In keeping with World Literature Today's commitment to offer coverage of such important literary and cultural topics as endangered languages and globalization (see our September 2007 and March 2008 issues, respectively), the current special section of WLT attempts in small measure to consider the

subject of the world's rapidly changing ecology. This, in turn, leads to discussions of initiatives to promote long-term environmental protection, environmentally "greener" lifestyles and societies, as well as literature that evokes an awareness of the interrelationship between human activity and the earth's physical, chemical, and biotic factors that ultimately determine our survival

As Laird Christensen deftly points out in his opening essay on page 16, the age of global technology in which we live "leaves no place on earth, no matter how wild, ... unaffected by human impact." He also echoes the belief of poet, essayist, and novelist Wendell Berry, who advises, "No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some part of it." Christensen goes on to cite numerous other contemporary writers who are preoccupied with these and other ecological concerns and who offer suggestions regarding what could or should be done about global environmental degradation. To this cast of authors we offer perspectives on the environment in poetry, prose, and illustrations from the contributors to this issue, including Kerstin Ekman (Sweden), Michiko Ishimure (Japan), and Mark Tredinnick (Australia) as well as Robert Day, John Felstiner, Carol Hamilton, Ellen Jonsson, James Ragan, Thomas J. Lyon, and Thomas Urquhart (all from the US). Also, an interview with Chinese author Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem (Penguin, 2008), appears on our website this month. Rong's novel, which has been called "a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture," has sold millions of copies in China and is being translated into over two dozen languages worldwide.

On a local and practical level, World Literature Today has undertaken a number of steps to conserve resources and achieve greater overall effectiveness in its production of WLT magazine and the operation of its affiliated programs. For example, our printer uses process-free lithographic plates, inks with zero levels of volatile organic compounds, and FSC-certified recycled papers. We are earnestly looking for methods to avoid waste, and although we have made improvements in this regard, we are exploring ways to become even more efficient (see page 5).

Finally, and from a more philosophical and aesthetic perspective, we should take to heart what Jonathan Bate observes in The Song of the Earth (2000): namely, that "the business of literature is to work upon consciousness. The practical consequences of that work--social, environmental, political in the broadest sense--cannot be controlled or predicted. They will be surprising, haphazard, indirect, long-term.... [We must live] with thoughtfulness and with an attentiveness, an attunement to both words and the world, and so to acknowledge that, although we make sense of things by words, we do not live apart from the world. For culture and environment are held together in a complex and delicate web."