Big Picture: Flying by Fire

Captured during the October 2017 West Coast wildfires, this image comes from Earthrise Media, a new project that gives journalists easy access to satellite imagery to support reliable news about the environment. Founder Dan Hammer, PhD ’17 Agricultural and Resource Economics, recently won UCLA’s inaugural Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. He is also a co-founder of the Earth Genome and a fellow of the National Geographic Society. Hammer collaborates on Earthrise Media with three other Berkeley alumni, including Steve McCormick, BS ’73 Agricultural Economics, former CEO of the Nature Conservancy and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “There is nothing more unbiased than the flyby images from a small piece of metal in low Earth orbit traveling at 10,000 miles per hour,” writes Hammer.