For 4.5 billion years, the Earth’s climate has constantly changed. When the last ice age peaked around 20,000 B.C., the Earth was mostly inhabitable with a cold, dry and windy climate. Humans were primarily hunter-gathers. Life was nasty, short and brutish.

But around 10,000 B.C., global warming ushered in the Holocene Age that was more hospitable to human civilization. Humans adapted to this change and developed agriculture, animal husbandry, towns and civilization. The stage was set for the subsequent development of the modern world.

Today, space provides insights into the Earth’s historically dynamic environment.

As ranking member of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, I’m proud of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) leading role in monitoring land, water and atmospheric changes. NASA devotes one-quarter of its science budget — $1.3 billion — to Earth Science.

14 NASA satellites orbit the Earth and generate an array of data measuring critical variables including ice cover and ice sheet motions in the Arctic and Antarctic, stratospheric ozone levels, ocean temperatures, aerosols, clouds, temperature and relative humidity, rainfall, and radiative energy absorbed by our atmosphere, landmasses and oceans. By 2014, NASA will launch seven missions that will add new information about our planet’s complex environmental systems.

Climate monitoring and weather differ. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – especially through its National Weather Service — handles weather. Both geostationary and polar orbiting satellites provide critical data for forecasting hurricanes, severe winter weather, droughts and floods.

A tremendous synergy exists between NASA and NOAA. Data and algorithms provided by NASA allow for more accurate long-term weather forecasts. Each new NASA Earth Science satellite provides measurements that improve forecasting models.

NOAA — with the use of NASA satellite resources — also monitors the sun-earth environment — a discipline known as space weather. Severe solar events, which eject electromagnetic radiation and charged particles, can disrupt satellites, power grids and long-distance commercial aviation operations.

Images and data from remote sensing satellites (both government, such as Landsat, and private commercial providers) can identify forests vulnerable to fire and insect infestation, manage water resources, plan urban development and road construction, mitigate forest fire hazards and map floodplains.

We have only begun to use information from space-based resources to understand and adapt to dynamic environmental challenges.

 For example, satellite data has vastly improved forecasting hurricane tracks and intensities. Timely and precise warnings allow for preparation and evacuation activities that greatly reduce the loss of human life.

Another example was provided at a recent Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee field hearing on satellite remote sensing chaired by Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo). Leaders of the Colorado Springs Fire Department testified about how satellite imagery is used to identify areas in the wildland-urban interface where the reduction of fuel loads (i.e., removal of timber and brush) can protect citizens from devastating wildfires like the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm in California that killed 25 people.

Satellite data also monitors environmental damage resulting from the unintended consequences of public policy decisions. From the salinization of Uzbekistan farmland due to Soviet-style command-and-control farming practices to Southeast Asia deforestation caused by Europe’s biodiesel fuel mandates, satellite data documents how deviations from private property regimes and free markets devastate diverse biosystems.

How can we continue these advances courtesy of the Space Age, which began a mere 50 years ago?

To provide strategic advice about the types of missions needed to understand Earth’s environment, the National Academy of Sciences recently released a comprehensive vision for America’s Earth Science program — the types of satellite missions for NASA and NOAA to pursue over the next decade. Using this framework as a guide will help continue American leadership in Earth science.

We must also maintain an uninterrupted data stream from our earth and space weather satellites and Landsat. Gaps in satellite coverage are simply unacceptable.

Finally, favorable regulatory regimes should continue for commercial providers of satellite imagery and data. Governments at all levels should utilize these products to better provide public safety and environmental protection.

“Environmental sustainability” means different things to different people. For some it means communal living, subsistence farming, worshipping Gaia, and Malthusian limits to growth. America certainly has a rich heritage of movements based on such beliefs.

But the vast majority of Americans choose to live in today’s world where human ingenuity and adaptability push back against nature’s limits and challenges. Our age provides unprecedented opportunities to sustain life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a legacy worth continuing. Our greatest blessing — the human mind’s unlimited creativity from which the Space Age was born — will sustain our way of life and our planet while allowing millions of fellow humans throughout the world to emerge from abject, grinding poverty.

Feeney is a member of the House Science and Technology Committee.