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3 - Earth's Intelligent Body: Subterranean Systems and the Circulation of Knowledge, or, The Radius Subtending Circumnavigation

from Part I - The Body as a Map

Kevin L. Cope
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
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Summary

Anyone who has built, repaired or renovated a home, hut or hovel anywhere in North America has probably come across the famous logo of the largest paint and finish supplier west of the prime meridian, the Sherwin-Williams Company. In what an environmental law blog from the Berkeley and UCLA law schools describe as a ‘breathtakingly anti-green’ hallmark, this renowned vendor of colour coatings takes as its emblem a bucket of brilliant red paint spilling all over the terraqueous globe. This paint-dispensing bucket seems to hang on a point in space as its contents incarnadine roughly three-fifths of the earth, with the initial splash-down occurring at a point near the ecological utopia of the Galapagos islands. Three words emblazon the Sherwin-Williams logo: ‘cover the world’. Oddly enough, that goal is not accomplished within the logo. Those who yearn for a revival of old-world culture will delight to discover that, contrary to cartographical custom, both western Europe and western Africa have been tipped ninety degrees off the standard north-up orientation so as to hang upside-down at the bottom of the escutcheon, there to remind viewers of the prehistoric African origins of humanity and to celebrate the Italian ports from which began the exploration of the Sherwin-Williams ‘world’. Although surface tension adheres the paint to the globe a few degrees beyond the girdle of the tipped, formerly blue-green sphere, the bottom half of the planet remains open to daylight.

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Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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