What does SkyTruth do?
I want anybody who cares about the environment to see for themselves what's going on, using the powerful tool of satellite imagery. Small environmental groups can't afford to have someone on their staff with 20 years of remote-sensing experience as I have. We provide consulting services, and also act as free agents to track mining, drilling, logging and pollution incidents. We make that information public.
How did you come to found SkyTruth?
I spent 10 years as an exploration geologist using satellite imagery to travel the world in a virtual sense. I saw images that told remarkable environmental stories, often unreported ones.
Tell me the real story of Mount St Helens.
The image of destruction everybody has is from the 1980 eruption, but they're not seeing forests that have been levelled by loggers around the eruption zone. Looking at a pre-eruption satellite image, it seemed to me that logging was altering more of the landscape than the eruption had. Nobody was seeing those pictures.
What sealed the deal for me was seeing photographs of gas drilling in the Green river basin in Wyoming. The oil industry in general was promoting new low-impact drilling techniques, but here I was looking at images of the same intensive footprint of drilling they had used all along. That was disappointing, so in 2001 I founded SkyTruth.
How did you find a second, smaller spill in the Gulf of Mexico?
Looking at images of the BP spill, we saw another small oil slick in the same area day after day. A photographer happened to take photographs and videos, which showed a streak of oil that went on for miles. We learned that hurricane Ivan had destroyed a drilling platform there in 2004. Another rig was working there to plug leaking wells from the destroyed platform. This leak wasn't widely known to the public.
What other projects are you working on?
We've been monitoring forests on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, a highly biodiverse ecosystem. Much of the forest is private land, and parts are being rapidly logged for the pulp and paper industry. It's hard to monitor on the ground, but state agencies say the total area covered by forest hasn't changed that much. We can show - without getting onto the land - that the pulp companies are replanting logged areas with fast-growing pines, creating what is essentially a pine plantation monoculture.
You are also monitoring a gold mine.
Yes, we're monitoring the Grasberg Pit, the world's largest gold mine on Irian Jaya in eastern Indonesia. For years, the debris from the mine, the tailings, have been dumped into rivers running off the mountain range. When the rivers reach the lowlands they slow down and dump their sediment load. On satellite images you can see the spread of mine tailings over a large area of tropical forest.
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