We can’t fix China, but we can do something.

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The smoggiest city in the world is a place few Americans have ever heard of. According to an informal poll—conducted over the past five minutes here in the offices of the Weekly—seven out of eight people could not even name the country in which it is located.

The worst air pollution on the planet is found in Lenfen, China. The air in Lenfen is so bad, according to New Scientist magazine, it’s difficult to see the tops of the city’s countless smokestacks.

That grimy vista is not uncommon in China. Massive industrial growth, which has transformed that nation overnight into a global economic power, has filled its skies with smoke. The 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in China, as are 16 of the worst 20. In two years, China will overtake the US to become the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases.

The Weekly’s ‘Green Team’ has been working up strategies to reduce our environmental impact.

India is close on China’s heels. As ambitious modernization gives birth to new cities, factories and power plants, India is pumping vastly increasing amounts of poison into the planet’s air and water. And the same scenario is unfolding all around the globe—aggressive industrialization, accompanied by an immense stream of toxic fallout. By some accounts, new sources of pollution in developing nations could offset whatever reductions might be achieved elsewhere.

This knowledge could easily lead anyone to conclude that nothing we do matters. And yet we do not seem to be living in a world that has given up hope. As awareness of the global predicament spreads, the environmental movement has grown. In the past year, it seems, a shift has taken place. In the face of what can look like imminent destruction, a growing number of individuals—and even some states, nations and corporations—have come to recognize the need to take action.

There is some proof of this trend in these pages: Check out the number of Earth Day events planned for the coming week.