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.

Q. Climate change has emerged to be the dominant issue in the green space. How has that changed the way the Nature Conservancy does its work?

A. Right before I joined, TNC decided to be in the policy arena in connection with climate change. That was a reasonably big decision. TNC happens to be one of the few conservation organizations that is determinedly nonpartisan, and actually does have friends on both sides of the aisle. That’s an asset, and that was something that my predecessors on the board were concerned about protecting. But we try to identify the biggest threats to our missions from a science lens, and identify the biggest tools to address those threats. And so our scientists reasonably said, climate change is not only a threat to what we want to do, it will undo everything we’ve already done. It trumps everything else. So then we said, OK, what’s the best way to address that? So we engaged in the policy battle.

And then it got really interesting. We were members of USCAP [the U.S. Climate Action Partnership]. I know USCAP was controversial, and anyway it didn’t succeed, although we got darn close. But it was a high-profile thing. So if you were a big donor who had misgivings about TNC being in the climate game, you would get a direct call from me to explain what we were doing. People would say, well, why are you doing the climate thing? And I would answer just like I did. And they would say, yes, that’s fair, you’re supposed to be science driven.

So mostly that has all died down. Now I think we are as much in that game as anyone, both in the international, domestic, and even state-by-state approaches. And it shows that these organizations have more resilience than you think. There was a lot of trepidation about that, but everyone’s been fine and we’re in the game.

Q. TNC has also made a recent shift to working in urban areas. What’s the thinking behind that?

A. If you came to a TNC event and looked around the audience, you would see well-to-do older white people. And if you say to them, how did you become a conservationist? They would often say, oh, when I was a kid, my grandparents had a ranch or a farm or took me hiking, that kind of thing.

So now you think about the future and you look at the data and you say, wow, young kids, they spend less than one-third of the time outdoors than people my age did. By 2030, something like 70 percent of the world’s people will live in cities. And obviously the world’s becoming more diverse. So what do we do about that?

I happen to have a city background. So when I arrived I asked our chief scientist, hey, how come we can’t do work in cities? And he said, oh there’s no reason we can’t, we just choose not to. And so then I sort of put the green light on — let’s find urban stuff — and it’s getting great traction.

We got a grant from Toyota to take inner-city kids, sometimes from really bad circumstances, and put them in our projects in the summer. I now know a lot of these kids, and often they just wanted a safe place to be in the summer when school was out of session. So they’d go out into nature for the first time in their life and a couple months later they’d be, like, walking the walk, wearing fleeces, the whole thing.

Now we have more than 500 graduates of that program [called LEAF]. Ninety-six percent of those kids go to college. Eighty-five percent of them are nonwhite. And more than one-third of them are majoring in life sciences like environmental studies and biology, whereas on average, 6 percent of Americans major in life sciences — and those that do are 82 percent white. And so we think we have real evidence that you can use nature in so many ways.

Q. You come out of the world of business and investing. Do people in that world understand what you’re doing now?

A. To be honest, the business guys are pretty smart. It’s the environmentalists, including my colleagues, who have more to learn here. I was at this Fortune conference this week — honestly, it’s so interesting to me, most business people who pay a little bit of attention to this, or make an effort to understand it, kind of get it. The pushback and criticisms is all from environmentalists.

I don’t want to be too critical of environmentalists, because these organizations are really good at getting things done. But I think we have some bad habits. We are quick to portray things as good vs. evil. And the closer I get to all this, I just think that’s usually not true. More often it’s grayer and more complex than that.

There’s two bad consequences of that. First, it turns off parties that we would want to work with. It discourages them from working with us. It also, I think, confuses environmentalists, because then they say the reason these things aren’t happening is that people are bad. But I could argue, and I think with real evidence, that sometimes the reason things that we want to see happen aren’t happening is because we haven’t had a good dialogue and explained things well, and we haven’t actually acknowledged holes in our argument.

Q. Give us an example of how you’re working with the corporate crowd.

A. We’re very much in the business of understanding and demonstrating that ecosystems can provide the most resilient, and most cost-effective protection from the bad consequences of climate change. The Dow [Chemical Co.] thing, which I write about in the book, is really interesting in its subtleties. The company’s CEO, Andrew Liveris, he gets it, so he says, we have an opportunity here at Dow to test these theories of TNC’s, and if they work, it should be good for our business. Also, we’re a global citizen, and we have a big environmental footprint; it’s the right thing for us to do, to be experimenting with this stuff.

I put together a team of really good scientists, and I sent them to Freeport, Texas, which is where Dow’s big facility is. One of our theories was that coastal ecosystems would provide better protection from storms — because the plant down there is right on the coast. So our scientists said to the engineers, what about storms? And they said, we’re ready for that. Here are our seawall plans. And they know everything, A to Z, about seawalls. And our guys said hey, well, have you thought about coastal ecosystems? And they said, no, sounds interesting. Show us your data. And we don’t have data to that same degree. And so we’ve gotta make that case. That’s the spirit of the project.

But then other stuff happened. We learned, just because we were hanging around down there, that as the plant expands they have to put in new scrubbers in their chimneys, to deal with local pollution issues. But then our scientists said, hey, I think tree plantings will do that. So then we checked into it — and this isn’t a done deal, but the EPA’s been very encouraging — but it could be the case that Dow will be able to save money, instead of putting scrubbers in chimneys, which of course do nothing for anyone, other than address the local pollution issues — they’ll be able to plant trees up and down the Brazos River. There are enormous co-benefits, even to Dow there, protecting that watershed, but community benefits too.

And then because of the way the wind patterns flow, Dow might be able to plant trees in Houston and get credit for dealing with their pollution issues. So now you’re not building scrubbers, you’re planting trees in a local area and protecting your watershed, and you’re planting trees in Houston — a fine city, but one that could use more trees.

This is exciting stuff. But that only happens if you get these parties together, get everyone to just shut up basically, and roll up their sleeves and work.

Q. The Nature Conservancy is working with companies like Dow and Coca-Cola that are spreading nasty chemicals and high-fructose corn syrup around the planet. It’s one thing to get corporations like that to green their operations, but can you get them to think a little more holistically about the stuff they’re putting out in the world?

