FROM THE EDITORS October 12, 1992 Issue

FROM THE EDITORS

The Editors

The week marks the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World. Of course, North and South America had already been inhabited for thousands of years. Yet for the people of Europe, this was an immensely significant discovery. And the impact on civilization, culture, and religion would be beyond what anyone imagined at the time.

Like many of the early European explorers in the Americas, people today still sometimes feel the need to conquer and subdue their world. But the social and environmental challenges we face are calling for something else—for a new discovery of value and meaning, for greater respect for the planet and all its inhabitants, for deeper caring, for healing.

In his book The Rediscovery of North America, Barry Lopez points to the complex problems confronting our civilization and our earth. He draws a parallel, for contemporary men women, with Columbus and his crew and their uncertainty about what awaited them in an alien land. Lopez writes, "We lie in the ships with those men, I think, because we are ambivalent about what to do. We do not know whether to confront this sea of troubles or to stand away, care for our own, and take comfort in the belief that the power to act lies elsewhere."

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