I have to admit — sometimes Joe Romm ruins my mornings. As the author of Climate Progress, one of the most influential global-warming blogs on the Internet, few debates on energy or the environment get past his ravenous attention, and he takes particular pleasure in targeting mainstream journalists who’ve written something he deems stupid. That’s been me occasionally -- like the time Romm took me to task for referencing an analysis on energy research and development he found wanting. At least I’m in good company: writers from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have all been the subject of Romm posts.

I don’t know what’s more suprising. That Time named me one of its “Heroes of the Environment 2009” -- I certainly don’t see myself as a hero.  Or that they gave the assignment to Bryan Walsh, given my earlier critique of one of his pieces -- and he still wrote such a generous profile, which continues:

But here’s the thing -- more often than not Romm’s right. A physics Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Romm, 49, clearly has brains to spare. He combines that intellect with a strong sense of moral outrage. He also possesses a Jon Stewart-like quality for pointing out the absurdity of his opponents.

Unlike many climate bloggers, Romm comes at global warming not from an environmental background but from a national-security one. After graduating from MIT, he worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. His job in the twilight of the Cold War was to identify the world’s new big problems -- and as he talked to experts across the ideological spectrum, he found them: energy and climate change. “These were the sleeper issues that were really going to dominate the coming decades,” says Romm.

The 1990s were spent working for the Clinton Administration in Washington, where for several years he was an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, an experience that put him well ahead of the curve on green power. But it wasn’t until Romm’s brother lost his house in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina that climate change became personal. Romm began an in-depth research project to determine whether his brother should rebuild there. The result was the 2006 global-warming book Hell and High Water, which displayed a trademark urgency that bordered on hectoring. “The consequences of doing nothing were far more than what people realized,” he says.

It’s become Romm’s mission to make people realize that -- and his Climate Progress blog is the perfect vehicle for this son of a newspaper editor. What began as a once-a-day side job has become full time, with Romm scouring the Internet for climate studies and filtering them through his own firmly fixed values: that global warming is a potential human catastrophe, but that it can be fixed with today’s green technology, applied relentlessly. It’s “excellent and indispensable,” as New York Times columnist -- and new green champion -- Thomas Friedman likes to say.

It’s also much needed therapy for a writer who spends his time worrying about the fate of the world. “I used to be very frustrated,” he says. “But the blog keeps my blood pressure down.”

Indeed, it does (see “Why I blog").

Walsh is a good reporter, as evidenced by his 2008 cover story, “How to Win the War on Global Warming,” which I thought was first rate.

[Note: If anyone has come here because of the Time story, be sure to read "An Introduction to Climate Progress."]

Time sent a great photographer, Jordan Hollender, who took a lot of photos.  I might try to post some of the others. I’m a little surprised this is the one they used but I certainly do sometimes blog with my daughter on my lap. And she certainly is a great motivation for me to fight to preserve a livable climate for the next generation.

One final comment on the subject of heroes. When your father is a newspaper editor and your mother is also a journalist and your older brother collects comic books, it’s hard not to see journalists as heroes.

Clark Kent, of course, was (is?) a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper.  Peter Parker was a newspaper photographer.  Journalists were secret heroes. With Woodward and Bernstein and All The President’s Men, real journalists themselves became movie heroes to my generation. But now, a great many journalists have become part of the establishment, like Woodward himself, defenders of the status quo, like David Broder, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming.

Certainly I have the greatest respect for Time magazine, which continues to do the best science-based global warming coverage of any major national magazine (see “Time: How climate change is causing a new age of extinction“). So this means a lot coming from them, though it is ironic that I am being recognized in part for taking on the media itself, for being in some sense an anti-journalist, like Jon Stewart.

Let me end with Time’s framing of this issue:

From saving wild mountain rivers in China to measuring the Arctic’s icy expanse, from protecting the lush forests of Africa to conducting a feisty online debate, our green heroes are informed by this simple notion: We can all make a difference….

