From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Flying high above the verdant Amazon jungle, TIME correspondent Eugene Linden experienced a kind of epiphany. "I had thoughts oddly similar to those I had when I flew in a small plane across the Arctic -- a sense of reassurance that the world still contained places so immense and so empty of people," recalls Linden, who wrote this week's cover story. "But while the emptiness of the Arctic is austere, the forest canopy that seems to extend into infinity is choked with life."

Linden has explored the complex and sometimes tragic relationships between humans and nature in several books, including Silent Partners, which considers the implications of language experiments with apes. For this week's article Linden spent ten days crisscrossing the region by air, water and land to assess the Amazon's chances for survival. Says Linden: "The question is whether the concern everyone now has about the environment will translate into meaningful action."

Washington correspondent Dick Thompson pursued that question by joining a congressional fact-finding mission to the Amazon. The local contingent of our jungle team, Rio de Janeiro bureau chief Laura Lopez and reporter John Maier, made its own treks through the region. Maier was struck by how virtually everyone in the region, politician and peasant alike, knew that the Amazon was the subject of intense international debate. In speaking with one poor farmer near the Peruvian border, Maier reports, "As soon as I began asking questions, the farmer said to me, 'Whose side are you on, the environmentalists' or ours?' " That question, Maier knew, has no simple answer.

This week Massacre in Beijing: China's Struggle for Democracy ($5.95) will go on sale. Overseen by special projects editor Donald Morrison, the paperback includes eyewitness accounts and analysis of the events in Tiananmen Square from Beijing bureau chief Sandra Burton, correspondents David Aikman and Richard Hornik and reporter Jaime FlorCruz.