Kosovo 1999: SPOT 083-264 - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 55

4 Kosovo 1999: SPOT 083-264

The necessity of linking satellite images
to the data that accompany their production

New York, 2012— From the onset of their availability in the 1970s, the value of
Landsat and SPOT image data was noticed more quickly and put to work more
readily by environmentalists than by any other advocacy group. The view of Earth
from outer space, from somewhere quite unprecedentedly not on the Earth, made
the existence of the planet as such somehow more evident. Activists recognized the
power of the image to explore and publicize oil spills and fires, toxic waste dumps,
the effects of irrigation, acid rain damage to forests, tropical deforestation in the
Amazon, shrinking lakes and seas, calving icebergs, or quite simply the vulnerabil -
ity of the Earth as a small blue marble, floating in space. 32 People were absent from
these images, but their effects could easily be seen—and seen as threatening—
precisely because the effects were so large that they could even be captured at low
resolution.
In 2000, with the launch of Ikonos, people still for the most part were absent,
but finally the public could view the Earth with the same 1-meter resolution that
the U.S. government had been using since the 1960s. The possible domains of “civic
satellite surveillance” or “satellite imagery activism” opened up—activists were
granted the clarity of vision to be able to identify burned villages in Darfur, nuclear
sites in Iran, prison camps in North Korea, or the ruins of Grozny in Chechnya.
But the “humanitarian interventions” of the 1990s—that is, wars undertaken
in the name of humanitarian values—had already brought satellite imagery into
the international public imagination, and at the decade's end, with the war in
Kosovo, the United States and NATO committed themselves decisively to large-
scale releases of aerial and satellite images.
One set of pictures stood out for me in those days in the spring and summer of
1999: publicly released images of a newly dug mass grave in a place called Izbica.
The first images were shown by NATO at a press conference in April, reporting a