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Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nathan MacDonald, Professor of the Interpretation of the Old Testament, University of Cambridge

Five hundred years ago the first Bible featuring a map was published. The anniversary has passed uncelebrated, but it transformed the way that Bibles were produced. The map appeared in Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Old Testament, which was published in Zürich and widely distributed in 16th-century central Europe.

Yet despite being a groundbreaking moment in the Bible’s history, the initial attempt was hardly a triumph.

It is flipped along the north-south axis (meaning it’s back to front). As a result, the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine, rather than to the west. It illustrates how little many in Europe knew about the Middle East that such a map could have been published without anyone in the printer’s workshop questioning it.

The map had originally been drawn about a decade earlier by the celebrated Renaissance painter and printmaker Lukas Cranach the Elder, based in Wittenberg in latterday Germany. Written in Latin, it shows Palestine with various important holy sites such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem. At the bottom, you can see the mountains of Sinai and the path taken by the Israelites as they escaped slavery in Egypt.

Look closely and you can see the Israelites and their tents, plus various vignettes of the events on their journey. The landscape is more European than Middle Eastern, though, reflecting the printmakers’ ignorance of this region. There are walled towns with numerous trees and, in contrast with reality, the Jordan meanders rather more dramatically towards the Dead Sea, and the coastline has more bays and coves.

In the previous century, Europeans had rediscovered the second-century Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy, and with him the art of making accurate maps that used latitude and longitude (insofar as longitude could be estimated at that time – it greatly improved in later centuries). With the advent of printing, Ptolemy’s Cosmographia had taken Europe by storm. His scientific treatise on geography was published and his maps of the ancient world reproduced.

Printers soon discovered, however, that purchasers desired contemporary maps. Soon new maps of France, Spain and Scandinavia were published. To our eyes these are truly modern. North is at the top of the page and the locations of cities, rivers and coastlines are presented highly accurately.

These maps rapidly replaced medieval mapping with its symbolic approach to the world, such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi of the known world circa 1300, where it was more about conveying cultural or religious meaning than geographical accuracy. Except, that is, in one case: Palestine.

The early modern printers of Ptolemy also gave their readers a “modern map of the Holy Land” that was nothing of the sort. It was a medieval map produced not by using latitude and longitude, but using a grid to measure distances between different locations. It was orientated with the east at the top of the page and the west at the bottom. It portrayed the holy sites of Christianity and divided the land of Palestine into tribal territories.

Cranach’s map blends these two types of maps. At its top and bottom edges it has lines of meridian, but the coastline is slanted so that the entire map is orientated with the north-east at the top of the page.

It is as though Cranach couldn’t quite decide what type of map to create. Its portrayal is realistic and modern, but the map is full of symbolic geography: as your eye passes over, you journey with the Israelites from Egyptian bondage to the promised land, with all its resonant locations, such as Mount Carmel, Nazareth, the River Jordan and Jericho.

Perceptions of Palestine

The map was characteristic of Europe’s lack of interest in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman empire. What European book buyers cared for was the strange hybrid space that is the “Holy Land”: somewhere that was in our world, but also not part of it.

The towns the map portrayed were those that had flourished two millennia earlier, which for Christians were in some sense more real. They were part of the imaginative space described in their churches and scriptures.

That curious juxtaposition of ancient and modern was particularly consequential when it came to the mapping of Palestine into 12 tribal territories. The 12 tribes that descended from Jacob symbolised Christianity’s claim as true heir of Israel and its holy sites, and also what the holy sites represented: the inheritance of the heavenly Jerusalem. Lines on the map communicated the eternal promises of God.

But in the early modern period, lines began to be used to mark the borders between sovereign states. The maps of the Holy Land, neatly divided amongst the Israelite tribes, set the agenda for cartographers. As the 16th century went on, more and more maps in atlases divided the world among distinct nations with clearly defined borders.

The fact that a map divided into territories appeared in the Bible gave apparently religious authorisation for a world full of borders. Lines that had once symbolised the boundless divine promises now communicated the limits of political sovereignties.

Within Bibles themselves, maps had arrived for good. The following years saw printers experiment with various configurations, but eventually they were to settle on four maps: one of the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites, one of the territories of the 12 tribes, one of Palestine at the time of Jesus, and one of the apostle Paul’s missionary journeys.

There is a pleasing symmetry: two maps for the Old Testament, two for the New Testament. But also, two maps of journeys and two maps of the Holy Land. Such symmetries communicated the connections between events: the Old Testament was fulfilled in the New Testament, and Judaism in Christianity.

The first map in a Bible is therefore a fascinating moment in history, but a troubling one. It transformed the Bible into something like a Renaissance atlas, but deeply embedded in assumptions about Christian superiority: the Holy Land of Christian imagination displacing contemporary Palestine, and Christianity superseding Judaism.

It was also one of the agents in creating the modern world of distinct nation states. In many ways, we’ve been living with the consequences ever since.

