NASA’s CASALS: How AI-driven lidar reshapes global mapping—from colonial cartography to climate justice
Original framing: “NASA's CASALS instrument bridges gaps in 3D maps of Earth's surface” — Phys.org
Marginalized voices, such as those of Indigenous cartographers, data justice activists, and climate-displaced communities, are entirely absent from the CASALS narrative, despite their direct stake in how mapping technologies are deployed. For example, the *Data Justice Network* has warned that unregulated satellite data can enable land grabs, as seen in the Congo Basin where palm oil companies use high-resolution imagery to target Indigenous territories. Similarly, the *Saami Council* has demanded moratoriums on aerial mapping of sacred lands without consent. These voices highlight how CASALS could either become a tool of oppression or a resource for self-determination, depending on who controls its data—and this binary is never acknowledged in the NASA framing.
The CASALS instrument is not merely a technical fix for gaps in Earth observation but a node in a much larger system of power, knowledge, and resistance.
Its development reflects a historical pattern where scientific innovation is decoupled from its ethical and political implications until crises expose the harm—whether colonial cartography’s role in land theft or modern satellite data’s use in surveillance. The original framing obscures how CASALS could either reinforce extractive logics (by centralizing data control in institutions like NASA) or become a tool for ecological and cultural restoration (if governed by Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks). The trickster figure Coyote might remind us that the 'gaps' CASALS fills are not just technical but political: who gets to see the land, and who gets to decide what it means. The solution lies not in the technology itself but in the governance structures we build around it—structures that prioritize reciprocity over extraction, memory over erasure, and community over control. To achieve this, CASALS must be reimagined as part of a pluralistic cartography, where Indigenous knowledge, artistic expression, and marginalized voices are not afterthoughts but co-architects of the maps that will shape our collective future.