I frequent this site quite often http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3 . When the fires ocurred recently in Southern California, I used this along with mapquest, http://www.mapquest.com to determine whether or not my family members were in danger. They got a lot of smoke last summer.

Hold your mouse pointer over the little icons located on the Mercator map of the Earth to get a quick pop up explaining the hazard. You can click on that little icon for a satellite photo of the area and then choose to look at an even higher resolution. It's cool, though if you look at the Mexican and African jungles right now, you can see the extent of the clearing of land. Seems like too much to me.

I expect this kind of technology will improve and probably already improved resolution with overlaid maps is available to the military. I can imagine sometime a virtual scene where you point to spots on the planet and zoom in.

No, I don't think too much land is being cleared. Rather, it is forest fire season, and I think other countries generally don't suppress forest fires much, so they aren't as much a problem. They don't have multi-millionaires building homes in the middle of the forest, and don't let the forest fuel build up to as dangerous of levels.

Forests have been burning naturally, long before man had much to do with it.

And satelites have such a good vantage point, and special sensors, that allow them to "exxagerate" the intensity of the smoke and fire I think, as many of those pictures, are "false color" or something like that. And a rather dispersed smoke cloud, still looks rather thick and big, when viewed through miles of atmosphere by satelites. So we don't really see an "accurate" picture if we try to read too much into it.