It seems that most every magazine out there has a special “Green” issue these days, and Time is no exception with its April 21 edition. For only the second time in its history, the magazine has forsaken its familiar red border, this time, of course, replacing it with green. To illustrate its cover headline, “How to Win the War on Global Warming,” Time chose to use Joe Rosenthal’s famous WWII photo of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. But instead of a flag, those brave men are hoisting a tree, which didn’t set well with some Iwo Jima veterans.

“Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,” said Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center. “The Japanese Empire in February of 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history. War analogies should be used sparingly by political advocates of all bents.”

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel defended his magazine’s cover choice yesterday on MSNBC: “[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change. It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them, and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don’t understand why they don’t do that.”

This particular photo manipulation is hard for Time to defend. I mean, you don’t mess with Marines. Maybe they should’ve used another famous WWII photo, the Life magazine one of the sailor celebrating V-J Day in Times Square with a kiss, but instead of a nurse, he could be laying one on a tree.

I caught myself today before the day began in earnest. I woke up prepared to live as usual, in that old cobweb that sees all time as neutral time.I was going to shuffle over to the kitchen and thrum idly through a dated magazine and glance up at the calendar with a yawn to see if there was anything penciled in there that I had to do. I was going to make it from breakfast to lunch somehow, and then from lunch to dinner. I was going to nurse low expectations.Then I saw what I was doing and shook a little green dust off myself and said that God is on the move, and that today is a different day from yesterday. I decided to live deliberately:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,…and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,…to rout all that was not life,…to reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it….; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden, Henry David Thoreau)

March 11,2008, will never come again in all of history.