It’s easy to think that all the hard decisions are in the hands of our leaders alone. Not true. As the men and women in the following pages prove, we can all make a difference. Pen Hadow, leader of a daring survey across the Arctic to measure the thickness of sea ice, puts it this way: “Turning off a standby light once won’t make a difference. Do it for the rest of your life and that amounts to something. And if everybody’s doing something, then we’re moving in the right direction.” We hope our environmental heroes provide both inspiration and action. Like financial pundits, most of them embrace the idea that a crisis also presents opportunity. They are heroes because they set out to discover what that opportunity might be.

We can all make a difference. Indeed, we must.

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On a frigid January night some years ago, a friend and I snuck into a Massachusetts state preserve, stripped naked, and charged into Walden Pond. For a few exhilarating, painful moments we swam, and I imagined some hard-to-name kinship with the pond's most famous neighbor, the 19th century eccentric Henry David Thoreau.

It was a climax in my relationship with Thoreau and his Walden. When I read the book for the first time at age 17, it reawakened the intellectual curiosity that I tried to bury in high school. (It didn't seem useful for attracting girls, not that anything else worked better ... ). Thoreau's reflections on nature inspired me to take a notebook out to the forest preserves that dot suburban Chicago, determined to think deep naturey thoughts of my own. Thankfully, that notebook's been lost.

In college I made my pilgrimage to Walden -- hence the dip. But somewhere around then Thoreau's uncompromising social critique grew tiresome. Like plenty of Walden readers before me, I came to see the great champion of American individualism less as a prophet than as a self-righteous crank. In praising the bright fire within each soul, I concluded, he failed to see the profound ways our lives are connected to others. The famous proof for his hypocrisy is that while philosophizing about self-sufficiency in his solitary shack, he would drop off his laundry at his mother's place back in town.

Lately, trying to make sense of the deeply un-philosophical threat of climate change, I've wondered if Thoreau has anything to say to the movement to halt greenhouse gas emissions. Back-to-nature environmentalists of the '60s and '70s embraced Thoreau's skepticism toward technology -- he distrusted even the telegraph and the railroad. Organic gardeners approved of his bean field. His contemplative habits seemed to fit the spiritual strain of the era.

But now? Environmentalists have largely cast off their crunchy garb in favor of business suits, the better to woo lawmakers and venture capitalists. This is especially true of climate-minded activists. As Time magazine's Bryan Walsh wrote last winter about a renewable energy summit in Abu Dhabi, "There's little about trees or wildlife, nothing about environmental sacrifice -- this is about the business of getting the carbon out of our energy supply as quickly as possible."

All of that suggests the movement has outgrown Thoreau, just as I thought I had myself. I've been prompted to reconsider by Robert Sullivan's recent book The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant. Sullivan, who has written unusual "nature" books on rats and the Meadowlands dumping grounds outside New York City, tries to rescue Thoreau from the humorless image that turned off so many high school English students and the cloud of reverence cast by those who would see Thoreau as a patron saint of wilderness preservation.

I think Sullivan does a great job. In place of the crank Thoreau, he offers evidence for a dancing Thoreau, one who played ditties on his flute, got along well with children, and wrote with his tongue in cheek. In place of the wilderness saint (and hermit) image, Sullivan introduces a Thoreau just as interested in the peopled world as in the natural world, a distinction he didn't buy into anyway.

"Today, adults force high school students to read him, though he critiques the life-in-a-rut grown-up and might prescribe a little teenagerness," writes Sullivan. "He loved nature, but if we read him closely ... we see him cutting down trees, polluting ponds, working with land developers and miners."

It's not hard to see how the humor suffers over the years. Thoreau has a line about eating rice because he likes the philosophy of India. I misread it as deadpan until Sullivan pointed out the joke, uncovering a bit of Thoreau's mischievous streak.

