Home Planet

The news we get about the planet is often pretty depressing. The warming climate impacts our economies, influences our politics and culture, threatens the food we eat and the water we drink; it even affects our love lives and the education of our children. 

The climate crisis is increasingly disrupting our fundamental sense of where we belong and what we consider home as extreme heat and climate disasters displace more people around the world. We’re faced with difficult questions every day about how to ethically exist on our planet, often navigating these challenges in our lives from moment to moment. 

Confronted with alarming headlines, it’s easy to lose sight of the dynamic and interesting — dare I even say beautiful — ways the planet is changing and how we’re changing right along with it. It starts in our homes. 

We believe there should be some space to explore that. 

Home Planet is a collection of stories that celebrates life on Earth: It shows the meaningful ways our lives are entwined with the natural world and how humans can adapt to preserve our planet and deepen our connection to our shared home. 

Some of these stories unfold within the literal four walls of home, such as our feature on our fraught relationships with our household appliances or our story on the New York City apartments teeming with the city’s most despised pests. 

Others explore the theme of community and the unexpected places to find it, be it among a troupe of squirrel-obsessives or through the comfort and spiritual nourishment of plant-based foods. 

These stories delve into some of the most intimate aspects of our lives, too, like this refreshing and heartbreaking tale about one mother’s struggle to raise her preteen daughter, a member of Generation Alpha, amid climate-change acceleration and the pervasive distractions of social media and tech. While each will play out in a personal way or within the ecosystems of our homes, all of these stories tap into bigger questions about how climate change will impact our daily lives and what we can do to make life better. 

Even the smallest shifts, the most subtle changes in our orientation, can make a huge difference in how we exist on our planet. As humans on Earth in 2024, there’s still a lot to be hopeful about. This package illuminates many paths to begin forging a more attuned, sustainable, and ecological relationship with our home planet. —Paige Vega, climate editor

CREDITS

Editorial Lead: Paige Vega | Project Manager: Lauren Katz | Editors: Alanna Okun, Izzie Ramirez, Lavanya Ramanathan | Reporters: Marina Bolotnikova, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Keren Landman, Brian Resnick, Tracy Ross, Allie Volpe | Style & Standards/Fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Sarah Schweppe, Madeleine Vasaly | Art Director: Paige Vickers | Illustrators: Rachel Victoria Hillis, Christine Mi, Danielle Kroll, Mary Kirkpatrick | Audience: Shira Tarlo, Gabby Fernandez | Editorial Director: Bryan Walsh | Special Thanks: Bill Carey, Nisha Chittal, Jorge Just, Swati Sharma, Elbert Ventura