A. It’s complicated, right? And don’t assume — don’t ascribe more power or clout to us than we have. But when I came, I had this view, or a theory, that we could do the kinds of things we’re doing with Dow, which is show them that they can improve their business and get better environmental outcomes. And so that’s what we’re trying to do with a bunch of companies — Cargill, Coke, Pepsi, Dow, Rio Tinto – these are the guys. So it’s controversial.

But other than folks on the far left, most folks seem OK with the thought. We tell them that we’re going to disclose everything as fast as we can. That way, if you see an opportunity for us to do something better, or if we’re making a mistake, you’ll tell us. We’re not trying to make money or anything. We’re trying to achieve our mission. Most people seem to think that’s reasonable.

Then you say, yeah but gosh, Coke’s product is so bad. And sometimes people say to me, Mark, you seem to be a person who has like healthy food habits, what the hell are you doing? But I — this may be romantic or naïve, but I think when we get people, like these Dow engineers, they were a little bit hostile, in fact, on arrival. Now they kinda like our scientists, because they’re likable guys and gals, they’re smart. And then because they’re working with us they go out in these ecosystems, look at them, understand how they work, and they kind of become environmentalists.

So I think we are going to turn our corporate allies into environmentalists. But you’re asking something even harder. You’re asking, what’s Coke going to do about its product, or how can they be an even nobler citizen? I don’t know the answer. And it’s not exactly TNC’s job. If Coke’s product is a bad product, I think the government has to say so. That’s my personal answer. I don’t think you can ask a business to not be a business.

Q. But if all you do is green your operations, it’s window dressing. If these corporations were serious about making a difference, wouldn’t they be in Washington, lobbying for smarter policies on climate, for example?

A. It’s hard to get companies to do the right thing. Look at fracking. Whenever I talk to an energy industry executive in the big companies, I say you, not us, YOU should be the champions of smart regulations. You’re screwed. Otherwise these small upstarts are going to create some disaster, you’re all going to get blamed, things are going to get shut down. What are you waiting for?

I think it’s absolutely in the energy industry’s interest to have the toughest regulation possible. It’s just sort of a hard thing for them to get around. They’re good at fighting stuff they don’t like, but to be for regulatory policy is so unusual, they don’t know how to do it.

Q. What’s next in terms of policy for you guys?

A. What’s next in terms of importance, for sure, is a price on carbon. It trumps everything. Maybe a close second, from a U.S. perspective, is rebuilding bipartisan support for the environment. I’ve had private conversations with really important, younger Republicans that would surprise you. And they’ve said to me, look, I’m ambitious, and I know that we can’t be the anti-science, anti-environment party and succeed in the grand scheme of things. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. How can we get out of this?

It’s not going to happen in the Obama administration. I don’t think anything’s going to happen. It’s so sad. And I say that without blame — I mean I would blame the Republicans personally, but the Obama administration’s probably responsible too. Everybody’s decided they’re going to vilify each other for the next few years and nothing’s going to happen.

But I do think there’s a pent-up demand for things to happen by everybody. So we might have an exciting period of action right after that. And anyway, you’ve got to hope that, ’cause we’re screwed otherwise. But there are Republicans who want to get out of this corner. And they also say to me, Mark, you’ve got to get these other environmentalists to back off attacking and vilifying us, because it makes it hard for us to get out of this corner.

Now, you could also say, but they deserve to be attacked! Yeah, but somebody’s going to have to be the adult in the room and end this cycle.

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.

Studies conducted by University of Colorado snow scientist Mark Williams and his colleagues predict that, if we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever. The Great Melt will hit maritime ski resorts in the Cascades and Sierra even sooner. A study in New England found that only four of the region’s 14 major ski resorts will still be profitable by 2100 — if they even survive that long.

Given the prognosis, you’d think that ski industry leaders would be screaming for action on climate change. With a few notable exceptions, you would be wrong.

Last March, a group of industry insiders sent a letter to the trade groups that are charged with promoting skiing around the country and lobbying for its interests in Washington, D.C., begging them to act before it’s too late.

“We believe strong national climate policy … should be a primary focus of industry trade groups,” said the letter, which was signed by the CEOs of Powdr Corp, Aspen Skiing Co., clothing manufacturers Patagonia and The North Face, professional snowboarders, and others. “We know this year’s dry season can’t be solely attributed to climate change. But the extreme variability of the weather, and increasingly violent storms, are exactly what climatologists predict in a warming world. 2011 gave us a taste of that future, what PBS recently called ‘mind-boggling extreme weather’ resulting from warming, what meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters called ‘steroids for the atmosphere.’”

The response from the trade groups was tepid. The National Ski Areas Association has created a program called the Climate Challenge that encourages resorts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it has advocated for clean energy programs on the national level. Many individual resorts have cleaned up their operations by shifting to renewables like wind power. But when it comes to the larger fight against climate change, most industry bigwigs would rather watch quietly from the sidelines.

“It’s a tough reality to swallow,” Elizabeth Burakowski, a PhD candidate in snow science at the University of New Hampshire, told me. “It’s bad for business.”

Burakowski co-authored a study [PDF], released in December, about global warming’s disastrous economic impacts on the ski business. It was commissioned by two environmental groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council and Protect Our Winters (aka POW), which was founded by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones to raise awareness of climate change — and it got the same response from the industry as that letter from the CEOs: Yes, climate change is a problem, but let’s just leave skiing out of it, shall we?

To be fair, the ski biz has plenty to worry about as it is. This is from a sidebar to my Mammoth story:

Nationally, the number of visits to ski resorts has remained essentially flat since the industry started keeping track in 1979. Analysts blame younger people, who aren’t replacing aging Baby Boomers, the ski industry’s main market. And now comes the news that snowboarding, a sport largely credited for saving the industry in the 1990s, is on a steep downhill slide. A report released this winter by RRC Associates, a company that tracks winter recreation, found that the percentage of snowboarding visits to ski areas has declined over the past two years, while the number of days boarders head to the mountain has dropped sharply in the past decade.

I know that the industry has brought many of these hardships on itself, but I grew up in a ski town, so I sympathize with those who are struggling mightily to keep the business, and their communities, alive. I also love skiing. I’m teaching my two young daughters the joys of sliding around in the snow.