Nathan MacDonald does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How the first Bible to include a map helped spread the idea of countries with borders – https://theconversation.com/how-the-first-bible-to-include-a-map-helped-spread-the-idea-of-countries-with-borders-270901

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Siavash Alimadadi, Research Associate at the Centre for Sustainable Business, King’s College London

While the UK needs to accelerate its energy transition, targets are being missed, projects run into delays, and the public wonders why progress feels so slow. The temptation is to blame politics, funding or technology. Yet there is a deeper reason the road to net zero keeps stalling.

Everything in our modern life, from our roads to our factories, have been built around readily available fossil fuels. As a result, we expect things to happen quickly, to last indefinitely and to disappear without consequence.

Why this expectation? Burning coal, oil and gas taps carbon and sunlight that were locked away over millions of years and releases that energy in a matter of decades. That compression of deep time (the vast geological timescales of Earth’s history) into human time gives the impression that highways, buildings and plastics can be produced at speed and endure without limits. Through burning fossil fuels, millions of years worth of stored sunlight and energy can be transformed into concrete, plastics and electricity in a matter of hours.

When we talk about decarbonisation, we are not just changing fuels. We are being asked to change this entire pace of living.

Fossil fuels made energy cheap and abundant, and so our economies were organised around speed. We learned to pour concrete and we assumed it would stand for decades. We built factories that ran day and night and supply chains that delivered instantly. Convenience became normal.

In this context, it makes sense that governments promise to “accelerate” the green transition. The problem is that the very systems we are trying to fix still run on the rhythms of the fossil era. They are not designed to slow down or pivot quickly.

Read more:
Five ways to improve net zero action – our new research highlights lessons from the past

The North Sea’s recent “tieback” oil licences help show what is really happening.

The UK government’s new North Sea strategy is a case in point. The introduction of “transitional energy certificates” or “tiebacks” allow new drilling on or near existing fields. So while the UK has committed to banning all new oil and gas licences, some new fossil fuel extraction is still permitted.

Instead of marking a clean break from fossil fuels, they extend existing infrastructure by linking smaller oil fields to older platforms. This approach is faster and cheaper than starting new projects. On the surface, it looks like progress. But it keeps the old system going rather than rethinking it.

This logic shows up in how we build, too. Concrete is a telling example. In 2025 the UK announced its first carbon capture retrofit for a cement plant in Padeswood, North Wales. This so-called “net zero” cement factory will trap around 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and start producing low-carbon cement in 2029.

This is a major technical step forward. Yet the retrofit does not change how cement is made. It simply adds a filter to an existing process that heats ancient limestone to very high temperatures. It still relies on the idea that we can turn geological time into buildings in hours and have them endure for centuries.

The four-year retrofit shows how slow it is to adapt a single plant, but the real lesson is that governments, industries and societies are investing heavily to keep the same rapid tempo of construction, rather than imagining different materials or building practices.

The electricity grid reveals a similar mismatch. For years Britain’s electricity network connected projects on a first come, first served basis. This model assumed a steady trickle of large fossil fuel plants. The surge of renewables has overwhelmed it.

By late 2025 there were more than 700 gigawatts of generation and demand projects waiting in the queue – over four times the capacity needed to meet the government’s 2030 clean power target. Some developers have been waiting a decade for a connection. The backlog exists not because there is a shortage of projects, but because the system was never designed to handle so many small, decentralised schemes.

Regulators are now reforming the queue to prioritise “shovel-ready” projects. That is a necessary fix, but it is also an admission that our assumptions of endless, rapid growth have outpaced the physical network we built.

These examples reveal a deeper pattern. We are not only managing emissions or upgrading technology. We are holding on to the pace and habits shaped by the fossil era. The green transition often involves making the old system more efficient, rather than asking what a truly different future would require.

Many also expect this transition to be as quick and frictionless as the fossil fuel era made everything seem. Yet decarbonising means reworking industries and infrastructure that took decades to build.

Cement plants last half a century. Power lines take years to plan and construct. Even the most optimistic timelines involve years of design, consultation and construction. This is not a failure; it is the reality of shifting away from a system designed for speed and permanence without patience.

Resetting the clock

Recognising this mismatch does not mean giving up on urgency. Climate change demands swift action. But urgency is not the same as haste. Instead of expecting every solution to scale overnight, we need to design policies and industries in a way that respects how long things take, and, indeed, whose timing counts.

For example, do policies align with corporate investment cycles, election calendars or the slower timelines of ecosystems and future generations? Whose timeframes shape action?

Building a low-carbon economy will not feel like the rapid transformations of the past. It will involve repairing, adapting and sometimes slowing down. But if we want to move beyond fossil fuels, we cannot keep living on fossil time. A successful transition will be one that aligns our policies, industries and daily lives with the slower, more regenerative rhythms of the world we depend on.

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Jonatan Pinkse receives funding from the ESRC – The Productivity Institute.

Siavash Alimadadi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Green transition targets are not realistic – how to decarbonise at the right pace – https://theconversation.com/green-transition-targets-are-not-realistic-how-to-decarbonise-at-the-right-pace-270720