Donna Shirley Interview (page: 4 / 8) Mars Exploration Program	Print Interview

How did you first become interested in management?

Donna Shirley: When Laura was born, I thought, "What do I want to do? How do I want to contribute?" And I decided I would be a manager. In engineering organizations, engineers get promoted to be managers. Some of them can do it and some of them can't. Engineers are not carefully selected for their people skills. They're carefully selected for their engineering skills. In fact, a lot of them take engineering so they won't have to deal with people.

It's catch as catch can when you promote engineers to managers. And so, I was looking at the people I was working for and I was saying, "Hey, I can do at least a good a job as these guys do." So, I decided to be a manager because you have to make a decision as to whether to try to stay up with your technology, particularly when technology is changing so fast, or to go into management. And so, I decided I would go into management. So, I laid out a plan: and this is how fast I was going to try to progress and these were the kind of jobs I wanted, and this was the job progression. And, I laid it all out by the time that Laura graduated from college, this is where I'd be, 'cause I needed the money to get her into college, and so on, and laid it all out. And, I've been tracking along very well with that plan.
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But now, Laura graduates from college next year, and I've done everything I've set out to do. Now what do I do? I mean, I don't want to manage JPL, it's very political. NASA and everything having to do with Washington, DC is incredibly political. It's getting more and more political, and less and less about getting the job done, more and more about personalities, and things that are going to get people elected. It's not anywhere near as much fun as it was.

I would like to take all this management skill that I've learned and apply it to environmental issues. How do we provide the support for families in this country? How do we regain a sense of community instead of dividing ourselves up into a thousand little Bosnias?

I'm interested in leaving a world where my grandchildren -- I hope I have some -- are going to be able to thrive, instead of leaving a world where my generation has despoiled the planet, has fragmented into warring factions, has engendered hate and xenophobia, and all of these sorts of things, and then has pulled in and said, "We're not going to explore. We're just going to sit here and stew in our own juices." And to say, "We're going to spend all our money," -- throw money at problems that aren't solvable by just money, that have to have other kinds of solutions applied to them.
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There's got to be a niche where I can make a difference. I haven't found it yet, but that's what I'm looking for.

It sounds like you feel responsible for this earth. Where do those values come from?

Donna Shirley: It was part of my upbringing.

My family was always very concerned with the environment, way before it was popular to do that. I mean, we have Native American background. I'm a very small, part Choctaw and Chickasaw and Cherokee. And, one of the things about the Native Americans was, my ancestors came over the Trail of Tears. Their land was taken away from them progressively, and finally they were deprived of everything and driven in a very hellish way into Oklahoma, and then thrown there and they had to survive. And, they did survive and became farmers and prosperous farmers and so on. But, they had their allegiance to the land.
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It was the land that gave them their ability to survive. They had land and it was taken from them; they were moved out of their environment. All my ancestors are pioneers. So I think it's in the genes somewhere. We used to take family vacation to national parks. All the time I've been at JPL I've been backpacking and skiing, and doing outdoor pursuits. You can see how the environment ought to be, and then you look at what people are doing to it. When I first started backpacking in the '60s, you'd go out and there wouldn't anybody there. Now people have to camp away from certain areas, because they've been so trampled over. There's just too many people.

We've got to control our population. Between now and 2025, the population of the world is projected to go from 6 billion people to 8.5 billion people. That's a 25 percent increase, at a time when we're already destroying all our forests. We're destroying all the habitats for animals. When we destroy the rain forest, the source of future drugs isn't there, because we're not finding new organisms that counter bacteria. We're feeding our animals antibiotics, so that they grow and are healthy, then we eat them and we become resistant to antibiotics. Now you have these new strains of horrible diseases that we don't have any antibiotics for, when we're busily destroying the habitats which are the source of future antibiotics. We're self-destructing. That seems to me a very bad place to leave for my daughter.

Maybe we should go to Mars.

Donna Shirley: I get a lot of that. Some people say, "We need to develop space travel, so if we destroy this plant and make it uninhabitable, we can flee to other planets." If you think we can trash this planet and flee to other planets, that's nuts. The amount of resources it takes to send people to other planet, so they can survive and thrive there, requires a strong economy. And that requires an ecologically sound world.

We can't destroy this planet and jump off to the next one, it's just nonsense. We have to take care of this one and then we'll have the economic strength and the capability to go to other planets. I think we will anyway, just because that's the kind of monkey creatures we are.

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