EcoGeek isn’t much for activism. I mean, we get excited about solar subsidies and carbon caps, and controlling coal. But really we think that the trick to saving the world is just doing it…creating new solutions that are better than the old solutions.

But there’s this little thing that George Bush did that irks me greatly. It’s not the kind of thing that will destroy the world, more an ideological difference of opinion that makes me dislike the world a little bit more.

He changed NASA’s mission statement from

To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.

To:

To explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.

He took out the part where it’s NASA’s job to understand and protect the planet! What the frak! So does NASA have no role in using their science to actually deal with the problems they identify?

So now that Obama’s on the job and working hard undoing an awful lot of what Bush did, I think it’s time he ads that little sentence back in. Alex Steffan at World Changing is spearheading a campaign to try and get the mission statement changed to:

To understand and protect our home planet for the benefit of all humanity; to explore the universe and search for life; to prepare for the future and to inspire the next generation of explorers.

Which I rather like. In any case…I think it’s about time we restored science to it’s proper place in America. And I think that we now have a fairly good chance of actually getting that done.