Exploring the Global Education Project’s Website can be as addictive as eating potato chips, but both far more enlightening … and depressing. That’s not a slam on the Website, though; rather, it’s actually a compliment on how effectively the site helps visitors visualize the state of the world. Which, in a word, is "troubled."

While daily news reports and studies mercilessly remind us just how troubled things are, a picture — as the tired but true old saying goes — is worth a thousand words. And that’s what you find plenty of at the Global Education Project: pictures, maps, graphs and charts that illustrate at a glance the many different trends affecting Planet Earth. Whether you’re interested in human life expectancy, soil degradation, water consumption or global reserves of fossil fuels, you’ll find not only graphic images but lots of well-referenced information at various pages on the site.

The Global Education Project’s site focuses on 10 key topics: development and debt, energy supply, fishing and aquaculture, food and soil, fresh water, global ecology, human conditions, toxic pollution, wealth and weapons. A separate page for each topic offers, in addition to graphics and background information, lists of related links and recent news about that particular subject.

To get an idea of how much more punch a graphical map can deliver than a statement of fact, consider first this nugget from the Website’s "Food and Soil" section: "About 2 billion hectares of soil, equivalent to 15 per cent of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined), have been degraded through human activities."

Then see what that statement means visually by checking out the soil degradation map.

Was your reaction "Wow?" Mine was.

The Global Education Project is a non-governmental organization in Canada that’s been publishing educational wall posters and producing issue-oriented events for the past 15 years. The group’s production team got together in 2005 to create the — as it aptly calls them, "jaw-dropping" — maps and other graphics now on the Website. All of that imagery is also available in the Global Education Project’s 27-by-36-inch wall chart, which is describes as a "book on one page."

If you’ve found yourself having a hard time convincing others — whether it’s your family members, students, co-workers or friends — about why it’s crucial to start living in a more environmentally responsible, sustainable way, the wealth of information you’ll find both on the Global Education Project’s Website and poster might be just what you’re looking for.