Deleted from NASA’s mission: understanding and protecting home planet
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
It can’t be any clearer than this — a story on the front page of today’s NY Times reporting that last February NASA quietly deleted from its mission statement its commitment “to understand and protect our home planet.” Read it and weep.
Then get busy responding, because this is an outrage. Time to contact our members of Congress and demand that this stupidity be reversed. We need this science. We need all the science we can get.
The last sentence says it all, a quote from James Hansen, NASA climatologist who complained earlier this year that he was being ”threatened by political apppointees” for his reporting on global warming and the threat posed by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
“’They’re making it clear that they have the authority to make this change, that the president sets the objectives for NASA, and that they prefer that NASA work on something that’s not causing them a problem,’ he said.”
Quite.
Thought you might like to see the work that NASA does under this former part of its mission — your tax dollars at work, helping us understand what we need to understand in order to protect our home planet.
August 10th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
[...] Into such hands, politicians who care more about hiding truth and protecting corporate interests than in protecting you and me, we are placing our health and well-being. This follows on many other stories that reveal how little this current administration cares about science that should be used to enhance our lives and protect our well-being. Another glaring example is a story I posted previously about how NASA’s mission has been altered, deleting the part about ’understanding and protecting the home planet.’ It goes on and on. [...]