Mark Tercek leads the largest conservation group in the galaxy. As president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy, he oversees a staff of 4,000 people spread around the planet, an annual budget exceeding a half-billion dollars, and land holdings that would fetch billions more if they weren't all locked up for the sake of protecting wild animals. Still, the former Goldman Sachs exec insists that he’s a small-time player in a world where large corporations rule and nature lovers get what they can.

In his recent book, Nature’s Fortune, co-authored by Jonathan Adams, Tercek argues that nature deserves a bigger slice of the pie. He's not looking for handouts (though his organization, like Grist, depends on the generosity of good people like you). Instead, he argues that conservation is good for business -- a message he says is catching on, particularly among corporations and cities.

Witness New York. In the 1990s, faced with the prospect of building a multi-billion-dollar water treatment system, the city instead invested in protecting its watershed in the Catskills, partnering with communities, landowners, and farmers to prevent pollution, rather than paying to clean it up after the fact. As a result, the Big Apple gets clean drinking water at a fraction of what it would cost to build water treatment plants, and the Catskills get an infusion of green -- trees, yes, but also cash. (Tercek and Adams tell that story in the book, in a section that we’ve reprinted here.) The Nature Conservancy is now helping to spread that model to cities all over the world.

Tercek dropped by Grist HQ a few weeks ago for some vegan vittles and a chat with the whole staff. Here are a few of our questions, and snippets of his answers, about how his organization is changing with the times, the challenge of getting city people to care about conservation, and his dealings with the big businesses that make even the Nature Conservancy look small.

Q. Why should we be putting half a billion dollars a year into protecting nature as opposed to say, pushing solar and other renewable energy technology forward?

A. I think we should do both. That new technology should be pursued either by the government doing the right thing because the private sector’s not, or the private sector. Obviously there’s lots of ways to incentivize that private-sector investment -- put a price on carbon. And there are enormous numbers of people who are rich, or powerful and influential, attracted to those initiatives. So they’re going pretty well.

In the meantime, we think the work we do is extraordinarily important. For example, in northwestern Montana, near Glacier National Park, there were 300,000 acres of land made available for purchase by us by Plum Creek. This land, just because of where it’s situated in between other protected areas, was extraordinarily attractive for development -- second homes for well-to-do people. So we bought all that land in one swoop for half a billion dollars.

Now why is that important? Well, all the species that were there when Lewis and Clark were there are still there. So it’s extraordinary wilderness. And if climate change occurs like we expect it will, those grizzlies and lynx, they can migrate north up to B.C. -- we’re doing comparable work right over the border. If we hadn’t done that, this land would have been developed, for sure, and this opportunity would be gone forever.

Ask any pack of bona fide shredders about their exploits on the slopes last winter, and they're apt respond, "Winter? What winter?"

The winter of 2011-12 was one of the warmest, driest winters on record in North America. The skiing and snowboarding was so bad -- and the weather in coastal cities so mild -- that many avid powder hounds just sat it out.

I wrote about the devastating season for the latest issue of High Country News. (You can read the full story on HCN’s website if you sign up for a free trial subscription, or just subscribe -- it's a great pub.) The story is based in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., home to Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, Southern California’s beloved snow sports Shangri-La:

After early storms that got the lifts running in time for the Thanksgiving 2011 rush, Mammoth was socked with a merciless dry spell. Nary a flake fell between Dec. 1 and the end of January. Just over the usually snowbound Tioga Pass, people were ice-skating on the snow-free surface of Yosemite National Park's Tenaya Lake -- for the first time since 1930, old-timers said.

Mammoth Mountain's notorious winds, meanwhile, scattered volcanic pumice across the ski runs. "There were a couple of days when you just said, 'Wow, that was the worst skiing I have ever experienced,' " says Craig Albright, managing director of the resort's ski and snowboard school.

At the end of February, the ski area laid off 77 employees, almost a quarter of its full-time staff. Locals called it Black Wednesday. And as the ski resort went, so went the town, where lodging and sales taxes are the bread and butter. On July 3, battered by the hard winter and hobbled by a string of bad decisions stretching back over more than a decade, Mammoth Lakes declared bankruptcy.

When I visited in December, the community was picking itself up and dusting itself off. This winter has been better for the town and the ski resort. But the story offers a look at what climate change has in store for ski towns -- and some of our beloved winter pastimes.

