Linda Zall

Time for another break from the burning fire hose of our withering democracy (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).

Have you heard about Linda Zall? I hadn't until yesterday when the Star Tribune reprinted a New York Times story about her.(unpaywalled at the Seattle Times here). Now 70, she spent her career out of view at the CIA, using her doctorate in civil and environmental engineering to "improve the analysis of reconnaissance images and to plan new generations of spy satellites."

Linda Zall in 1973 while in graduate school.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, we did get one piece of the "peace dividend" when Zall convinced her bosses to keep using the satellites for earth science and particularly climate change research:

Many spy satellites orbit on north-south paths that pass close to the poles. Spies had little use for the sweeping images. But they dazzled environmentalists because it showed the extent to which the Arctic and Antarctic ice was retreating.

"It gave us the first real measurements of the ice budget — how much loss you have from season to season," said D. James Baker, who directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1993 to 2001 and served on Zall's CIA advisory panel.

Zall's environmentalism for the CIA began in 1990 when then-Sen. Al Gore asked the agency to examine whether the nation's spy fleet might address environmental riddles. Zall quickly saw how the nation's archive of surveillance observations could also serve to strengthen assessments of Earth's changing environment.

As the Cold War thawed during the Clinton years, the Russians pitched in with their own archive of pictures, and altogether we ended up with the declassification of 800,000 satellite images showing deforestation and more. "A 1962 image revealed the Aral Sea before an ecological catastrophe left it bone dry", for instance. 

Her program, not surprisingly, languished during the George W. Bush administration, but was revived in late 2008. She retired in 2013, and it was ended in 2015. 

In interviews, former Medea members said the incoming Biden administration might want to establish a similar panel for helping the world push ahead on knotty issues of environmental change. Zall agreed, adding that Medea’s agenda was unfinished. She said her group, knowing that Earth’s fate might hang in the balance, wrestled for years on how to monitor climate treaties. She called the problem “very difficult” and argued that its resolution was even more important today.

“It needs to be done,” Zall said. “We have to figure it out.”

Zall is a fellow upstate New Yorker who grew up on a dairy farm near Hornell. Her family moved to Ithaca when she was in high school so her father could go to graduate school at Cornell University, and she followed him there later.

I hope there's more information forthcoming on her and her career soon. Her Wikipedia page is very, very short.