Mapping Resistance: Remote Sensing, Extraction, and Climate Injustice in the Global South

Remote sensing has long served state, corporate, and military agendas, enabling surveillance and territorial control. This paper asks whether it can be repurposed as a tool for resistance and justice in the Global South. Through case studies in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, and the Iron Quadrangle mining region, we demonstrate how open-access satellite imagery can expose environmental harms often obscured: fire-driven land conversion, glacial water loss, and extraction-induced terrain instability. Using remote sensing indices in Google Earth Engine and QGIS, we develop a framework for anti-hegemonic remote sensing rooted in accessibility, transparency, and political reinterpretation. Our findings show how remote sensing visualizes slow violence and ecological injustice, aiding community-led monitoring and advocacy. Yet limitations persist: reliance on proxies and spatial/temporal constraints of open-access sensors. Despite this, spectral data challenges dominant narratives, reclaiming environmental intelligence from technocratic logics. This work contributes to critical geography, environmental justice, and decolonial technoscience by showing how satellite-based tools can support insurgent visualities and solidaristic geospatial praxis. Future research should collaborate with frontline communities to integrate ground-truthing and oral histories, and to explore legal, pedagogical, and reparative uses of these maps.