On Friday afternoon, The New York Times discontinued the Green blog, the paper’s one-stop shop for environment-related news. Then on Monday, the Washington Post announced it was pulling its star climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off of the beat and putting her on an “online strike force” covering the White House.

All of this can only mean one of two things: 1) The environment is fine, or 2) imminent global catastrophe is not as interesting as photo essays of matching, over-upholstered apartments in Manhattan.

The Times decision in particular has people's heads spinning. Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review called the paper’s recent pledge to continue its robust environment coverage “an outright lie.” Paul Raeburn captured the sentiment in a post on the Knight science journalism blog Tracker: “The editors of the Times have perhaps forgotten that they work on an island, and that the entrance to their building is not too far above sea level -- current sea level, that is.” Slate served up a sampling of “the 65-odd other Times blogs that did not get the axe,” which include The Carpetbagger, about awards shows, The Rail, on horse racing, and six blogs on style, fashion, and leisure.

Last week, President Obama nominated Sally Jewell, CEO of the outdoor gear giant REI, to head the Interior Department -- the branch of government that manages national parks, monuments, and rangelands spanning from Ellis Island to Yosemite, and is currently overseeing an epic oil and gas drilling spree. Environmental groups are tripping over themselves to praise the president for his impeccable taste.

"In Jewell, President Obama chose a leader with a demonstrated commitment to preserving the higher purposes public lands hold for all Americans,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune gushed in a statement. Mike Daulton with the National Audubon Society called her “a strong leader who understands that protecting our natural world goes hand in hand with a strong American economy.” Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers, beamed that “she knows how important fishing, boating, and hiking and the great outdoors are to our families, to our future, and to our heritage as Americans.”

You get the picture. Why do the greenies love her so much? For starters, she’s a card-carrying conservationist with a long record of working to protect the wild places where she and her customers like to play. But there’s another reason Sally Jewell is the darling of Big Green groups: Her industry has given conservation cachet in Washington that it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1970s.

Neal Gorenflo had his come-to-Jesus moment with the sharing economy in a parking lot in Brussels.

It was June of 2004, and Gorenflo was well on his way to becoming a bona fide suit. He had worked in the telecommunications business and for an investment bank. Now he was on a strategy team for the global shipping company DHL, up for a promotion, and on a business trip in Belgium -- and he just couldn’t live with himself.

“On the surface everything looked great,” Gorenflo says. “But I felt disconnected from my community and my potential and my loved ones. I went for a jog outside my hotel. I projected myself into the future and I saw a mountain of regret. I stopped in the parking lot of this industrial warehouse and I started to cry.”

That was the breaking point, Gorenflo says. He ran back to his hotel room, resigned from his job on the spot, and vowed to “make a world where people felt like they were part of something meaningful.” He didn’t call it the sharing economy then, but it turns out that’s what he was after, and with a little work, he found it.

Fast forward almost nine years and Gorenflo is founder and publisher of Shareable, a website dedicated to promoting the sharing economy in all its forms, from car sharing to tool lending libraries and even pet sharing. Shareable is a one-stop shop for everything from the scoop on Jellyweek (sorry, you missed it) to a guide to sharing your wi-fi without sacrificing privacy or bandwidth -- and it is, itself, the product of a whole lot of sharing.

I spoke with Gorenflo for Grist’s series on the sharing economy.

Q. What did you do after you quit corporate America in 2004?

If 2011 was the year “collaborative consumption” went mainstream, and 2012 was the year it started to look like a threat to the old guard in the business world, 2013 may be the year that the crazy kids in the “sharing economy” are forced to grow up in a big hurry.

For evidence, look no further than Airbnb, the website that lets us all rent each other’s apartments/tree houses/haylofts for the weekend. A quick gander at the site’s New York City listings last month led the travel news site Skift.com to conclude that more than half of them were in violation of state law.

Airbnb’s response, via its global head of public policy, David Hantman: “We can’t possibly keep up with the law in all the cities.”

But Airbnb's strategy of pleading ignorance or powerlessness in New York, one of its biggest markets, doesn't exactly add up: Here the company actively lobbied against the very rule that so many of its users are apparently flouting. The city’s Office of Special Enforcement has already ramped up enforcement efforts, according to Skift, while a New York Times story about an Airbnb renter who suddenly found himself facing $40,000 in potential fines has Airbnb customers shaking in their boots.