I’ve come to accept that this is a dying pastime — my kids will ski, and maybe their kids, but beyond that, there simply won’t be enough snow, at predictable times of year, to support anything close to the kind of skiing that I’ve enjoyed.

In the meantime, however, it would be nice if there were more visionaries in the $66 billion winter sports business — more people like heads of Powdr Corp., Aspen Ski Co., Patagonia, and The North Face — who are willing to sound the alarm about climate change, and put their economic heft into pushing for action. Skiing as we know it may be doomed, but there’s still plenty to fight for.

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.

The news came just six weeks after the Times announced it was dismantling its special environmental team of seven reporters and two editors, to the great consternation of many of its readers.

A few optimists argued that it was a positive sign that the Times was moving its best and greenest out of their “ghetto” and pushing them out into the broader organization. Bora Zivkovic made the most eloquent case in Scientific American’s A Blog Around the Clock: “Instead of the environmental vertical, The New York Times will now have an environmental horizontal — environmental angle permeating a lot of other stories, as environmental reporters talk to and influence their new office neighbors.”

Ah yes, we’ll send the greenies out like little viruses, and pretty soon the business and style sections will be positively infected with great stories about climate change and mass extinction!

It’s a quaint notion, but the reality of life in a newsroom — whether it’s the Times or a small nonprofit like Grist — is that unless a topic is built into a reporter’s job description, and unless there are editors and colleagues holding reporters to account for covering that topic, it inevitably gets pushed to the bottom of the ever-growing pile of priorities. The world and, lord knows, a journalist’s inbox, Twitter feed, RSS reader, etc., are just too full of distractions.

Beyond that, the Green blog played an important role at the Times, picking up important stories that the print edition missed. Here’s Media Matters:

Several mainstream media outlets — including the New York Times print edition — ignored an October 2012 report on the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, but the Green blog covered it. In November, a World Bank report warning of the calamitous effects of climate change went unnoticed by the New York Times print edition, but not by the Green blog. Since the closure of the environment desk, the Green blog has accounted for 64 percent of the paper’s climate change reporting. And since January 2012, the Green blog has devoted nearly twice as much coverage to the threat of ocean acidification.

I spoke with Tom Zeller, who was hired by the Times in 2008 to start the Green blog’s predecessor, Green Inc., which lived in the Business section. Not long thereafter, it lost the “Inc.” and moved out on its own, under the new environment team, where it “flourished,” according to Zeller, who left the Times for a job at Huffington Post in 2011.

Zeller said he was sad to see the blog go, not so much because he thinks the paper’s environment coverage will suffer, but because readers will no longer have a convenient place to go to find it. He pointed out the Business section’s Energy & Environment page and the Science section’s Environment page, which both aggregate Times environment coverage, but added, “Dismantling the green blog does make it harder for readers with a deep interest in this subject area [to keep] gathering in one place and commenting on stories, interacting with reporters and each other in the comments section, etc.”

Zeller also pointed out that the Green blog was the one place where “reporters could unload their notebooks — write about the stuff that didn’t make its way into the newspaper.” The blog also served as an incubator of up-and-coming freelance reporters, who don’t appear to have another outlet for these stories at the restructured newsroom. According to the Times editors, environment coverage will be shunted to the Bits and Caucus blogs, which cover technology and politics, respectively, and Andrew Revkin will continue with his Dot Earth blog (he wrote about the Green blog’s demise here), but the Green blog is obviously more of a loss than they’ll candidly admit.

As for the Washington Post, the paper tells CJR it will replace Eilperin, and that it has no plans to significantly change its environment coverage. The move has raised hackles among climate hawks nonetheless. “No point in keeping one of the country’s leading reporters on the story of the century,” quipped Joe Romm at Climate Progress. “She had a good run, but that climate story is so five minutes ago.”

And at the Times, shifts are already underway. The two former environment team editors have already been assigned to different beats, and at least one reporter, Mireya Navarro, who covered the environment in the New York metro area, has been assigned to a different beat entirely. She now covers housing.

“There was a time when this paper covered every ship that came into New York harbor,” explained one Times insider, who asked not to be named. “The paper is to some extent plastic. It reorganizes itself to meet the requirements of the world around us.”

It’s hard to look at these latest moves and see a publication reorganizing itself to better mirror what’s happening in the world. With the environment team disbanded and the Green blog discontinued, we will inevitably see less reporting on these topics, even as they become ever more urgent. But then, that’s probably a sign of the (ahem) times, as the old newspaper model continues to wither and digital media and the blogosphere fill the void:

“The paper as a whole is getting slightly smaller,” said my Times source. “We may be doing a little less of everything.”

UPDATE: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan posted a column on Tuesday that begins, “Judging by appearances, things are not looking good for environmental reporting at The Times.” Read it here.

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.

Much has been written about how environmentalists have failed to get substantial legislation through Congress since the golden age of the Clean Air and Water Acts. The particulars of their many failures are varied, but it basically boils down to this: Their opponents always manage to dumb the debate down to “jobs vs. the environment” — and when that happens, you can guess who wins. In Washington, as they say, money talks.

Not long ago, Jewell’s industry — made up of companies that manufacture and sell tents and backpacks and kayaks and such — was having similar problems. Frank Hugelmeyer, CEO of the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, remembers huddling over drinks at the Hyatt in Washington, D.C., after a frustrating day of lobbying on Capitol Hill in 2004. The industry was growing by leaps and bounds, but “in the halls of Congress, we were still being treating as tree-huggers,” he told me last spring as I was reporting a story about the industry for High Country News. “I remember saying, ‘We need to quantify this — the real true impact of outdoor recreation.’”

The notes they scribbled on a napkin that evening would inspire two years of work, funded by REI, aimed at putting a price tag on outdoor recreation nationwide. The resulting report, published in 2006, estimated that the outdoor business generated an astronomical $730 billion annually. The figure included everything from gear manufacturing and sales to hotel rooms and restaurant tabs, but if you start throwing numbers like that around, politicians’ ears perk up, Craig Mackey, the OIA’s director of recreation policy, told me. “That report has gained us an enormous amount of traction in Washington, D.C.”

