While the devastating and mounting effects of climate change are writ large throughout our planet, it’s still tricky to fully comprehend the enormity of global warming and what civilization is up against. Shocking stats and figures can be compelling, but they can often feel too abstract to grasp.
That’s why longtime collaborators James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti (a geographer and a designer, respectively) have teamed up to bring us Atlas of the Invisible.
The award-winning new book released earlier this month provides a critical portrait of hidden patterns in human society, all visualized through data. Cheshire and Uberti use expert visual storytelling to turn unwieldy data sets into powerful and beautiful images, revealing hard truths about gentrification, illegal fishing, retreating glaciers, global happiness levels, undersea cables and cell towers, trends in geopolitics, and so much more.
Atlas of the Invisible ultimately redefines what an atlas can be. Atlases, as we’ve previously known them, have presented limited depictions of just what we could already see, like roads, rivers, or mountains. But Cheshire and Uberti mined deeper, seeing not only an opportunity but an imperative to make visible the invisible realities that bear so much weight in our existence.
Taking a long hard look at the state of the world can be a daunting concept, but it’s one we must confront. Atlas of the Invisible is an invaluable resource in that process, and it represents a critical new way of seeing and understanding.