It’s cavalier web startup culture smacking into old-school American bureaucracy, and we’re bound to see it play out over and over in the coming year.

“The tech industry is growing up and learning how to deal with the real world,” says Neal Gorenflo, cofounder and publisher of the web news outlet Shareable.net.

Shortly after being nominated to one of the top posts in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2009, Ron Sims declared, “President Obama has … challenged his Cabinet to prepare for the age of global warming. Success can only come if we transform our major metropolitan areas.”

Ah, those were the days! The following year, the Tea Party would sweep into the House of Representatives. In 2011, Sims, who held a major elected role in the Seattle metro area before his stint in D.C., would retire to Washington state, missing his family and frustrated with the slow pace of change in the nation’s capital.

Today, roughly two years after his return to the West Coast, Sims says he sees progress. Before he went to HUD, as the county executive of King County, Wash., he led the effort to prepare the region for the unavoidable impacts of global warming and worked to weave public health concerns into planning decisions. “We realized that we could predict life outcomes of children, health outcomes of adults, by the zip code they live in,” he says. “If you have a park a quarter mile from your home, your children are not going to be obese. If it’s a half mile away, you begin to see the early signs. But if a park is a mile or more away from a residence, obesity will be a problem. How a neighborhood is designed determines health outcomes.”

As deputy secretary of HUD, responsible for the agency’s day-to-day operations, he worked to bring this awareness to decisions at the federal level, arguing for housing, transportation, and environmental policies that emphasized dense, walk- and bike-friendly development rather than car-centric sprawl. And while these efforts hit roadblock after roadblock, Sims says there has been a shift in thinking in Washington, D.C. That, combined with economic and environmental realities, he says, is reshaping American cities.

Here, Sims talks about his work in Washington, D.C., how the bill is coming due for suburban sprawl, and why he believes we may see riots in inner cities.

Q. How much progress has President Obama been able to make on urban policy issues, given the roadblocks put up by Republicans in Congress?

A. There’s a lot of silo breaking. For example, the collaboration between the EPA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Republicans in the House have attempted to put barriers to that, but you know, the fact is, the staff still meet, so there’s a culture created among how you look at urban areas.

Promised Land, the new eco-themed Matt Damon/John Krasinski flick, hit theaters yesterday with a resounding “Meh.” Justin Chang at Variety calls it “a quietly absorbing if finally somewhat dubious drama.” “Wispy, over-earnest,” says Ann Hornaday at the The Washington Post.

But of course, this isn’t just any tale of corporate greed sullying bucolic, rural America. It’s about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial method of oil and natural gas extraction that is sweeping across parts of the country.

A year ago, as the curtain was closing on 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood in front of an audience at the United Nations and declared that it would be cities, not national governments, that would lead the fight against climate change. “As mayors -- the great pragmatists of the world’s stage and directly responsible for the well-being of the majority of the world’s people -- we don’t have the luxury of simply talking about change but not delivering it,” he said.

2012 would prove Bloomberg right. It would also lay bare just how far we still have to go before cities like New York are prepared for he havoc climate change is wreaking -- and how hard urban leaders in the U.S. will have to fight to get help from Washington on this and a whole host of other issues. In the closing days of 2012, we watched Republicans in Congress balk at funding disaster relief after superstorm Sandy barreled into New York, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in damage along the Eastern Seaboard.

In the immortal words of Philip Bump: “Oh my God, some politicians are dicks.”

To put it all in perspective, here’s an overview of Grist’s cities coverage from 2012 in five acts.

In the end, Barbie got the best of us. Despite weeks of talking and thinking about how to simplify the holiday season and put emphasis on fun times with family rather than the stuff Santa left, my wife, Tara, just couldn’t resist, as she puts it, “making a couple of dreams come true.”

This photo of Chloe, 4, probably tells you all you need to know about her feelings on the matter, but when I asked her last night, she put the Princess Popstar Barbie at the top of the "favorite presents" list. Her 8-year-old sister, Lucia, rated her Surfer Girl Barbie toward the top as well. Sigh. I’ll take some assurance from my aunt Jane, who tells me it’s just a phase: “She [Chloe] has good role models.”

Barbie domination aside, I think we managed to transform this holiday for the better.