The most recent industry report [PDF] — released at a press conference last summer where Jewell stood side by side with the president of off-road vehicle manufacturer Polaris and the governors of Utah and Washington — found that, if you toss in ORVs and power boats, Americans spend $645 billion a year on recreation. According to the industry, that number dwarfs what we spend annually on pharmaceuticals, cars, gas, or household utilities.

Under the Obama administration, OIA bigwigs and outdoor company CEOs have become regulars at D.C. press conferences unveiling initiatives to get more Americans recreating on public lands. (The industry’s interests dovetail conveniently with the Obamas’ fight against childhood obesity.) And now Jewell might be unveiling those initiatives herself instead of smiling silently off to the side.

And the environmentalists who love her so much? After decades of being blown off as dirty hippie backpacker types, they can finally declare, with a straight face and data to back them up, that protecting the public lands from oil and gas drilling and other ecological insults is not just the right thing to do — it’s also good for business.

Turns out that the argument has traction. In 2009, at the urging of outdoor industry leaders (among many others), Congress passed, and the president signed, the Omnibus Public Lands Act, protecting more than 2 million acres of new wilderness and more than 1,000 miles of newly designated wild and scenic rivers, and expanding the national parks and monuments system. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) both cited the OIA’s numbers in speeches supporting the bill.

Since that time, of course, we’ve seen the Tea Party revolution and a return to congressional gridlock. But now comes Jewell and the hope that, with her business savvy and the might of her industry, we might see more progress yet.

But will Jewell really be the answer to all the greenies’ prayers? If the Senate confirms her — and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t, despite flailing from right-wing pundits who say the one-time petroleum engineer is too green — she will be the first Interior secretary in at least 30 years who doesn’t wear a cowboy hat. This bodes well for those who value the public lands for things other than grazing cows, logging, and mining: Jewell is, above all, a business woman, but her loyalties clearly lie with those who view the public lands as a playground, not the source of commodities like minerals or meat.

Some have raised legitimate questions about whether the interests of Jewell’s industry line up with what’s best for the land. Off-road vehicle riders love nothing better than tearing up the virgin (and extremely fragile) deserts managed by Interior. And while “human-powered” recreation nuts like myself aren’t drilling and fracking the heck out of the public domain, we burn a fair amount of the resulting fuel in order to get to our favorite recreation areas. As Jewell herself quipped at the press conference last summer, “I don’t know anyone who walks to the trailhead.”

Jewell will no doubt continue her push to get more people — particularly young people and people of color — into the outdoors. That’s good for both the outdoor business and the environmental movement, which have become alarmed of late at the old age and whiteness of their customer/membership bases. It’s also a priority for land managers, who are under increasing pressure to make public lands “pay their way.” With land management budgets in shambles, we will likely see more pressure to outsource services like campground management to private companies and to create “public-private partnerships.”

But the biggest unknown surrounding public lands conservation is Jewell’s boss-to-be, President Obama. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are sure to block any conservation measures from passing through Congress, and while Jewell can steer the department toward more eco-friendly land management, there is a limit to what she can do from inside a government juggernaut like Interior. That means that her most powerful tool for any lasting progress is to work through the president, via executive fiat.

President Clinton used his executive powers to create a pile of new national monuments at the encouragement of his Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt. So far, however, Obama has shown little appetite for such action. He has made it clear that he plans to continue the oil and gas drilling orgy that his predecessor started. Meanwhile, he has protected less public land administratively than each of the four presidents who preceded him — even George W. Bush.

Can Jewell convince Obama to create a substantial conservation legacy, even if it’s only to shore up her beloved “recreation economy”? It might require getting him off the golf course and out onto the Potomac in a kayak — but then, I suspect that Jewell knows people who could provide the necessary gear and instruction.

CORRECTION: The original version of this story suggested that the outdoor recreation economy had shrunk between 2006 and 2011. A spokesperson for the Outdoor Industry Association tells us that, according to the industry’s numbers, it has been growing at approximately 5 percent a year.

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?

A. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got back [from Brussels]. I looked for consulting gigs and startups doing sharing work. I also organized a monthly salon about sharing and collaboration called Abundance League. We did it every month for five years. There were 20 to 40 people at each meeting, and at the beginning, we would have a gift circle — you would say what your passion is, what your gifts are. After everyone does that, you really get to know people and what they’re all about. And they get to know you — sometimes better than you do.

I literally open-sourced my career. My friends knew who I should talk to and where I should go. They moved me around like a chess piece. That’s the kind of community we built.

Q. Isn’t all this sharing and gift circle stuff a little “kumbaya” for contemporary America?

A. The thing is this: The life experiment I ran with Abundance League upended some core assumptions that I held and that are widely held in our culture — that competition, accumulating possessions, and pursuing your own self-interest results in the good life. I found out firsthand something completely different — that collaborating with peers to maximize common good was much more fun and meaningful.

There’s nothing kumbaya about it. It’s just a better life. And it’s nothing new. Wisdom traditions throughout the world speak of the salvation found in serving the common good. What is new is that peer-to-peer social relations and dynamics are ascending and could become the dominant way of life.

Q. You spent a year experimenting with a bunch of different facets of sharing. Give me some highlights.

A. My wife, Andrea, and I started a childcare coop and a monthly parents potluck which brought people from the coop together, but also other parents from the neighborhood. We also did a babysitting coop: If Andrea and I wanted to go out on a date, one of the other parents would babysit, and we’d do the same for them.

I donated my car — my surf wagon, an old Volvo — to charity. I became a train commuter and a biker and tried peer-to-peer car sharing for first time. We save $4,000-5,000 a year on car expenses.

Q. You also pulled some of your money out of Wall Street, right?

A. I started to make the shift that year to social lending. I have probably 15 percent of my savings in Prosper and LendingClub. The basic idea is that you can safely lend to strangers. They have credit ratings on everyone. [To minimize your risk,] they encourage you to lend a tiny amount of money on many loans. I use a heuristic: Invest a tiny bit of money in the smallest loans. I’ll make $25 investments in a collection of $5,000 loans. So far, I’m averaging about 9 percent return. I like it because that’s close to the long-term average of stock market return but without the volatility, and I feel like it’s less risky.

