Monitoring the Deepwater Horizon oil spill with satellite images from MODIS taken on April 29, 2010 (Image by SkyTruth, Creative Commons License)
Here’s an article in the Washington Post that features SkyTruth, an organization that is using satellite technology to monitor environmental impacts of mining and other extractive industries.
“This is the world we’ve built for ourselves — the modern world runs on hydrocarbons — but you have to wonder, floating in a little metal box thousands of feet in the air, if this is the kind of truth we want to leave behind as our mark on Earth, as our scratchmark, as Faulkner had it, on the face of oblivion” writes Washington Post author Neely Tucker.