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Each year the Heinz Awards go to 10 headliners in a wide variety of disciplines — the arts and humanities, public policy, science and economics — ranging from writers like Dave Eggers to doctors like Paul Farmer. "We wanted to identify people who were full of promise," says Teresa Heinz, who created the awards after her then husband, Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, died in a helicopter crash in 1991. "We wanted to continue John's work."

But this year Heinz decided to focus the awards on a single issue rather than recognize many. The winners of each $100,000 award, announced on Sept. 15, were acknowledged for their work toward one cause: protecting the environment. The idea was to highlight that in this moment — in the run-up to the all-important U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year — we're reaching a turning point for the planet. "This is absolutely the issue that defines us," says Heinz. "We wanted to make a statement that across America, there are people taking on these problems and that it's something we can all do."

Of course, the winners of the Heinz Awards do a bit more than the average person. Recipient Christopher Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology and a biology professor at Stanford University who shared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, Field has become the go-to scientist in his field, the one who perhaps understands — and can explain — best how man-made global warming will change our planet and the life that depends on it.

Scientists make up the bulk of the other award winners: Dee Boersma, a marine biologist at the University of Washington who found that the effects of climate change force penguins in Antarctica to swim 25 extra miles for food, putting them in greater danger of extinction. Ashok Gadgil, an environmental engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, won for inventing simple, inexpensive water-purification systems and stoves for use in the developing world. Kirk Smith, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was recognized for his work connecting indoor air pollution — mostly from cooking — to the premature death of women and children in developing countries. But scientists weren't the only winners: Joel Salatin, a pioneering sustainable farmer in Virginia, and Chip Giller, the publisher of the green website Grist.org, both won for changing attitudes in mainstream agriculture and the media.

For Heinz, the point of the awards isn't just handing out money — although a six-figure check goes a long way in the weakly compensated world of environmental science and activism. Rather, she wants us to see those winners as role models at a time when news of the environment can seem unremittingly dark. "This is a message of hope," says Heinz. "I want this to push people into action."

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See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.

If you're in prison, now might be a good time to develop a taste for pork. The same is probably true if you're in the military or in a public school. As part of a government effort to boost America's hog farmers — who have identified themselves as the forgotten casualties of the H1N1 swine-flu epidemic and asked Washington for financial help — the Agriculture Department announced last week a $30 million purchase of surplus pork. That brings the federal total of pork purchases for fiscal 2009 to about $150 million, or close to $100 million more than last year's figure for the same period. During a Sept. 10 morning press conference, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack also said he would work with fellow Cabinet secretaries in the Defense, Justice and Education departments to encourage pork purchases on military bases, in prisons and in schools.

In addition, Vilsack took the opportunity to ask — indeed, plead — with the media to desist forever from use of the misnomer swine flu, which has been the cause of many of the pork industry's woes. "It may seem silly," said Vilsack, "unless you're a pork producer. Then, you have to tell your family you can't afford to pay the bills because you're now selling your product for less than it cost you to produce it." (Read "Amid Swine Flu Fears, the Pork Market Falls Ill.")

It was soon after the first reports of the so-called swine flu emerged in the spring of 2009 that the already soft hog market practically collapsed. In China, a major consumer of U.S. pork, fully two-thirds of the 1.3 billion population stopped eating pork altogether, and Beijing responded with a ban on any pork produced in North Carolina, Iowa or Oklahoma. Russia and Ukraine followed with prohibitions of their own, and soon there were 27 countries that wanted nothing to do with any hog raised in America. Institutional buyers in the U.S. grew skittish too, as did big state and local consumers like school districts.

The U.S. government's most recent pork purchase comes just a few weeks after the National Pork Producers Council and a consortium of governors from nine pork-producing states sent separate letters to the Agriculture Secretary requesting assistance. The council asked the USDA to lift the $300 spending cap on pork products for government food programs, and to spend at least an additional $150 million on pork products during fiscal year 2009; the industry also asked for $100 million to help survey herds for H1N1. In a similar letter from state governors, lawmakers requested that the government urge overseas markets to start buying U.S. pork again, and Vilsack said he would lean on the international trading partners who haven't yet lifted their U.S. pork bans. "Among the ones who have been open to reason and logic," he says tartly, "many of the barriers are already down." (Read "Swine Flu: Don't Blame the Pig.")

Of course, no H1N1 has been detected in any actual swine in the U.S., and even if it were, Vilsack stressed — his voice sometimes betraying a how-many-times-must-I-repeat-this weariness — people could not get sick by eating infected pork. H1N1 is not a hog-specific virus, Vilsack reminded reporters. "Swine flu has been present in the United States for 80 years," he said. "But H1N1 is different. It's a novel flu strain. Its genetic makeup is unique. The virus is connected to strains from three species — avian, human and swine. Unfortunately, the media gravitated toward the swine aspect of it. But that's unfair and it's not right."

