This issue calls out an SOS: save our species. Editor Richard Swift believes that in our current political system, this is what is at stake. Not next year, perhaps, or even next decade, but certainly in the foreseeable future we are heading socially and ecologically down a slippery slope - the bottom of which promises a very hard landing. The main villain of the piece is our current system, which is committed to runaway growth based on ecological destruction and levels of social inequality unimaginable just 30 or 40 years ago. SOS is an attempt to help us put on the brakes and show we have other options.