Telling an Old Story with New Maps - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 70

entirely to avoidable poverty, over 100 million children were dying in their first five years
worldwide per decade. A further 30 million were born dead - per decade. Almost all of
these child deaths are in 'developing countries'. Every 10 years the largely avoidable deaths
of infants and the still-born match the estimate of all adults killed in genocides in the last
century. Two simple bar charts in Figure 5.2 sanitize this information on how children still
suffer the most, when they are still too young to have taken their chance to change things.
And this is despite many pledges made to protect children from forms of poverty (two of
which are shown below).
The remainder of this chapter tells a story with maps and just a few words. This is a story
of where we are now, told through the births of the poorest, and the deaths of the richest.
The maps and text boxes are all taken from a sample of less than a tenth of those available
on the Worldmapper website. All that is original here are the few new words introducing,
linking and concluding this story, and the way in which these pictures have been arranged
to tell this story.
Figure 5.2 Deaths by age group, worldwide 1990-1995. From 'the rhetoric and reality of child
poverty' [Adapted from: The State of the World Population (1998) reported in Smith and Bræin
(2003) courtesy of Earthscan Publications]