The Agriculture Secretary does concede that the absence of the virus among American hogs so far does not mean that the herds will remain clean. He reported government scientists have thus developed a master seed strain of H1N1 that they are making available to five veterinary-drug makers that can prepare vaccines to be rolled out if and when any herds come down sick. "By making the seed virus, we estimate we've saved two to four months of development time. We hope the manufacturers will now make the vaccine," said Vilsack. The Agriculture Department is also stepping up surveillance efforts so that any infection in any U.S. herd will be quickly reported.

But beyond the government's fiscal assistance, Vilsack maintains that the media still hold the greatest sway over potential U.S. pork consumers. "People hear the President or some other official say once or twice that pork is safe," Vilsack said, "and then they hear the term swine flu on TV and the Internet 50 times in a single day." The blame-the-media fallback is surely overstated, but for pork farmers trying to move the merch, less swine and more H1N1 in headlines will nonetheless be welcome.

See the top five swine flu don'ts.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

Epidemiologists love to crunch numbers — and Americans, on the whole, love to ignore them. Even the most health-conscious among us soon grow numb to the storm of statistics warning us about rising levels of obesity or falling levels of exercise or all the other numerical indicators that tell us how unwell we're getting. But on Sept. 14, a team of researchers released a new finding that should cause even the most data-weary folks alarm.

According to a paper published Monday in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, fewer than 8% of all Americans can now be considered at low risk for heart disease. No one needs a statistician's help to know that that means more than 92% of us are not as healthy as we could be, and that's worth paying attention to.

The study was actually the latest in a series of studies, all of which have been part of a program known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). Administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the program is a four-decade attempt to evaluate the country's health by conducting surveys and physical exams with a rotating sample group of about 10,000 Americans. The first NHANES study was conducted from 1971 to 1975, the second from 1976 to 1980, the next from 1988 to 1994, and the most recent — from which the heart-disease findings are only now being released — from 1999 to 2004.

For that portion of the survey, the investigators focused on people in the 25-to-74 age group and evaluated five different risk factors for cardiovascular disease: blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking history, obesity and diabetes. To be considered at low risk, subjects had to have a blood pressure reading of 120/80 mm Hg or lower without the aid of medication and a cholesterol level below 200 mg/dL, also without drugs. They had to be nonsmokers or at least former smokers, not be overweight or obese, and never have been diagnosed with diabetes. "From a prevention point of view, it's important that Americans achieve as many of these goals as possible," says the CDC's Dr. Earl S. Ford, the lead author of the study.

That's why it's troubling that so few of us did. In the latest NHANES, just 7.5% of adults were considered low risk in all five areas. That's a significant dip from the 10.5% in the 1988-94 survey — which was already a decidedly poor score. Within the adult population, there is no particular demographic slice that's doing particularly well, but some are clearly faring better than others. Among women in the current study, 10.5% were considered low risk (a decrease from 15.5% in the previous survey), compared to just 4.8% of men (down from 5.7%). In the 25-to-44 age group, 12.1% came in at low risk, compared to 3.5% of 45-to-64-year-olds and just 0.8% in the 65-to-74 demographic. Whites, among whom 8.2% were at low risk of heart disease, did better than Mexican Americans (5.3%), and both did better than African Americans (4.6%). The racial gaps have much to do with socioeconomic disparities and unequal access to health care, but there are also genetic factors at play, with certain groups having a higher susceptibility to certain conditions.

Bad as the current numbers are, they are actually not historic lows. In the 1971-75 survey, just 4.4% of the entire sample group was considered low risk; that percentage climbed to 5.7% in the next survey before peaking in the third one. The trend was reversed this time around. "Until the 1990s, we were headed in a positive direction," says Ford. "But then it took a turn."

Surprisingly — and encouragingly — rising heart-disease risk does not necessarily translate to rising heart-disease deaths. Last year, the American Heart Association announced that since 1999, deaths from coronary heart disease fell a remarkable 25.8%. There are a lot of reasons for that happy development, but the leading ones are better drugs and technology, closer adherence to evidence-based practice guidelines and the simple precaution of getting people in cardiac distress to the hospital fast.

All the same, the best way not to need the hospital at all is not to get sick, and even the greatest advances in treatment will amount to little if we can't bring the risk factors under control. The most important factors to attack, the Circulation paper explains, are not cholesterol or tobacco use. Both continue to drop, and with recent federal action to boost cigarette taxes and allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco for the first time, the decline in smoking may actually accelerate. (Indeed, last year, the share of Americans who use tobacco fell below 20% for the first time in modern memory.)

