Trees, Forests, Satellite Imagery

I made a trip to Redwood National and State Parks over the new year weekend and was absolutely overwhelmed. I have never seen anything so ancient or enormous in my life. Everything seemed to be living and breathing within a wild, mystical cloud. Of course, Redwoods are well known for being the tallest trees on Earth, but I also learned that this area of Northern California contains some of the last remaining stands of old growth forests on Earth. This left a dent in my heart. After that trip, I did research on tree planting programs in cities, which drew me to several articles about the use of satellite imagery in helping map biodiversity and habitat loss, and even one research paper about a remote sensing mapping project in Romania that is aimed at identifying old growth forests so they can be protected. The authors, Watson & Evans, wrote:

"[M]aintaining and, where possible, restoring the integrity of dwindling intact forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals. Retaining the integrity of intact forest ecosystems should be a central component of proactive global and national environmental strategies, alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and promoting reforestation.”

The word "intact" stuck with me, as did the fact that the authors found that even areas that were meant to be under protection were still being logged illegally. Gutted, as always, I did one small thing and made a donation to the Nature Conservancy. (I had seen the habitat restoration they were doing on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands and found it inspiring, so I felt gratitude for their work already.) 

 Elk Prairie Trail, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, January 2021.

Something positive that I took away from this exploration is just what amazing tools we have at our fingertips with remote sensing and satellite imagery. Even everyday citizen scientists have access to Google Earth, which is really fun to zoom around in. I also reflected more on a conversation I'd had with ML, a Lead Data Scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation, back in late 2020. She explained - and I tried my best to understand - how she could analyze remote sensing data (with code she had written) to find answers to questions such as "Can we use satellite imagery to identify low income areas in NYC?" (The answer is yes.) We have such a massive amount of information available to us, it occurs to me that we really need people who are asking the right questions, and great leaders who are listening and acting to move all the pieces into place to counteract the damage we've wrought. I feel that's what we're missing. Leaders. It grieves me. I watch Greta Thunberg's speech to the U.N. from 2019 and feel the same. She's such a young person, expressing such deep grief and anger over what has been perpetrated (and continues to be) by generations before us and by those in power. I'm still young, but I'm much older than she is. So I feel a responsibility to lead and ask the uncomfortable questions she makes reference to. 

Sort of in that vein, I plan to focus for the next two weeks on designing my own course of study to answer the question "how to successfully start a corporate sustainability program". The seed of this idea to create a sustainability program or initiative at my firm was planted when I spoke to the aforementioned AVP of Sustainability at a huge insurance firm (JW). The idea of designing my own course of study came from the book Roadmap, from the team behind Roadtrip Nation. I found this beautiful book in one of the neighborhood's "little libraries" and it seemed like a synchronicity. More on that next time.

Reading & listening materials:

1. Greta Thunberg's speech and transcript from the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York.
2. NYT article on the use of declassified Corona satellite imagery by scientists.
3. Watson & Evans' 2018 paper on using satellite imagery to identify primary forests in Romania.
4. Tree planting program in LA. (Note environmental justice component.)
5. The Nature Conservancy's Conservation Gateway website for scientists and practitioners.
6. How to Save a Planet podcast "20 Million Trees".