In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

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Some 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions now come from deforestation, especially in the lush, green band of tropical rainforest that circles the earth.

That is more than from global transport.

So representatives from member states involved in UN climate negotiations are attempting to hammer out a way to make it more profitable to protect forests than destroy them.

By providing cash for maintaining healthy forests, they hope to undermine the economic imperative for poor countries or individuals to cut down trees for timber, to free land for agriculture, or to make way for roads, housing and other infrastructure.

The idea, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, will be included in the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which is now the only international treaty aimed at climate change.

The new treaty is due to be finalized in 2015 and take effect in 2020.

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In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.

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Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.

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Take the Strait of Hormuz, already making headlines and shaking energy markets as 2012 begins. Connecting the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, it lacks imposing geographical features like the Rock of Gibraltar or the Golden Gate Bridge. In an energy-conscious world, however, it may possess greater strategic significance than any passageway on the planet. Every day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, tankers carrying some 17 million barrels of oil -- representing 20 percent of the world’s daily supply -- pass through this vital artery.

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I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

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The Atmospheric Brown Cloud, formerly known as the Asian Brown Cloud, is a mass of air pollution hovering over northern India along the southern Himalayas and down across Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. The cloud began growing shortly after World War II, a smoggy mass of soot and sulfates from diesel emissions, wood fires and other burning stuff that’s almost two miles thick.

A new study by scientists from a number of research organizations – including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – finds that the cloud’s pollutants are making cyclones in the Arabian Sea more intense.

This is a very big deal, because, as Dean Kuipers writes in the Los Angeles Times, “After the apparent recent increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, including the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, climate watchers everywhere have speculated whether these storms were made stronger by industrial or man-made emissions. This is reportedly the first study to indicate that human activity may, in fact, affect large storms.”

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Extreme weather plagued much of the world. Drought in East Africa has caused mass starvation; catastrophic floods came to Thailand, southern Africa and Australia. Winter temperatures across Russia averaged 4 degrees Celsius (roughly 9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average. Arctic sea ice was the second lowest on record.

Closer to home, extreme drought and wildfires turned Texas and adjacent Southwestern states into a living hell last summer. In Texas alone, 3 million acres burned up. Conditions haven’t improved much since. Cattlemen wonder if their way of life can be sustained there very much longer. F5 Tornadoes destroyed huge swaths of Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Joplin, Mo. In August, Vermont and upstate New York suffered record hurricane damage — Vermont!

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In 2000 Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, and Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, proposed that human agency has so transformed the Earth’s ecosystem that we are living in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the Human Age. Proponents of the Anthropocene concept disagree about when the era began. Was it with the industrial revolution, which began to release great quantities of pollutants and gases including greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Was it earlier, when agrarian societies cleared vast tracts of wilderness for farms and pasture? Or was it earlier still, at the end of the last Ice Age, when, according to the “Pleistocene overkill” hypothesis, hunter-gatherers drove large animals including mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths to extinction in both the Old World and the New?

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The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texasand Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

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Regardless of their different sizes, features, and forms, monsters have one trait in common — they eat humans. Whatever else they may do for us psychologically, monsters express — and ex-press — our dread of being torn apart, eviscerated, chewed, swallowed, and then shit out. This shameful fate of those who are eaten is confronted in an African myth in which a giant predatory bird swallows the hero whole day after day and then excretes him. Myth after myth confronts the stark facts of being consumed by a larger creature, obsessively depicting in graphic detail what both monsters and animal predators naturally do — turn humans into excrement.

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In late August 2009, dead fish began washing up in Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. During the next month about 22,000 fish washed ashore (some estimates say as many as 65,000 died). At least 14 species of freshwater mussels – the river’s entire population – were destroyed, wiping out nearly every aquatic species along a 35-mile stretch of the waterway.

“That’s the ultimate tragedy,” says Frank Jernejcic, a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. “Fish will come back, we can get the fish back. The mussels are a generational thing.”

The scene was horrific: Three-foot long muskies washed up along the riverbanks. Mud puppies, a kind of gilled salamander that lives underwater, had tried to escape by crawling onto nearby rocks. Many of the fish were bleeding from the gills and covered in mucous. The die-off marked one of the worst ecological disasters in the region’s history.

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With our nation's still unquenchable (and still highly subsidized) thirst for fossil fuels, the false comfort of NIMBY-ism and the fairy-tale notions of "safety in numbers" is quickly vanishing in our cities, as controversial oil and gas exploration projects creep into metropolitan areas. Incredibly, this geographic trend is accelerating just as new drilling techniques are evoking serious concerns about excessive air pollution and about adverse effects on limited water supplies -- problems that have plagued rural energy-producing regions for decades, but are sure to be even worse as they hit densely populated areas.

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Like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf that would steal the nation's attention (and 11 lives) just two weeks later, Upper Big Branch was the inevitable outcome of regulators turning a blind eye to a greedy corporate culture that puts profit above human lives. But this is nothing new. Coal, oil and gas companies in the U.S. have been getting away with murder for years. Sometimes it is just less obvious -- the slow poisoning of our air, water and food; the deterioration of human health, the loss of homes and jobs, the obliteration of whole communities and ecosystems.

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The Atlantic bluefin tuna — an animal that reaches 1,500 pounds, swims at 40 miles per hour, heats its blood 20 degrees above ambient and crosses the breadth of the ocean — is in serious trouble. The western, American stock has declined by about 80 percent and the Mediterranean-spawned population by about 70 percent. Even after the fish garnered a series of major PR hits (such as campaigns by Greenpeace and Sea Shepherds to liberate netted tuna in the Mediterranean last year and my subsequent New York Times Magazine cover story), the bluefin remains persistently present on menus around the country and around the world.

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The pipeline decision was a true upset. Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

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Howard is one of the chief architects of the "Cleveland Model" -- an effort to create good jobs in depressed urban neighborhoods by fostering for-profit cooperatives founded on a principle of environmental sustainability. The neighborhoods targeted by Howard's Evergreen Cooperative Initiative suffer from 40 percent unemployment, but he suggests tossing out any preconceptions one might have about whether or not desperately poor people care about the environment. Howard recounts one cooperative worker telling him, "I thought I'd have to move to Portland to become part of the green revolution, and now I can say that we lead the way in Cleveland."

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Sewage overflow is the No. 1 source of pollution for New York's waterways, says Percifield, a graduate student at the School of Art, Media, and Technology at the Parsons New School of Design. But information on how often or when the overflows occur is in short supply. Percifield believes that if New York City's water users had access to timely information, they could adjust their behavior to cut down on the amount of actual sewage they send into the system at the very moment overflows are happening. Or at the very least decide to postpone that swim in the East River.

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Money Rules: It's not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip.  In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents.  We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts.  We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television.  We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

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