Q. Let’s talk about these dog sharing websites for a minute. At what point does “sharing” become “free dog care”?

A. [Laughs] Some of these things I just scratch my head at. But I think what’s interesting here is, why not try it? The cost to start an internet startup has gone from millions to thousands. It used to be, you’d spend millions on market research. Now, why not just put the site up? Look at Airbnb: It sounds nuts to rent out a spare room or a mattress on the floor, but you could try it out really easy and they made a success out of it. And coworking: When it first started out, it sounded nutty — a bunch of strangers sitting in a room working together — but it has gone viral globally.

Q. Some of these business ideas take off and some crash and burn — Neighborgoods is out of business. What separates the winners from the losers?

A. Sharing works best when you have high-value assets that have a lot of excess capacity — so your car, for example, which just sits there most of the time. Transportation is linked to accessing things of high value – work, leisure, education. Access to place is quite valuable. So ride sharing and car sharing companies have gotten a lot of funding.

Commercial space is also very high-value. That’s why coworking has taken off. Shareable is a small nonprofit. We could get our own office, but with all the furniture and phones and wi-fi, it would be pretty expensive. But here [Shareable staffers rent space at Hub SoMa in San Francisco], we can get all of the stuff that we need, on demand: the coffeemaker, the wi-fi, conference rooms — we can even rent space for an event.

With a thing like Neighborgoods, you’ve got two problems. The first problem is that you’re dealing with low-value assets. You don’t want the drill, you want the hole. But nobody shares drills, and I mean, shit, they’re like $30. Why not just buy one? It’s also really tough to get a two-sided market going.

Q. OK, so given the limitations, how revolutionary is this sharing economy business, anyway?

A. I believe the sharing economy is a fundamental shift in the way we produce and govern. Broadly speaking, it’s becoming more democratic. The cost of interactions and production are low enough that individuals and small groups now have the power that only large corporations had a few years ago.

Look at the whole “maker” movement: People now have shared access, through hacker spaces and all the open-source software, to a wide range of production tools like 3D printers, CNC routers. You can go to Brightidea and get an idea, prototype it at Techshop, where you have access to three-quarters of a million dollars in machine tools in practically every medium – plastic, metal, wood – and then you go on Kickstarter and get funded. Once you have a product, go on eBay, Etsy, or Shoplift and sell it. One person can become a manufacturer in weeks.

On one hand, it’s never been more difficult to find a job. On the other hand, it’s never been easier to create your own. We’re shifting from a top-down factory-style society to a peer-to-peer, network-driven society.

Q. And sharing is infiltrating our government, too?

A. San Francisco recently launched a “participatory budgeting” process. People in certain neighborhoods decide how a portion of the city budget gets spent. It’s very democratic. This actually started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the 1980s. It is already in 1,500 cities around the world, but it hadn’t spread to the U.S. Four cities in U.S. are now trying it out.

Q. As more of these sharing startups go corporate, does the sharing economy risk losing its soul?

A. I think corporations should get involved, but if they really want to build a thriving business, I think they have to recognize that people are after something different than an impersonal, closed experience, where the user doesn’t have any control or input into what happens.

Airbnb is the leader, and one of the reasons they gained popularity is that it is so different from hotels. At its best, Airbnb provides a unique experience that gets you connected to the local scene and local culture. As they scale, they risk losing that special quality. If Airbnb becomes just a better-looking version of VRBO, that’s bad for them and bad for customers as well.

Can corporations scale this culture that makes sharing so unique and fun? Maybe, but only if they recognize that what makes this so revolutionary is the shift from a consumer culture where everyone is judging and competing with each other to a collaborative culture where we look at each other as allies.

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.

Some companies have been less than graceful about it. Uber, the smartphone-powered town-car service that sets up shop in new cities without consulting local officials, is now being sued by cab drivers and car-service companies in San Francisco and Chicago, and faces a $20,000 fine from the California Public Utilities Commission. In Washington, D.C., the company (and its many adoring fans) beat back plans to outlaw the service, and convinced the city council to pass a new law explicitly legalizing it, but it was a rather nasty process.

Driving this type of clash is a sense among some startups that the sharing economy should be immune from government rules designed for companies created in the old model. Arun Sundararajan, an associate professor at NYU’s business school, wrote in Wired in October that reputation systems (Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky calls them “magical”) and the transparency of the web make regulations obsolete:

After all, profit is a much more powerful driver for quality than regulatory compliance. If your last customer — one who has been vetted by others and has built reputation credibility — complains about the hygiene levels of your shared lodging, your future business prospects on Airbnb are pretty bleak.

As an added precaution, Sundararajan suggested that low-cost surveillance cameras could be installed in cars or homes that are being rented — and then he took it a step farther.

Why bother with restaurant inspections, when we could put a camera in the kitchen to spot health violations and leave Zagat and Yelp reviews to “administer” the quality control? Do we even need hotel regulators any more, when we have TripAdvisor to give us instant feedback on cleanliness, service, noise levels, and several other dimensions?

Sundararajan’s proposition seems optimistic. I suspect plenty of web-savvy customers share my trepidation at relinquishing the safety of dinner to the handful of anonymous netizens crazy enough to obsess over an online kitchen livecast. While many of these regulatory battles do smack of governments protecting old industries that are “disrupted” by the new sharing model, there are often good reasons that these rules exist.

Tenant advocates point out that laws against short-term rentals, like the one Airbnb users are apparently breaking in New York City, are designed to prevent landlords from turning apartment buildings into hotels and driving the price of living in cities such as New York and San Francisco even higher than it already is. There’s something to be said, too, for requiring taxi drivers to get special certification for the sake of their passengers’ safety. There is clearly a place for a little policing, albeit under some rules that are written with these new business models in mind.

We’ve seen some smart rewriting of the rules already, as with the laws on the West Coast that allow car-sharing companies to provide insurance for car owners and renters. And now, in San Francisco, which has been the cradle of much of the sharing economy, efforts are afoot to work out a more comprehensive system. Mayor Ed Lee, who was elected with help from tech investors, has created a “sharing economy working group” to look at the issues that arise when these new companies shake up the local business landscape.

“Many players in the sharing economy understand that the city is a crucial partner, and understand that city managers really do have a job to do,” says Milicent Johnson, a former Shareable.net staffer who is involved in the discussions in San Francisco. “The unique thing about these companies is that the users run them — and the users are the citizens of the city. The end goal is to do what is best for the city.”

