It is said that there's a time for everything done under the sun. I think, like no other period in human history, the time we live in is a time for heroes.

Time have just completed their own list of global environmental heroes - people who have lent their hands in some noteworthy way to the work of saving the planet from ourselves. There are names all will recognise, like Mikhail Gorbachev, David Attenborough, Al Gore, Prince Charles and David Suzuki, as well as some you may not.

The series is introduced thus:

Though home to us all, the earth is mute. It doesn't get a vote in any congress or parliament. It doesn't own blocks of shares in the market. It doesn't rise up at a protest rally. It can't even buy a hybrid car. The earth has no voice — so someone must speak for it.

We call the men and women on the following pages heroes, but they could just as easily be called speakers for the planet, a planet that is hanging, as one of them put it years ago, in the balance. - Time

While I appreciate the sentiments, and it's arguably talking semantics, I think it's not so much the planet that's hanging in the balance, as it is our own civilisation. If, as the Gaia theory goes, our disruption of natural systems becomes so significant that the earth casts us off like a horse its rider, or a host its parasite, the planet itself will begin a restoration process that will eventually see it become 'as good as new'. Civilisation, meanwhile, may never be the same again - arguably a good thing, except for the misery and death expected in the intermediate state of flux ahead.

This is where we need a new generation of heroes. The heroes I have in mind won't be industry tycoons and documentary-makers - although these can certainly play a role - and as political heroes seem so hard to come by we can't pin our hopes on these either. I think the real heroes over the next few years must be working class heroes. These will be people who realise that the economic system they're trapped in is unsustainable, hence finite. These new heroes will shift their priorities from wealth and prestige to health and happiness. They will be those who have come to acknowledge that an economy that survives only through ever-increasing consumption creates a society that is, in fact, self-devouring. These will be people who dream of a more sure future for their families and their community - people who strive, and yes, even sacrifice, to find the quickest route towards sustainability and independence.

Just as we can hold 'the planet' aloft, as a kind of detached symbolic entity, we can do likewise with the personages Time lists. The work of many of the men and women they mention, however, has been leading up to this point. Some of these people have worked doggedly for decades to get the word out, despite continuous ridicule and criticism from their contemporaries. But to what end? I think that this 'end' must be a social and cultural awakening that leads an increasingly lucid public to do for themselves what all those with a vested interest in the status quo, unfortunately the most powerful organisations on earth, will never do for us.

A Working Class Hero - Marianne Faithfull