EDITOR: Two weeks ago I watched a documentary about Apollo 8. It was the first time we left Earth's orbit and traveled to the moon. It was on that courageous leap toward the stars that astronaut Bill Anders took an epic picture across the moon's surface of our gorgeous, indigo blue planet rising against the black backdrop of silent, nearly infinite space.

When we saw that picture, now titled "Earthrise," we suddenly knew with absolute certainty that we were space travelers. Taken in 1968, what "Earthrise" signifies has been slow to settle in. For the first time, we saw ourselves on a finite, little ball, clinging to life, surrounded by the cold, airless vacuum of the cosmos.

Just as our astronauts have a life-support system to make living in space possible, so do the rest of us; we call it "sky." Full of air to breathe, it also has generated a pretty stable, life-giving climate for a long time. Ask astronauts to tinker with their life-support system and they'd call us crazy. Yet here we are messing around with ours. Despite all the alarm bells, we pour on the carbon dioxide.

On a global scale, this year will likely be the hottest we've ever recorded. The arctic really is melting away. The tundra really is too, as is Greenland's ice, glaciers everywhere wither and the seas are actually rising.

The election's over. Isn't it time we did something? Isn't it time we contacted our officials?

Dan Barth,


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