But it doesn’t help that a few of the bigger kids in the sharing scene are being less than forthright about their impacts and infractions.

Airbnb, which claims it’s worth $2 billion, has been cagey about its regulatory issues in New York City and elsewhere. Molly Turner, the company’s public policy director, says Airbnb is “collaborating” with regulators, but wouldn’t provide details. Turner pled ignorance about the report that more than half of the company’s listings in New York were illegal. Responding to the New York Times story in the company’s new public policy blog, Hantman, the global public policy chief, writes only that “New York hosts have generally not been targeted for enforcement.”

Turner points out that in the past two years, Airbnb has created a hosting manual, a “policies” section on its website, a “trust and safety center,” and a “responsible hosting” page. “We try to remind people that there are a lot of things they need to think about when they post a property on Airbnb,” she says.

“I don’t think sharing economy companies are anti-regulation at all,” Turner adds. “The question is what’s reasonable.”

But the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, as Slate’s Matt Yglesias calls it, is still the default for many sharing economy startups. And while this approach served companies like Airbnb in their early stages, it could be dangerous for this budding industry as it continues to grow and spread — not because these industries need regulation per se, but because they’re going to get it one way or another.

“The attitude is that we’ve got a great product and they [regulators] shouldn’t be involved in it,” says Patrick Murphy, CEO of the D.C. lobbying firm 3Click Solutions and one of the organizers of the nonprofit Collaborative Economy Coalition.“But you [sharing economy companies] are a threat to existing industries, and these companies spend millions and millions to protect their market share from each other and anyone from the outside.”

If sharing economy wunderkinds can’t get their acts together and face regulation reality head-on, they may watch their profits decline and lose traction in the battle to make collaborative consumption a societal norm. But the costs to consumers will be much steeper: We’ll all have to go back to renting stuffy hotel rooms and driving our own cars. And that would just suck for everyone.

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.

Q. Why is this kind of collaboration so important?

A. If you look at default rates [on home loans], the biggest cause for a default in the United States was transportation costs. It often amounted to 42 percent of [the household’s] income. It was higher than the mortgage cost, which was 34 percent of income. And then you add energy cost, which varied often between 25 to 28 percent. So all you had to do was have one person [in the household] go half time [from a full-time job], and it was over.

We’ve got to look at communities and look at, how do we have people working more closely to their homes, and how do you put shopping and other things closer to people’s homes? Because people were driving distances for soccer games, distances to shop, distances to work, and you’re basically burning up a lot of money.

Now there’s another factor. From a public health aspect, we can tell you that if you’re in a car with a one-hour commute — one hour in, one hour out — we can tell you what your heart-attack risk is, based upon your race. And it’s really high no matter what race you are, right? Cause it’s not healthy. There’s an absolutely predictable health consequence.

Q. One of the main ways the federal government can affect these types of transportation and health costs is through transportation policy — but Republicans seem bent on keeping the focus on highways rather than improving mass transit or walking and biking infrastructure.

A. HUD and EPA, working with USDOT and the departments of Agriculture and Interior, worked in a collaborative process on the transportation bill. A lot of that got taken out [of the bill in Congress]. But you can’t build a modern transportation infrastructure using an old model. It just doesn’t work. You simply are not gonna build any more highways in major metropolitan areas because they become cost-prohibitive. You can’t tear out hospitals and schools and neighborhoods in order to expand a freeway.

The reliance on the gas tax is also part of the discussions. I have a hybrid, right? It gets 42.8 miles to the gallon. So I get to use roads much more cheaply than my son, who’s in a Highlander that gets 28 miles per gallon. My next cars, though, will either be electric or even more fuel-efficient, as will his. So that gas tax dives. The only solution is going to be a toll or another mechanism. [Transportation Secretary] Ray LaHood talked about actual miles driven — requiring locators on cars and seeing what roads I’m on and what time of day, and have that as a [basis of] payment.

Q. So you and I look at that and we see a system that will attach the true costs to driving and sprawl. But there are some who see tolls and per-mile fees as part of the “war on the suburbs.”

A. Well it’s not a war on suburbs. You know, here’s what happens. We had dense cities, and people said, “I want a better quality of life so I’m moving to the suburbs.” But every time we move away, growth never pays for itself. When you look at the infrastructure — whether it’s for water or for roads, electricity, police, fire — all that stuff costs money. So it is subsidized by areas that already have their infrastructure put in place. And that’s how most suburbs grew. Suburbs had free lunches. And what’s happened now is, the true bill for that is now arriving.

So you look at a place like Washington, D.C., where people tended to move farther and farther and farther away. You take a look at those highways, and go wow, when the true bill comes, this is gonna be an ouch. So people will begin to move into the city, because at least they’ll be home at a reasonable time. Their jobs will be nearby. And people will begin to say, “My life is better. I’m not on the highway.”

Q. We’ve seen some of this — people moving into downtown areas — but many American cities are in rough shape. You’ve even mentioned the possibility of riots.

A. Oh, I think they’re gonna happen. It’s unavoidable.

Q. What do you see out there that makes you think riots are inevitable?

A. We have the largest group of people who are chronically unemployed for a longer period of time than we’ve ever had in our history. Unemployment hit communities of color the second year of President [George W.] Bush’s administration. And we have never in this country faced the issues. You can only hang so long — “What are you doin’ today, man?” “Just hangin’.”

These riots will occur not because of something the president’s gonna do in terms of direct policy. It’s gonna be something that all of a sudden fires up people in a big, big way. It’s gonna be a law-enforcement issue, probably, and then, boom, it’ll be the match on the flammable substances.

Q. Riots in 1968 were the beginning of the end for cities like Baltimore. Anyone who could get out of the city did. If we do see riots again, what happens then?

A. You want to avoid those, because there’s no good side to them. You can’t have cities that look uninhabitable, undesirable — you just can’t.

Q. If you could push one policy initiative in the next two to four years to make a difference for America’s cities, what would it be?

A. Chronic unemployment — that’s gonna be really important. Dealing with climate change and adaptation from an urban level is gonna be critically important. I’d probably choose those two first. There’s ways to implement both: If a city’s going to adapt, it’s gonna rebuild itself or redesign itself.

