OnEarth's Fall 2008 issue, now live on the "read/write" Web.

I opened up my mailbox yesterday to find the new issue of OnEarth Magazine, its soy-based inks still hot off the proverbial press. "Happy day!" thought I. If past experience was guide, I held in my hands a pile of stories that would resonate for months, framing and making sense for me of a surprising amount of the daily jumble of news.

In other words, I get to experience the magazine just like any other subscriber. I'm the designated web guy at OnEarth, and I usually have little more than the sketchiest outline of each issue's contents in advance of its publication. And while my colleagues on the print side -- who are of course completely, intensely immersed in bringing every word and pixel of each issue to fruition -- no doubt know a deep, abiding satisfaction as they handle a freshly printed magazine, I really enjoy engaging OnEarth as a reader. Just consider this partial listing of the new issue's contents:

• Barry Yeoman's discovery of an impending water crisis in northern California's Sacramento Delta;
• Elizabeth Royte's trashy adventures at Disney World;
• Mike Goldwater's photographic journey to a small, remote, energy-independent Scottish island;
• Elizabeth Kolbert's bracing assessment of U.S. climate politics;
• Lisa Selin Davis's on-campus visit with the next generation of environmentalists;
• Alan Burdick's weird immersion in an utterly paperless world;
• Sharman Apt Russell finds a way to break through and make small greenhouse-emissions-busting lifestyle changes -- you know, the ones we all struggle with.
• Poetry from Eamonn Grennan and John Allman;
• An interview with the Red Cross's Madeleen Helmer, who helps developing nations prepare for the potentially disastrous consequences of climate change;
• Kim Larsen's review of Poisoned Profits and The Body Toxic, two new books that "enumerate the ways and means by which we find ourselves marinating in a chaotic stew of chemical pollutants."

Quite a feast; sitting with each of these will, for me, be a chief pleasure of the next week or so.

That said, the act of reading now usually feels incomplete to me without at least fly-by surveillance on the Web to see how others are reacting to the same material. This is, after all, the era of the "read/write" Web, in which a wired dialectic -- in blogs, forums, on YouTube, Twitter, etc. -- forms around just about any significant news event or media item. And in this age, it's not rare for the purveyor of good reading to find that their "readers who write" are able to enrich and extend the story. As Dan Gillmor, a pioneer of grassroots digital journalism, has said about this sort of online conversation (which is made possible by web-page reader-comment forms and many other "social" web tools that have emerged in recent years):

My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed.

We want that kind of conversation percolating around OnEarth Magazine's stories. There are roughly 450,000 of you OnEarth readers out there, and among your number are a lion's share of the savviest, best-informed environmental leaders in America. We've worked for more than a year on a swing-for-the-fences effort to build an onearth.org that facilitates (and values) reader participation and, with luck, will draw this amazing community a little closer together. This new issue's articles are the first batch from the ink-and-paper magazine to make their online debut on the finished, fully tricked out OnEarth website.

And so, I truly hope that, as you read these articles, you'll stand up, say hi, and weigh in -- do the one-minute site-registration drill, and then say your piece. Often. Loudly or softly, in brief or at length. Use the Comments sections that now appear with every article, blog post, and podcast on the site. Or write to us directly if you've got a question, comment, or suggestion that's not related to a specific article. We -- OnEarth's editors, and the award-winning journalists who write for the magazine -- are indeed listening.