area – towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north.

The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.

• The highest percentages of fair-haired people can be found around the Baltic Sea (e.g. Denmark, the Polish coast and the Baltic states), making it in effect an almost entirely blonde-bounded lake. Only the German part of the Baltic coastline is remarkably un-blonde.
• Iceland was settled by mainly Norwegian colonists, and Icelanders still share the same degree of blondness with the largest part of Norway.
• The southern border of the fairer-haired part of Great Britain seems to correspond quite well with the southern border of the Danelaw, which was ruled and settled by the Danish in the early Middle Ages.
• The northern border of the 50-79% blonde area in Britain excludes the Highlands, perhaps indicating this was a refuge for the darker-haired Celtic people of Scotland.
• The darkest-haired part of France seems to correspond with those areas most heavily populated by its more ancient Gallo-Roman inhabitants, lighter-haired regions possibly reflect a later influx of Celts (in Brittany) and a more pronounced settlement of Frankish tribes of Germanic origin (in northern France and down towards Burgundy).
• Galicia prides itself on its Celtic heritage. Maybe this explains the relative blondness of that nort-west corner of Spain.
• The darker-haired area of Switzerland seems to correspond with the areas where Rhaeto-Roman and Italian are spoken.
• The blonder area in northern Italy might reflect a larger Germanic, Celtic and/or Slavic component of the local population, a similar area in the heel of Italy, way down south, is more of a mystery.
• A significant blonder-darker divide cuts through the Balkans, dividing Serbia in two (whilst Montenegro lands on the ‘blonder’ side of the border, and Kosovo on the ‘darker’ side).
• Romanian areas closest to the Hungarian border are equally blonde – many ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, possibly most of them closest to the border.
• Moldova, ethnically Romanian, is equally dark-haired.
• As is an adjacent part of the Ukraine, which for the largest part is as blonde as most of central and eastern Europe (all the way down to Georgia).
• The darker areas in Russia’s far north (the Kola peninsula) and further east (Siberia) are probably due to the prevalence of native, darker-haired peoples, e.g. the Saami (formerly referred to as the Lapps), who also account for the darker area at the very north of the Scandinavian peninsula.

I’ve no idea which year this map is from, but I suppose the larger mobility of people nowadays would make for a more diffuse distribution of hair colouration. Which dovetails nicely with this blonde joke:

Q: What did the blonde do when she heard that 90% of accidents occur around the home?
A: She moved.

The map was sent to me by Faluvégi Balázs from Hungary, and can be found here on eupedia.com, together with other interesting maps showing the distribution of eye-colour, religion, ethnicity, GDP per capita, legal age to purchase and drink alcohol and even the legal status of cannabis.

213 - Pangaea Ultima: Climbing the Mediterranean Mountains

 “Is this what will become of the Earth’s surface?” asks the entry for 22 September 2007 of Astronomy Picture of the Day, a website affiliated with Nasa (judging from its url).“The surface of the Earth is broken up into several large plates that are slowly shifting. About 250 million years ago, the plates on which the present-day continents rest were positioned quite differently, so that all the landmasses were clustered together in one supercontinent now dubbed Pangea*. About 250 million years from now, the plates are again projected to reposition themselves so that a single landmass dominates. The above simulation from the Palaeomap Project shows this giant landmass: Pangea Ultima**. At that time, the Atlantic Ocean will be just a distant memory, and whatever beings inhabit Earth will be able to walk from North America to Africa.”

• Not only will the Atlantic Ocean disappear (and be replaced by an Atlantic Mountain Range), the Indian Ocean will become a large lake, bounded by the eastern coasts of South America and Africa, and the coast of southeast Asia. The protrusion of the Indian subcontinent is still recognizable.
• Australia, Antarctica and New Guinea will be joined too; if present species persist and the resulting mountain range doesn’t prove impassable, Australia might be overrun by penguins or Antarctica by kangaroos. Or Austro-Antarctic Guinea might be ruled by a new species that’s a hybrid of both, a tuxedo-clad marsupial, hopping across the icy wastes.
• The Hudson Bay and Alaska remain recognizable, but the Great Lakes appear to disappear.
• Ireland and Great Britain obstinately refuse to merge – both with each other and with the Continent.
• Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea will change position, but not shape.
• The Mediterranean Sea will be squeezed out of existence by Africa pushing into Europe, giving rise – quite literally – to a mountain range where at present there’s still sea.
• The Korean peninsula is still there, but Japan seems to be swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean, no longer content to be the biggest ocean in the world, it will be the world’s only ocean.

*: or Pangaea, in a more conservative spelling. This name for the supercontinent that existed around the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras was first used by Alfred Wegener in his 1920 book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (’The Origin of Continents and Oceans’), in which he first proposed the theory of continental drift.**: or Pangaea Ultima, translatable as ‘the ultimate unified landmass’. The remaining sole body of water can then be dubbed Panthalassa Ultima. This map was sent in by Jenn Berg.