Editor's Page

Two horrifying events occurred this spring that, at first, may seem to have nothing in common. In Bangladesh, more than a thousand garment workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza, a building whose owners knew it was a structural peril. Seven thousand miles away, at an observatory in Hawaii, scientists reported that, for the first time in human history, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had climbed to four hundred parts per million—a symbolic marker of climate distress.