"A lot of people look at trees and just see green, I see a kaleidoscope."

"A lot of people look at trees and just see green, I see a kaleidoscope."  

Nature.com has an article on Greg Asner's Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). 

"The heart of the CAO's US$8.3-million sensing system — dubbed the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (AToMS) — is a spectroscopic imager designed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Capable of registering more than 400 frequencies of light, from ultraviolet to infrared, the instrument will take 60,000 measurements per second, with great accuracy."

Policies and politics apart: the images (mapping carbon storage and biodiversity) are absolutely brilliant in their own right: otherworldly diagrammatic landscapes created from data but with such richness and clarity that are 99% photo-realistic with iridescent trees bathing in purple'o'negative.

Emily Carr had vision

A few years I visited a retrospective on the Canadian painter Emily Carr, who is best known for her attempts to create a native (as in vernacular, not as a ethnic attribute) artistic vision on Canadian nature. At the time I was most annoyed by three pretentious art-snobs, all woman, who were mocking here amateurish style and awkward colour palette. Negativity always comes cheap. What struck me about Emily Carr is that I could really get, sometimes even borrow, the feeling she was trying to capture and the awesome spectacle of nature that she wanted to record. And I think that her unrefined technique actually communicated her vision and intents better than a more accomplished technician could ever have. I was especially struck by a painting of a totem-pole popping up in the landscape which I thought represented the pleasant feeling of arriving in a village after a horrible week-long journey through the wilderness.