In the land of serendip

Luigi briefly drew attention to the latest offering from our friends at Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security: the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network. And that — along with all the other maps that seem to have been springing up whenever one’s back is turned — reminded me of a map passage from a little-known Lewis Carroll book, Sylvie and Bruno. ((Well, little known compared to Alice, say.)) Looking for the exact quote, I discovered that it had appeared yesterday in the daily blog of the august Paris Review. ((The internets are a wonderful place, except when they aren’t. And the whole post is worth reading.))

Toward the end of Lewis Carroll’s endlessly unfurling saga Sylvie & Bruno, we find the duo sitting at the feet of Mein Herr, an impish fellow endowed with a giant cranium. The quirky little man regales the children with stories about life on his mysterious home planet.

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr. “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Revisiting the passage in question, I discovered that it involves farmers, which entirely justifies me using it here. My real purpose, though, was to disagree gently with Luigi’s complaint that “You can’t really share the AMKN maps” Why would you want to? The map, after all, is little more than an index, like at the back of a book, that adds geography to content to help you find something you’re looking for.

If I wanted to draw your attention to a bit of a book, I wouldn’t point you to “line 36 on page 304” when that’s the entry in the index. I’d point you directly to page 211, where the bit in question resides. Same with the map. Why embed a bit of the map, when all it really does is point you to content elsewhere?

I had hoped there’d be something in the map around Baku, which I would then have taken a screenshot of ((As suggested by the mapmaker himself.)) to illustrate my point and pique Luigi further. But apparently there is no knowledge of climate change adaptation and mitigation happening anywhere CCAFS doesn’t work, which I’m sure is just a coincidence.