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Story of the month ...

May 2009: I spent a week at the Lago Maggiore in Italy, not because I needed a break or had the rare chance of a holiday, no, I was there because Stresa at the Lake shores was the place where the 33rd International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment (ISRSE) took place. The theme of this years Symposium was Sustaining the Millennium Development Goals. Humanity, at least some of the leaders, have agreed on a set of goals to be reached in order to improve sustainability and to overcome some of the inexcusable sufferings that large parts of humanity have to endure today. Reachable are these goals only with sufficient knowledge about the environment, that is, the current state and the emerging trends. Rightly, somebody said that Earth observation is the eye of humanity on the planet.

However, sitting in the sessions and listening to one presentation after the other, I increasingly felt weird and disengaged. I was stunned by the lack of inspiration and forward looking of the speakers. There was no genuine acknowledgment of the challenge humanity is facing, no real enthusiasm of how Earth observation may contribute to meeting these challenges. Focus was on the technical achievements, demonstrated by long sequences of artistic picture of satellites, with an unclear message of how these satellites actually improved decision and policy making. Policy making and decision making were the buzzwords, never really defined, unclear as the accusations in Kafka's 'The Trail'.

At one time, when dosing away in a jet-lagged daydream, I was on a troubled airplane. People were showing to each other the latest pictures of failing parts of the plane that they had just taken with the most advance little cameras. Very few were discussing how these pictures could provide decision support for the pilots. However, most of them were bragging about their cameras, and how well they captured the detrimental events. Others were more occupied with pictures of the sunset that was going on in parallel to the plane falling apart. Then I realized I was not on a troubled plane: I was on a troubled planet. The 'eye of humanity' was looking at itself and at its beautiful design and exquisite capabilities. Thomas Reiter, the former German astronaut, was showing beautiful pictures of sunsets which he had taken during one of his space trips. None of the speakers was really occupied with the failing parts of the planet. Not once did I see the Millennium Development Goals mentioned to any more detail than the title, or even hear an assessment of how remote sensing has brought humanity closer to achieving these ambitious goals. All the money spent on the little gadgets of remote sensing to no other avail than to document in pictures of amazing quality what is going on, and even more so, to document the eye of humanity itself. And then, more than 800 people from all over the world getting together for what? Beautiful colors, spectacular events, great pictures - mainly of satellites. Are we that crazy?


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.