The real problems are blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, all of which are relentlessly on the rise. Worse, there's a time bomb in the trend lines. According to a 2008 survey by the CDC, 32% of American children are now overweight or obese, a number that at least appears to have plateaued after a long period of steady increase but one that's shocking all the same. Once those children reach the 25-to-74 demographic, their heart-disease risk could cause the national numbers to explode. "As these children grow up, I expect to see a decrease in the number of people who qualify as low risk," says Dr. Seema Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist and medical director of the Weight Management Program for Children at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "Our obese children are at high risk of becoming obese adults; some of them are already developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes."

The answer to much of this — as is so often the case — is better diet, more exercise and early detection. Such preventive measures form one of the cornerstones of the ongoing health-care debate — one of the few points on which nearly all sides can agree. The authors of the new study call for physicians to be reimbursed for heart-disease-prevention measures like working with their patients to develop weight-loss and smoking-cessation plans and to be allowed enough breathing room in their schedules to let them do good cardiac assessments. Schools and workplaces, the paper argues, should also be in on the prevention game. Since both are places where large numbers of people congregate, they are also places where simple measures like blood-pressure screenings could do the most good.

"Much potential exists to reverse ominous trends in cardiovascular health," the authors write, "but this is unlikely to occur without making prevention of overweight and obesity a national priority." There's no way of knowing when Americans who have heard this refrain again and again will take notice — and take action — but when 92% of us are affected, now seems like a very good time.

It was back-to-school time for much of the U.S. this week, as millions of students bustled into classrooms to start the new year. But compared with school years past, this academic season has been decidedly more fraught, since it marks what could be the full-scale return of the H1N1 influenza virus.

If previous flu pandemics are any measure, we may see spikes in infection once school gets under way. Kids in classrooms are major spreaders of infectious disease; they get sick, infect one another, then bring the disease back home. That's why officials are trying to get the new H1N1 vaccine tested and ready for use as soon as possible — the longer America's schoolchildren go unprotected, the bigger the H1N1 pandemic could become. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine flu.)

A new study in the Sept. 10 edition of Science makes the case for widespread and speedy immunization, suggesting that doing so could stifle the pandemic. A team of researchers led by Ira Longini, a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, used data from earlier H1N1 outbreaks this year in the U.S. and Mexico to model how the pandemic is likely to unfold this fall. The team found that by first vaccinating children, then adults, until 70% of the U.S. population is covered, officials would be able to all but stop the pandemic.

The problem is that, according to the model, vaccinations would have to begin by mid-September — but the first batch of the vaccine isn't due until October. "Clearly the best strategy is to vaccinate schoolchildren first," said Longini. "The problem is the supply of the vaccine." That means the disease could begin to spread, and quickly, before protection from vaccinations could take hold.

The Science study also provided the first estimate of the person-to-person transmissibility of H1N1. The researchers calculate that every person infected by the virus will go on to infect 1.3 to 1.7 other people on average. (That number will probably be higher for schoolchildren — in one outbreak at a private school in New York City in the spring, each sick student infected 2.4 classmates.) As flus go, that makes H1N1 more transmissible than most — on par with the moderate 1957 Asian flu pandemic — which makes it particularly important to get a large chunk of the population vaccinated early.

Vaccine trials are currently under way in the U.S. and around the world — and the early findings suggest that the immunization is safe and effective. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health recently opened trials to pregnant women and children to test the safety and efficacy of the shot, and so far, the vaccine appears suitable for those groups.

There's more good news from the international front. In the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, researchers in Australia and Britain reported the early findings of their H1N1 vaccine studies. Preliminary data from the Australian trial showed that 21 days after getting one shot, 96% of the 240 trial volunteers ages 18 to 64 generated an impressive amount of antibodies to the virus. The results were "unanticipated," according to the authors; health officials had expected that people would need two doses of the vaccine for full protection because H1N1 is a new flu virus to most of the population.

It's not clear yet how much immune response is necessary to protect against infection or illness, but if the trials' final data confirm that one dose of vaccine is sufficient, it could mean that twice as many people as expected could be immunized in mid-October, when the U.S. government intends to make available the first batch of 45 million doses. The Australian researchers stress that while their results are encouraging, they are also incomplete; they have not compared the response in these vaccinated volunteers to a group of unimmunized controls, so it's still too early to decide whether it's safe to do away with the second inoculation.

In the U.K. study, scientists explored another question — whether the current vaccine doses would still be effective if they were halved, by being diluting with an adjuvant (currently, the U.S. government has not approved any vaccines with adjuvants, but some have been approved in other countries). The answer, it seems, in another early look at the data, is yes. Even a single dose of the watered-down version of the vaccine produced enough antibodies to protect against infection in 80% of the 175 people studied.

