Expanding and protecting human rights from space

Abstract

The area of surveillance of human activities from above is fraught with concerns and controversy. Such surveillance is clearly being used in ways that invade human lives and often put those lives in danger. At the same time, there is an argument for more oversight, and the need to support more surveillance, in a controlled and monitored way, to expose and render access to sites of criminal activity, and particularly those of the most egregious crimes—slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, and the operation of ‘rebel’ military gangs or national militaries run by rogue states. If nature can be harried, harmed, and turned against human existence, it is also true that humans have now brought increasingly powerful diagnostic techniques to bear so that oceans, land, forests, fields, plains—all ecosystems—can be monitored for health as well as the scars of exploitation—including that of the human within the monitored ecosystem. The field of human rights now stretches far beyond humans to all life and nature—since useful and meaningful human rights can’t truly exist in a physical and natural world that is hostile to homo sapiens. Earth observation can be, and often is, a force for good.