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Comment by edflsafoiewq | Hacker News Reader

The article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.

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It’s silly that the UN chose to prioritize equal area over all other aspects of a map projection, but if we must use an equal‐area projection, I’m glad they chose this one. Gall–Peters is just hideous and it’s awful that it’s as widely adopted as it is. I hope Equal Earth replaces Gall–Peters everywhere.

...which seems to have been an entirely US-centric debate (especially when it was brought up again in the late 2010s), which explains why Europeans seem kinda baffled by the discussion. But projections that preserve size much better than Mercator were common in education systems outside the US long before the 1970s - mostly a projection closer to Robinson which is a compromise between preserving relative size without distorting shape too much, while still mapped on a common (but not rectangular) 2D area.

I mean Peters himself was German.

But my point is the "decolonization" bit. Fine, we work towards more accurate maps. Everbody (except the US government haha) wants that I guess. It's the identity politics part that still baffles me.

True, but he mainly seemed to have made a splash in the US with the colonialism angle. I don't think there was much of an outrage in either direction in Germany about that topic in the 1970s. I guess most people just shrugged and moved on because popular map projections already did balance relative size vs shape long before the 70s, and Peters-Gall was just a variation and not all that different to what was already established.

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