An ‘Atlas for the End of the World’
Dozens of colorful new maps and graphics show where urbanization is most likely to conflict with biodiversity.
In 1570, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius published the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the World). The Age of Discovery was just kicking into high gear, and Ortelius’s artfully drawn maps showed what many Europeans must have seen as a brand-new world, full of recently discovered lands waiting to be colonized and exploited.
That world no longer exists, says Richard Weller, a landscape architect at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of a recently released online project, “Atlas for the End of the World.” The apocalyptic-sounding title doesn’t refer to the end of the world, Weller says, but to the world as Ortelius knew it. “It's the end of the world where we thought nature was
