Tag Archives: The instrumented Earth

We’ve surrounded the Earth with surveillance satellites, but who is that good for?

It is no longer just advanced militaries and rich corporations who can keep tabs on what people are up to half a world away. Watchdogs such as Global Forest Watch, Global Fishing Watch, and SkyTruth are combing through satellite photos and radar scans to alert authorities to illegal clear-cutting, rogue fishing, mountaintop removals, and other environmental misbehavior. Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have exploited Amazon cloud servers to assemble millions of amateur birdwatcher reports into exquisite animated maps that plot the changing abundance of 122 bird species throughout North America. Ranchers are stapling health-monitoring microchips to their livestock. Beekeepers are sticking wireless sensors into their hives. Farmers are planting high-tech electronics into the soil along with their crops. >click to read< 16:17