TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010289/01028900.056

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 3KB | 56 lines

FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 3


    This week's unorthodox choice of Endangered Earth as Planet of
the Year, in lieu of the usual Man or Woman of the Year, had its
origin in the scorching summer of 1988, when environmental
disasters -- droughts, floods, forest fires, polluted beaches --
dominated the news. By August TIME knew it was no longer enough
just to describe familiar problems one more time. "The new
journalistic challenge," says managing editor Henry Muller, "was
to help find solutions, and that by definition meant international
solutions." So we invited a distinguished group of scientists,
administrators and political leaders from five continents to a TIME
conference charged with producing a tough but realistic action
program. The conference was organized by Washington correspondent
Dick Thompson. His proudest coup was to persuade a team of Soviet
experts to participate. The group was led by Fyodor Morgun, Mikhail
Gorbachev's hand-picked chairman of the state committee for
environmental protection.

    Even before Thompson's preparations were complete, our editors
decided that the growing concern about the planet's future had
become the year's most important story. Thus was born the idea of
using the conference as the centerpiece of this week's 33-page
package, which was coordinated by sciences editor Charles
Alexander. It is not the first time the magazine has recognized
something other than humans in its Man of the Year issue. In 1982
it named the computer Machine of the Year.

    The Environment Conference was an extraordinary event, set in
appropriately pristine surroundings: the foothills of Boulder,
where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. For three days in
November, 26 TIME journalists and 33 experts engaged in an
interchange of ideas that was as freewheeling as it was productive.
The meetings took place at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, whose staff helped plan the agenda. The Soviets were
particularly open in what they revealed both about their country's
environmental woes and on a personal level. At one point Thompson
challenged Morgun to a game of eight ball on a barroom pool table
in Juanita's, a Mexican restaurant. To his shock, Thompson not only
got his match, but was soundly beaten.

    While a team of writers and researchers worked on the stories
back in New York City, art director Rudy Hoglund and deputy
director Arthur Hochstein, who designed the layouts for the entire
package, faced a difficult problem: how to create a strikingly
original cover image. Their solution was to approach Christo, the
famed Bulgarian-born environmental sculptor. In earlier works
Christo had draped in plastic large sections of the earth -- a
stretch of Australian coast, a canyon in Colorado -- but never the
whole planet. This time Christo bundled a 16-in. globe in
polyethylene and rag rope and drove more than 350 miles up and down
New York's Long Island in search of the perfect combination of
light, air and sea for a photograph. The result -- Wrapped Globe
1988 -- is a fitting symbol of earth's vulnerability to man's
reckless ways.