These look like challenges that are overwhelming. They’re not. They’re opportunities — opportunities to be smarter than ever. And urban mayors, urban electeds, people living in urban areas, and the business community in those urban areas are gonna have to be out of their silos, talking about common visions and purposes, and driving the change. I think we can do that.

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.

Daniel Penner summarized the movie’s plot thusly for Grist:

Corporate salesman and all-American good guy Steve Butler (Matt Damon) tries to sell a teeny, depressed Pennsylvania town on the benefits (i.e. mad cash money) of fracking. Just as it looks like we’re headed for a happy ending, with a well on every plot and a fat wallet in every pocket, Butler is thwarted by a tenacious environmentalist (John Krasinski), some bad press, and a plaid-clad voice of wisdom (Hal Holbrook).

So of course the pundits and greenies have weighed in as well. Kyle Smith in the New York Post calls Promised Land a “groaner of an agenda movie,” referencing reports that the film was partially funded by “the enemies of our domestic gas industry — the foreign oil nabobs in the United Arab Emirates.” Right wingers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere did their best to use this information (apparently true) to discredit the film — months before any of them likely saw it.

Mark Brownstein at Environmental Defense Fund, meanwhile, argues that the film “is not reflexively anti-natural gas.” “You will be sorely disappointed,” he writes, “if you go to the theatre expecting to see lurid visuals of sinister-looking waste water ponds, plumes of diesel soot and road dust, or bucolic landscapes scarred by roads and pipes.” (Um, yeah. That’s totally what I was looking for in a night at the movies.)

A couple of things bear mentioning here. First, Promised Land didn’t start out as a movie about fracking. Krasinski, who co-wrote the script with Damon (with a little help early on from Dave Eggers), told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that it was originally going to be about a wind energy development. Here he is talking to Michael Ordoña at the San Francisco Chronicle:

“When fracking came into the discussion, we started reading this series in the New York Times called ‘Drilling Down,’ and I’d seen a ’60 Minutes’ piece called ‘Shaleionaires,’ about people who were literally becoming millionaires overnight. People had so much potentially to gain, so much potentially to lose (because of environmental impacts associated with fracking). So they were making very, very human decisions. Survival decisions. This wasn’t a political discussion anymore, an intellectual exercise. This was an everyday affair for these people.”

And true enough, there’s actually very little about fracking in Promised Land, other than a couple of quick lines explaining what it is and a (deliberately) dumbed-down eco-scare lesson by Krasinski in front of a classroom full of schoolkids. One walks away with only the vague feeling that we really don’t know much about the impacts – which is actually true, and more than a little unsettling.

But if this is a movie about the soul of blue-collar America, as Krasinski and Damon would have it, then it’s lacking there, too. As Lisa Kennedy writes in the Denver Post, “Promised Land does a careful job honoring small-town America.” But in doing so, it plays down the rage that boils beneath the surface of many rural communities and the deep cultural divides that fracture many small towns. The characters in this film are all too willing to go along with whoever seems to have the more compelling story to tell. They feel a little too salt of the earth, a little too simple-minded, to be real.

Jeanette Catsoulis, in a review for NPR, points out that “Promised Land (unlike Josh Fox’s searing 2010 documentary Gasland) isn’t a howl of anger against corporate callousness.” Which is fine, but having lived through a natural gas boom in a small town in Colorado, I can tell you that in the real world, locals do a lot of howling at each other when big business comes to town.

And that’s just how big business likes it. A number of commentators have said that the final plot twist ruins the affect of Promised Land. I won’t tell you what it is, but I will say this: It is more than a lefty contrivance. It’s too bad that it is made less believable by the rest of the film’s simplistic portrayal of small town America.

In the end, Promised Land, however thin, is a worthy effort. The fracking boom has ridden largely on corporations’ ability to sweep into rural communities and snap up drilling rights before the locals realize what is at stake, and before the scientific and democratic processes can play out. If this film does nothing else but prod people to think twice before signing on to these drilling schemes, then it will have contributed something to the debate — even if the film itself is something of a snooze.

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.

Act 1 Cities step up

Bloomberg’s speech at the U.N. was part of the lead-up to the United Nations Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June. The summit marked the 20th anniversary of the original Rio Earth Summit, and for a handful of starry-eyed optimists, it represented a chance for world leaders to make bold commitments to tackling climate change and other problems.

Rio, traffic-choked and deeply divided between rich and poor, offered a glimpse of the challenges the world’s cities will face as they struggle to accommodate another 2 billion people by mid-century. It was no great surprise, then, that while international diplomats dithered, leaders of some of the world’s largest cities stepped up, committing to bump up their battle against climate change by, among other things, reducing methane emissions from garbage. (Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more powerful than CO2, and can be captured and burned to generate electricity.)

At a press conference, Bloomberg announced that the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — a network of 59 cities, including New York and Los Angeles — had already laid plans to cut 248 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of taking 44 million cars off the road for a year. By 2030, the group could slash carbon emissions by 1 gigaton. “We’re not arguing with each other about emissions targets,” Bloomberg said. “What we’re doing is going out and making progress.”

Act 2 A green-cities arms race

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, U.S. leaders were far too busy running for office to be bothered with the climate fight. President Obama (You are our only hope, Obi Wan!) hardly mentioned climate change on the campaign trail or in the debates. His rival, Mitt Romney, turned it into a punchline.

On the local level, however, urban leaders were engaged in a sort of arms race for the title of “greenest city in America.” And perhaps they should: Cities are responsible for a whopping 70 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released earlier this year by the Carbon Disclosure Project. They are also increasingly vulnerable to heat waves, droughts, and flooding.

In Los Angeles, where a UCLA study found this year that climate change will drive up average temperatures by an average of 4 to 5 degrees F by mid-century, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has enacted an ambitious climate action plan. In Chicago this month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled a new blueprint for creating 645 miles of bike lanes by 2020. Philadelphia, meanwhile, is sewing the seeds of a sort of green urban renaissance, replete with a burgeoning urban farming scene and a new bike share program. And there are many examples in between.

