  The Color Glass Condensate is an effective theory description for the small
momentum fraction x degrees of freedom in a high energy hadron or nucleus,
which can be understood in terms of strong classical gluon fields. We discuss
the resulting picture of the initial conditions in a relativistic heavy ion
collision. We describe recent work to show that the leading logarithms of the
collision energy can be factorized into the renormalization group evolution of
the small x wavefunction. We then describe how this framework can be used to
understand the long range rapidity correlations observed by the RHIC
experiments.
