GAINING PERSPECTIVE.

• Author: Sheehan, Molly O'Meara
• Position: Statistical Data Included

The proliferation of satellite technology, from spy-quality photos to low-resolution radar images, is giving us new, more meaningful ways to envision complex information about the Earth. But whether we will act on the picture of ecological destruction this technology is cobbling together--from global climate change to wholesale clearing of forests--remains to be seen.

During the last few decades of the 20th century it became evident that tropical rainforests were endangered not only by road-building, timber-cutting, and other incursions of the bulldozer and saw, but by thousands of wildfires. Historically, relatively small fires have been set by slash-and-burn farmers trying to clear patches of jungle for farm land. But starting in 1997, fires in the world's tropical forests from Brazil to Papua New Guinea raged on a scale never recorded before. The causes of these huge conflagrations raised questions, because tropical rainforests rarely burn naturally.

In the wake of several haze-induced accidents and public health warnings in smoke-covered Indonesia, the need for a clear answer to these questions was given legal significance when President Suharto, under pressure from neighboring countries, passed a decree making it illegal to set forest fires. The politically connected timber industry had managed to direct most of the blame for forest fires on the small-scale, slash-and-burn farmers, but Indonesia's rogue environment minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja employed a relatively new intelligence-gathering technology to get a clear picture of the situation: he downloaded satellite images of burning Indonesian rainforests from a U.S. government website and compared them to timber concession maps. The satellite images confirmed that many of the blazes were being set in areas the timber companies wanted to clear for plantations. With the satellite evidence in hand, Kusnmaatmadja got his government to revoke the licenses of 29 timber companies.

HIGH SPEED INTELLIGENCE

The environment minister's quick work on the rainforest issue is just one of many recent cases involving environmental questions in which satellite surveillance has been used to provide answers that might otherwise not have been known for years, if ever. The images captured by cameras circling high above the planet are proving effective not only because they scan far more extensively than ground observers can, but because they can be far faster than traditional information-gathering methods.

Pre-satellite studies of the oceans, for example, had to be done from boats, which can only reach a tiny fraction of the oceanic surface in any given month or year. And even after centuries of nautical exploration, most of the information scientists have gathered about winds, currents, and temperatures comes from the commercial trade routes of the North Atlantic between the United States and Europe. Satellites don't replace on-the-water research, as they can't collect water samples, but for some kinds of data collection they can do in minutes what might take boats centuries to do. Satellites can, in principle, watch the whole of the world's oceans, providing almost immediate assessments of environmental conditions everywhere.

Similarly quick surveillance is available for many parts of the biosphere that are otherwise difficult to reach--the polar ice, dense forest interiors, and atmosphere. As a result, says Claire Parkinson of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), "theory and explanations no longer have a database restricted to areas and times where humans have physically [gone] and made observations or left instruments to record the measurements." The speed of environmental research has taken a quantum leap.

Speed isn't only a matter of technical capability, however. In practice, it's also a matter of access. Spy satellites began circling the globe soon after Russia's Sputnik went into orbit in 1957. But the information they relayed to Soviet and U.S. intelligence agencies was kept sequestered. The difference now is that satellites are increasingly being used for purposes other than espionage or military intelligence. The great majority are for telecommunications. However, more than 45--many owned by governments, but a growing number of them privately owned--are being used for monitoring various phenomena on the ground, on the water, or in the atmosphere. In addition, more than 70 launches are planned during the next 15 years by civil space agencies and private companies. How these instruments are used, and by whom, will have enormous consequences for the world.

THE RACE AGAINST TIME

If incidents like the Indonesian forest fire intervention are any indication, environmental monitoring by orbiting cameras could play a critical role in reversing the global trends of deforestation and ecological collapse that now threaten the long-term viability of civilization. Denis Hayes, the former Worldwatch Institute researcher who is the chairman of Earth Day 2000 (see page 6) asked a few years ago, in a speech, "How can we have won so many environmental battles, yet be so close to losing the war?" Since then, we have edged still closer. Clearly, the number of battles being won is too small, and the time it takes to win them is too long.

Another way of posing Hayes's now famous question might be to ask whether the processes of information-gathering and dissemination essential to changing human behavior can be speeded up enough to accelerate the environmental movement. Telecommunications satellites began providing part of the answer several decades ago by facilitating the formation of an active international environmental community that can mobilize quickly--whether to protest a dam on the Narmada River of India or to stop the use of genetically modified organisms in food production in Europe.

But while activism gained momentum, field work remained ominously slow--biologists slogging about in boots and rowboats, while the forces they were trying to understand raced over the Earth on the wings of global commerce, or ripped into it with the blades of industrial agriculture and resource extraction. However, satellite monitoring has begun to help researchers to more quickly assemble the data needed to bring decisive change. Remotely sensed images are contributing to critical areas of environmental research and management, including:

* Weather: The first meteorological satellites were launched in the early 1960s, and quickly became a key part of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization's World Weather Watch. In addition to the satellite data, virtually all nations contribute surface measurements of temperature, precipitation, and wind to this program to aid weather prediction, which has enormous social and economic benefits. In...