Why?

I read an article today about the mission to the Hubble Telescope. It turns out that this is the last time that they plan to service it. They figure it will run for another 5-10 years and then they will put a rocket on it and fire it back into the earth's atmosphere where it will be destroyed and probably end up on the bottom of the ocean.

My question is why? Why would they destroy an expensive piece of equipment like that instead of continuing to repair it? I would be willing to bet that the answer lies in some NASA budget - that continuing to use it would prevent them from being able to pad their budgets to build a bigger, newer one - one that would have budget overruns and would cost billions of dollars before it is finally put in place.

But why do we have to be so wasteful? I really am tired of this disposable mentality that we have here. It is like a rock star smashing a guitar during a show. (I haven't liked Garth Brooks since I saw him do that in one of his shows. Not that I liked him that much to begin with, but I really was looking for a reason not to like him after that.)

That offends me. It reminds me of the passage in the Bible where the sheep of Israel were rebuked for selfishly muddying the waters and trampling the grass so that the other sheep couldn't drink or eat. Why do we produce junk that has to be constantly replaced? Why have we allowed companies to get away with planned obsolescence? It is wasteful, and it is greedy, and it annoys me.

Anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time would probably not call me an environmentalist. The truth is that I do care about the environment, but I am tired of hysterical people running around jousting windmills when there are real monsters in the land!

This planet was created to be the home for people, and people need certain things to live. One of those things is heat. It is impossible for us to live on this earth without producing so called "greenhouse gases." We can't eat, work, or survive without that outcome. And apparently God planned for it to be that way. Not since the fall of man have we been able to live without fire. That is one of the reasons that I think that this whole global warming thing is a bunch of baloney.

Yet there are plenty of problems in our environment that can be solved. How many environmental problems would be fixed by merely abandoning this disposable economy that we have and beginning to produce products of high enough quality to be passed to our children's children? I believe that it is time to start thinking about such things. Why don't we work to make companies clean up their waste instead of dumping it into our rivers? Why don't we work to help re-establish habitats so that threatened plant and animal species can recover? These things are so much simpler and far more effective that the other green nonsense that is going on now.