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Earth Scopeawareness of these extraordinary facts toall of our fellow citizens. Sadly, we havefailed in our role. We have not harnessedour potential to collaborate. We havedebated endlessly over the past 30 yearsIt all comes back to measuringand monitoring the Earth’ssurface—something that wecould do, but have not done.to distribute freely a global collection ofLandsat, AVHRR, and MODIS data. TheUniversity of Maryland’s fire monitoringand land cover change research hasdeveloped excellent templates for globalcollaboration. What is needed is the willto collaborate with other remote sensingcenters. Townshend’s team is monitoringphenomenal rates of land cover changes(deforestation) in Argentina, Boliva,Columbia and other South Americancountries, as well as large areas ofprofessional vocations to a collectiveeffort that will enable the world to begincalibrating and monitoring the elementsof our life support system? I would positthat this collective whole will not comeabout from any of the existing groups ofcommittees, and certainly not from anyknown government.Innovation, like the Internet, Googleand Microsoft must take the stand andbegin to harness the array of talentsand to network the centers that existaround the globe in order to accomplisha true physical view and accounting ofthe planet—an “Earth Scope”—in orderto provide a true and level playing fieldfor Udo’s generation before they inheritthe future. Anything less would be adisservice to the beautiful and wondrouschildren that are growing among us todayand an abrogation of our unique role asthe only qualified clinical monitors for theEarth’s health.with alphabet-soup committees (GEOSS,GTOS, GOFC-GOLD, GLCN, etc.) andstill have not produced one operationalreport that could be used to calibrate thecondition of the Earth’s surface and itstrends. This would seem to indicate thatwhat we are doing now is not working,and what we should be doing needs to beidentified and acted upon.Notable and noble examples ofworking models abound. Professor JohnTownshend, through the Global LandCover Facility (GLCF), in conjunctionwith the EROS Data Center, is attemptingWest Africa and Asian countries suchas Myanmar. Other excellent researchcenters are tracking hotspots or topicalareas of interest to their investigators orinvestors.But this represents a disparate set ofresource centers with hit-or-miss focus,and certainly is not a serious collaborativeeffort to provide a regular global censusof the Earth’s surface conditions — aclinical diagnosis of the planet.What can we do about this deplorablecondition in which we find ourselves?How can we apply our passions andDr. Timothy W. Foresman is Presidentof the International Centre forRemote Sensing Education. He hasbeen director of United NationsEnvironment Programme’s Divisionof Early Warning and Assessment(Nairobi, Kenya) and national programmanager for NASA’s Digital Earth(Washington, D.C.). He is editor of TheHistory of Geographic InformationSystems, 1998, Prentice Hall.12 s u m m e r 2 0 0 6 w w w . i m a g i n g n o t e s . c o m