Darshan Karwat thinks big. Really big. Like as big as the cosmos. Or like reinventing an entire profession. So he asks a lot of questions. Questions that challenge conventional thinking. Questions that many people have never even thought about.
On September 30, SkyTruth, along with its partners at Wake Forest University and the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, were selected as a winner at the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge for our proposal to develop a public map that tracks mining in the Amazon using satellite radar imagery. We call this effort Project Inambari after one of the rivers in the region that has been particularly devastated by illegal and unregulated gold mining.
The Amazon rainforest is one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth; a breathtaking riot of life that evolved over eons, encompassing the Amazon River and its vast system of tributaries. Illegal mining in Peru and Brazil is a growing problem, destroying forests and polluting water. SkyTruth is developing a tool to detect illegal mining in the Amazon using radar satellite imagery.
As Alice wraps up her four-month internship at SkyTruth, she shares some highlights and takeaways from her experience. During her internship she explored the field of geospatial technology for the first time. She learned about global environmental issues that she hadn’t known existed. And she got to work with — as she puts it — a kind, dedicated, creative group of people.
You might say Mary Anne Hitt has Appalachian activism in her blood. When she was growing up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee her father was Chief Scientist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Back then, acid rain was decimating high elevation forests in the East, fueled by pollution from coal-fired power plants. Her father watched as iconic places in the park turned into forests of skeleton trees. Today, Mary Anne is National Director of Campaigns for the Sierra Club; and she also serves on SkyTruth’s board of directors.