The image on the cover is a United States Forest Service poster published in 1946—a year after the end of World War II. At the time, the nation was suffering an acute housing shortage, because so few houses were built during the war and during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This poster marked a shift from wartime to peacetime arguments for forest-fire prevention. We are able to reproduce the poster courtesy of the Northwestern University Library.

     Michael Rawson's article on the decision to build a public water-supply system in Boston reveals much about how urban Americans viewed nature in the mid-nineteenth century. To some Bostonians, water was a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. To others, pure water was essential to moral order. Working-class residents often saw water as a community resource to be enjoyed by all as a matter of right. Rawson's analysis of the water-supply debate in Boston neatly joins environmental, social, and cultural history.

     In recent years, historians have begun to explore the social conflicts caused by conservation efforts. Bill Parenteau's article on salmon conservation in Canada adds much to that growing literature. In the period from 1867 to 1914, many people evaded or resisted fishery regulations in the Atlantic provinces. The resistance in many ways was similar to resistance elsewhere to efforts to conserve forests, wildlife, and places of sublime beauty. Yet the Canadian salmon conservation program was unusual in one fascinating respect: The government encouraged a kind of privatized enforcement of the conservation regulations. I hope that Parenteau's article will spark comparative work in conservation history.

     By looking at the making and remaking of the landscape of a Canadian industrial city from 1890 to 1960, Ken Cruickshank and Nancy Bouchier deepen our understanding of the history of urban environmental inequality. They show how private and public decisions created and then sustained class divisions in exposure to environmental hazards and access to environmental amenities. Cruickshank and Bouchier give particular attention to the failure of city planners to redress environmental inequalities. In some cases, indeed, Hamilton's planners even intensified the problem.

     Environmental historians rarely write about events. Of course, the definition of an "event" in environmental history often is quite different than in other historical subfields. Yet, as Ralph Lutts demonstrates in this issue, events can be important and evocative subjects for environmental historians. One hundred years ago, the chestnut blight came to the United States, and Lutts uses that event as a starting point for a rich analysis of the historic meaning of the chestnut for people in southern Appalachia.

     Neil Maher's "Gallery" essay considers two iconic images of the earth viewed from space. One was called "Earthrise," and the other was called "Whole Earth." Though taken only a few years apart, the two images ultimately told two very different stories.

WHEN I ANNOUNCED last year that I planned to step down as editor at the end of 2005, the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society jointly appointed a search committee to find my replacement. Last month, the committee selected Mark Cioc, a professor of history at the University of California-Santa Cruz. I was not part of the search process, and I very much appreciate the hard work of committee members Jeffrey Stine, Thomas Dunlap, Hal Rothman, Julidta Tarver, Alice Ingerson, Douglas Weiner, and Steve Anderson. They did a terrific job.

     Mark is perhaps best known as the author of a wonderful "eco-biography" of the Rhine. He has served on the journal's editorial board during my tenure, and I have enjoyed working with him. He also served as one of the journal's associate editors under Hal Rothman. Mark officially will become editor-elect in January 2005, and his first issue as editor will come a year later. I look forward to seeing what Mark will do with the journal!

ADAM ROME