Julia Shaw

Yeah, where no one's debating, did someone just burn down this rainforest?

It's like, we can see it.

I was at a European Space Agency conference recently.

And they're telling us all about the different satellites that are imaging, sort of pointing at the Earth rather than out into space, and that are imaging through all these different wavelengths exactly what's changing, and basically just chronicling how the Earth has changed over time.

And a lot of these environmental crimes can be seen from space and can be measured.

And so it's, like, as long as you trust those data, the question then is, okay, these crimes are happening.

How do we stop them?

And as you say, like, I was very much trying...

I mean, you can't write a book on environmental issues and be apolitical.

I think that's impossible.

But I certainly was trying to look at it quite logically and go, here's a crime.

We all agree this is bad.

And these are people who've been convicted.

This isn't just like someone who didn't do the recycling.

Because also I think that individual level is often detrimental.

But these are...

huge, huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a huge amount of human health and have these other knock-on effects and are changing, certainly, the structure of our planet in a way that we can feel already.

And so that is the purpose of the book, is to try and show that we actually have lots of laws already.

We've got lots of enforcers.

We've got lots of researchers on it from space and not space looking at these issues, tracking them, and trying to hunt down the criminals.