From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

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.