Mare Tranquillitatis, Moon, 20 July 1969. The whole earth is holding its breath. The LEM is communicating “one-to-one” with Capcom based in Houston. Some background crackling, a few word exchanges punctuated with “beeps” confirming moon landing. Armstrong is speaking to the world “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”: communication "one-to-many". These words are engraved forever in history of mankind. Earth seems so amazingly small, beautiful and fragile from Moon.

2006, Internet. Google Earth. A virtual walk-over on a real world, more fragile than in 1969. Certainly more fragile. On this map spots are multiplying. They are running along the Transiberian line and seem to cover entire areas in Asia. Another line is linking Asia to Eastern Europe. A few spots seem to betray agglutinating unities and wander through Africa and Western Europe. Each spot locates a seat of H5N1. The surface of Earth has no centre, neither have the crisis shaking our planet. And if there are some global crises overstepping any distinctions and ignoring all sorts of borders, avian flue is one of these. And this issue cannot do without it.

Other seats. Other maps, shocking ones, away from Google Earth. Maps showing the shortage of drinking water, world hunger, spread of AIDS, latent conflicts, circulation of guns, violence suffered by women all over the world, drug business, prostitution incomes marbling luxurious villas on the French Riviera, children at work whose products are displayed in our shops, complicity between unrestrained neoliberalism and a restraining Chinese regime, melting of the ice cap, decline of Amazonian forest. From the Mare Tranquillitatis our little planet is living a crisis, a crisis of the system, of the running system, I should say. A global one!

For over 5 years this magazine has been striving to explain the inner workings of the communication and the management of the crisis. Our columns are in no way partisan but open to tendencies. But they all accord to acknowledge the idea that crisis seem to make a continuum. And the denser the means of communication, the more complex the crisis communication. Adolescent crisis? Discipline is moving to a sensitive communication and to the so Anglo-Saxon “issues management”. We were to offer you an issue up to the stake of global nature, that is to say an issue that would be less purely French.

How can I thank our contributors who give up some valuable free time to share their knowledge? How can I express my pleasant surprise, so constantly renewed, to see many of them respond our entreaties spontaneously whereas they do not need our magazine to build their reputation?

According to Christophe Roux-Dufort, “a crisis results from accumulations of fragilities, plus ignorance”. Our modest magazine is powerless against the fragilities of the world. But step by step our contributors take part into this long march as well as a number of media online and this slowly moves us away from ignorance.

D.H.

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