If borne out, the results suggest that more vaccine may be available for more people and that more people could be protected against H1N1 sooner. If only a single dose is required, that means vaccines could yield protection within three to four weeks after inoculation, instead of the six to eight weeks it would take if two doses were needed.

The question now is whether we can test and produce vaccine faster than H1N1 can spread. Act quickly, and we might be able to stifle the disease in its earliest stages. But even if the vaccines arrive too late to stop H1N1 from spreading rapidly now, they can help build population-level resistance to the disease going forward. The Science study estimates that without vaccines, the virus could infect as many as 2.2 billion people worldwide over the course of the year. "The virus will be with us for many years to come in many forms," said Longini. "It's important to start building up resistance now."

See pictures of the swine-flu outbreak in Mexico.

See the top five swine-flu don'ts.

New York City–based writer Colin Beavan was casting around for a new book idea a few years ago — and fretting over the state of the planet — when he had an epiphany. He and his family — wife Michelle and baby daughter Isabella — would live for an entire year while making as little impact on the environment as possible. That meant no motorized transportation, no elevators, no nonlocal food, no caffeine and (eventually) no electricity. TIME talked to Colin and Michelle about the new book and documentary on their green year, No Impact Man, and why pulling the plug on modern life was the best thing that ever happened to their family. (See photos of how our food is produced, from farm to fork.)

For your year of living with no impact on the environment, what was the hardest thing to give up?
Michelle: For me the hardest thing was giving up the caffeine. The brutal and ugly and murderous caffeine withdrawal — that was tough. And I wasn't able to see my family because they don't live locally, so it was great on day 366 to be able to get on a plane with my daughter Isabella and go see my parents.

Colin: I find it interesting that everyone asks that question. But the surprising thing to me is that instead of how hard it was to live environmentally, we discovered how joyful it was. We found that by creating space in our lives in terms of letting go of stuff, cutting out the TV screens, we had more time for relationships — more time to spend with each other and with friends. More time just reading books or going to the park and going swimming. We were eating better and getting more exercise. That's what really struck me.

And what did you do with all that time that was opened up by the project? Was it hard to figure out what to do once the noise of electronic culture and consumer culture ceased?
Michelle: There was this weird moment when my consumer self kind of died away, and it felt like there was an empty spot. If you've heard of the slow-food movement, this was like the slow-life movement. It changed my perspective of time.

Michelle, all through this year, you kept your job writing for BusinessWeek. How did you manage to keep up that fast-paced lifestyle, and shift back and forth?
Michelle: It was like two alternative realities that I would have on the same day. But they were really complementary.

How so?
Michelle:BusinessWeek was my fast life, where I got my weekly adrenaline rush, doing this work I really love and really believe in, which is a huge part of having a happy life. And then I would go home, where the screens were off and it was very quiet and it was just my family. I was living in the moment then.

Colin, you mentioned before that there were environmental groups that, when news of what you were doing first broke out, were worried. They thought people already associated environmentalism with giving things up, and they worried that message wouldn't work with people. Do they still feel that way?
Colin: For me, there are two models for change. One is a model that works through collective action and politics. And then there is the model that works through individual action and lifestyle change. People in the environmental movement have been working so hard for collective action that when No Impact Man first started to get attention, they became very concerned that people would only think they had to change their lifestyle and didn't have to worry about collective action. I think some people are very ambivalent about the possibility of political action, but are wiling to change their own lifestyle, and once they have skin in the game, so to speak, they will get into politics.

Are we ultimately going to have to redesign our lives, make do with less, if we want to combat climate change?
Colin: The simple answer is yes. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says that developed nations are going to have to change the way they live. But maybe there's a chance that we could actually gain something — a different kind of life that we might like more.

You talk a lot about how the year of no impact actually improved the quality of your family's life. How?
Michelle: Before the project started, I was really heavily into a diet of high-fructose corn syrup. My life was very much determined by having screens all around me, all the time. I was a major TIVO user, totally addicted to sugar and reality TV. I was just a high-consuming member of the high-consuming lifestyle. And I think that I was just asleep to the toll, in terms of my health, in terms of not being with my family, and to the literal cost in terms of debt. I also realized halfway through the project that it was a great joy to eat this way and live this way, and how much I'd been sacrificing without realizing it in my old life.

You started out this project in a state of despair over the fate of the planet and over your inability to do anything about it. After a year of no-impact living, how do you feel now?
Colin: You know, a couple of years ago, when the publicity over this first started, I tried to tread gently on this question, but the truth is that I believe we're in a gigantic crisis and it's a difficult one. I see a huge number of people trying to figure out the solution to the problem. I don't despair for the human race. I'm an optimist — I believe that people are good. I don't despair of our ability to affect change when we need change. But what is required is that we actually engage that ability. I believe we can solve the problem. We have to yet to find out, however, whether we have the collective will.

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