Act 3 Women take the helm

Many of the people leading the fight against climate change on the city level are women — a surprising number of them quite young and, dare we say it, smoking hot. Grist’s assistant editor, Darby Minow Smith, has talked to more than a dozen of these women for her series “Knope and change.” (The name is a nod to Lesley Knope, the main character in the TV show Parks and Recreation.)

Philly’s sustainability director, Katherine Gajewski, is leading the effort to bring the city into compliance with the Clean Water Act using “green infrastructure” — read: green roofs, rain gardens, streets with porous pavement, etc., that slow, absorb, and evaporate stormwater before it overwhelms the sewers. In Gary, Ind., sustainability chief Lauren Riga has ramped up the recycling program and helped launch an urban agriculture program in a post-industrial city that has been compared to post-evacuation Chernobyl. Fort Lauderdale’s assistant city manager, Susanne Torriente, is preparing her city for rising sea levels — and for good reason: Depending on what happens on worldwide climate action, 48 percent of South Florida could end up submerged.

“There’s been a lack of progress at international negotiations. We saw it in Rio,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, head of Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told me earlier this year. “There’s a growing realization that cities are the right level of governance to tackle climate change issues.”

Act 4 A violent reality check

Which brings us to Oct. 29, when superstorm Sandy roared up the Eastern Seaboard and slammed into New York City, revealing just how sinister the impacts of climate change are — and how ill-prepared we are to deal with them, even where urban leaders have drawn lines in the sand.

As Grist’s Susie Cagle wrote as New York was still reeling from the blow, “There are multiple factors that came together to whip up Sandy, and no one causal judgment, however attractive, is fair. But given the evidence, it’s likely that no matter how Sandy came in to this world, climate change has helped this storm grow bigger, go faster, and head farther than it might have in earlier times and cooler seas.” And Sandy was undeniably a taste of what is to come as warming and rising seas and a warming atmosphere whip up bigger, more frequent storms.

Five weeks after Sandy hit, with parts of New York still without power and flooded buildings still too dangerous to enter, Bloomberg appeared at a press conference with Al Gore and Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, to begin laying plans for defending the city from future storms. “We may or may not see another storm like Sandy in our lifetimes, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that we should leave it to our children to prepare for the possibility,” he said.

Act 5 A question for 2013 and beyond

Sandy brought into sharp relief what is at stake with climate change. It also made it clear that cities will not be able to tackle the challenge, or respond to its wrath, alone. And yet, on the national level, politicians continue to ignore the issue or pretend that there is still some debate over whether it is even real. And that, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing American cities today.

In recent decades, the U.S. has turned its back on urban areas, pouring billions into car-centric suburbs while allowing inner cities to crumble. As with climate change, we understand what it will take to assuage many of our cities’ worst problems — joblessness, poverty, crime — and yet we’re content to turn a blind eye, dismiss these as someone else’s problem. Many Republicans go so far as to call any policy that would help cities part of the bogus “war on the suburbs.” Urban sustainability efforts, they say, are a United Nations plot to destroy the American way of life.

In truth, cities are the key to battling the climate conundrum, as Alex Steffen eloquently points out in his new book, Climate Zero, published in Grist last month. The question for Americans — for our national and local leaders, for millennial urbanophiles, and baby boomers who say they want to live in cities again — is whether we’re really ready to commit to making our cities work again. The answer to that question will have huge implications not just for our cities, but for our warming planet as well.

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. Most of the girls’ other gifts were thrift-store finds and things they really needed: new winter clothes, toothbrushes, hair bands — stuff we would have bought them anyway, but infused with a little magic because it came wrapped in reindeer paper. Even relatives and friends who usually shower the girls with presents did their best to restrain themselves (a little).

My writings and TV appearances sparked a lot of healthy conversation, and some folks really got what I was trying to do. My friend Lionel, Chloe’s godfather, took the cake by sending the girls a homemade video of his hunt for an experience that would make him feel close to them at Christmas time, even though he lives 3,000 miles away. (If you watch it, you should know that one of their favorite things in the world is to be launched into a pile of beanbags by Lionel — over and over and over again.)

And the experiences: We did manage to have a lot of those, thanks mostly to Tara, who set out to stretch the Christmas holiday across the whole month of December. We saw Irish dancing and a Santa Lucia parade and Christmas light displays. The highlight was a fantastic production of The Nutcracker featuring sets designed by Maurice Sendak. I was amazed at how well my kids knew the story, both from reading the book and seeing the ballet in past years. (During the scene where the nutcracker battles the mouse king, Chloe stood up on her chair and shouted, “Throw your shoe! Throw your shoe!” at the main character, Clara.)

On Christmas Eve, Tara and the girls made goodie bags packed with cookies, fruit, granola bars, and a couple of bucks, and delivered them to homeless people around Seattle. That night, I cooked a big pot of African peanut soup and we feasted with friends, then headed to the beach for a bonfire and hot chocolate and s’mores. (Just like Jesus used to do!) The girls wore themselves out playing tag and tackle-your-sister in the moonlit sand. Rarely, I suspect, have two kids fallen asleep faster on the night before Christmas.

And me? “The Grinch”? “Ecodad”? The guy who asked people to get his kids nothing for Christmas? I can’t remember a holiday season as rich and full as this one. Even the presents were awesome. From Lucia, I got a great handmade picture with the message, “I wold like to bild a tree howse with you for Christmas!!!!” Chloe’s card said, “Let’s go mountain climbing!” Tara gave me a gift certificate for a night at a Russian sauna.

None of these are things — just promises of more good times to come. And that’s what I gave them, too. Lucia and Chloe each got two “daddy days” — days of their choosing in the coming year when they can call everything off (school, work) and go on an adventure with me, or just stay home and read a good book. Lucia got an afternoon at the art museum. Chloe got a trip to the zoo. Tara got 52 personal days — one day a week during the coming year when I’ll take the kids and she can do whatever she wants. It’s my effort to clear space in her life so she can take care of herself rather than us for a change.

Sure, my “nothings” couldn’t compete with Barbie for sheer, visceral, Christmas Day ecstasy. But I bet if I ask them a few years from now what they remember about this holiday season, it’s the experiences that will stick with them, not the stuff.

So thanks, everyone, for all the holiday wishes and gifts — and especially for the nothings. It’s been a great ride. Now if you’ll excuse me, there are mountains to climb and tree houses to build.