tokatlas
Teacher account

The satellite data that cost a director his job

From Latin America and the Caribbean·An enduring case

In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's director was dismissed. The monitoring system's methods were internationally respected and unchanged. What had become unacceptable was not the measurement but its implications.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

EvidenceGrounds of Knowledge
What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.
PowerKnowledge and Society
The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
ObjectivityStatus of Knowledge
Independence from the particular standpoint of any individual knower. Objectivity is better understood as something a method or a community achieves through checks on individual bias than as something a single knower can simply decide to have.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

Themes

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.