An Issue That Affects Us All

By James Kelly/Managing Editor

Every so often, my colleagues and I think a public-policy issue is so urgent that we should give it special treatment in the magazine. We felt that way about AIDS in Africa in January; this week we devote 16 pages to the crisis of global warming. We explore at length the reasons President Bush abandoned the Kyoto accord and the ensuing uproar, but we devote the first part of the package to a meticulous account of the latest scientific research that shows the world is getting warmer. Good-hearted people may disagree on how much humans are to blame for this and how to fix it, but the days in which one can shrug and say no one knows for sure whether temperatures are rising are gone. The climate is changing, and our future will be different because of it.

The good news is that it is not too late to slow the warming trend. I get my optimism from Charles Alexander, who has been writing and editing environment stories for TIME since he oversaw our Planet of the Year issue (Jan. 2, 1989). Charles has always believed that we should explore solutions with at least as much energy and passion as we spend describing problems, an approach that led to our two-year series on Heroes of the Planet. This week's coverage includes a one-page guide to what you can do to fight global warming in your home.

Instead of asking just one expert to write an essay about the problem we face, Charles came up with the idea of asking 10 influential people to collaborate on a letter to President Bush urging him to develop a plan to combat global warming. Noted conservationists Edward O. Wilson and Jane Goodall signed, but so did leaders from several other fields, including Walter Cronkite, John Glenn, financier George Soros and Craig Venter, who helped map the human genome. And you may not know that Harrison Ford, when he's not busy on movie sets, is an ardent environmentalist who is on the board of directors of Conservation International. Tracking down Jimmy Carter required the assistance of TIME's Hugh Sidey, and Charles contacted Mikhail Gorbachev via cell phone while the former Soviet President was traveling in Italy.

But the most unusual communication was with the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time (almost 9 million copies sold), whose battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) did not keep him from visiting Caltech in March. Charles e-mailed Hawking's assistant, and after making two small editing changes requested by Hawking, received a FedEx package from California the next day. Inside was a piece of paper bearing Hawking's freshly made right thumbprint.

As always, we welcome your comments by letter or e-mail [email protected]) And to find Web resources on global warming or see how eco-conscious you really are, go to time.com

James Kelly, Managing Editor