The simplest reason to reconsider Walden's relevance might be its economic context -- Sullivan argues the book was written after a recession as bleak as our own. New England's dominant agricultural industry was unsmoothly giving way to the early stages of a manufacturing economy. Thoreau no doubt had money on his mind at Walden. For much of his adult life he casted about, struggling to make it as a schoolteacher, poet, lecturer, or in the family pencil-making business (where he gladly embraced advances in pencil-tech; it was the uncritical embrace of technology he opposed).

To miss the recession context of Walden is like reading the Grapes of Wrath without considering the Great Depression, Sullivan says. The United States had reached middle age, its political parties grown bloated, and a variety of reformers were grasping about for various fixes. "America needed a kick in the pants and a lot of people knew it," Sullivan writes, "though all those people had very different ideas of where and how to deliver the kick, resulting in no one effective boot."

With that familiar situation in mind, I'd suggest three reasons Thoreau is still worth engaging.

Key to Sullivan's interpretation is the idea of the Walden years as a stunt, with a book deal always in mind. Think No Impact Man, Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, even Supersize Me. These are undertaken as journeys of self-discovery, sure, but also out of full knowledge that the hero is on camera, so to speak.

Same with Walden. Thoreau's itemized list of costs for his hut -- with second-hand materials, it totaled $28.12 and 1/2 cents -- parodied the lists in house pattern books fashionable at the time. The hut's lack of ornamentation rejected the way housekeepers had begun to stylize their homes. In his writing at the pond, Thoreau could describe his own strange life and the reasons he chose it. He knew readers would listen.

The cheap lesson for climate change activists is something about being media savvy. Perhaps there's a bigger message: People look at how you live. Even a stunt shows some investment. That's why David de Rothschild builds his plastic boat. There's an undeniable power in preaching something by living like you believe it.

What first hooked me with Walden was the chapter on solitude and the author's story of returning to the pond after a late dinner with friends to paddle alone and fish. At 17, this deliberate aloneness seemed like an appealing alternative to lame old loneliness. Withdrawing from a society that was "commonly too cheap" felt more noble than tripping around awkwardly inside it. But Thoreau wasn't looking for zero company; he was looking for encounters that let him give and receive full attention: "We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another."

Dealing with climate change -- through legislation, international treaties, renewable energy projects, green entrepreneurship -- is all about playing well with others. Thoreau-as-misanthrope isn't much help. But the Thoreau who praised periods of contemplative solitude because they allowed him to present a more fully awake self when interacting with others -- there's something useful in that.

I haven't even mentioned "Civil Disobedience," the essay in which Thoreau explains why he went to jail instead of paying taxes to fund the Mexican War, seen in its day as an effort to expand the reach of slavery. Here lies the strongest proof that Thoreau's politics were about engaging, not escaping, society and government. "Let your life be counter friction to stop the machine," Thoreau writes in the piece that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. found deeply influential in the following century.

He is not demanding no government but better government: "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."

Civil disobedience still finds some expression in the climate change movement, in demonstrations against coal power and nowhere in the country more than in Appalachia. In their appeal to moral authority, these demonstrators are saying something considerably more difficult than "we all win with green jobs." They're saying, if we don't do anything, some people won't win. They'll die.

I'm all for doing the easy stuff first. By all means, let's take the nearly painless gains to be gotten through weatherizing and retrofitting jobs and saving easy money through energy efficiency. There's money lying on the ground and we may as well pick it up. But once that's done, there's still Thoreau in his hut with his confounding instruction to "simplify" and his aphorisms:  "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

He spoke in glaring moral terms, and that's always a risk. It gets tiresome. It's like the wrong kind of song stuck in your head -- catchy and unrelenting both at once. Sullivan makes a good case that Thoreau wasn't quite as irritating as he's been made out to be. But he was still irritating. Still is. That's why he's hard to ignore.

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Mountaintop, removed. Near Rawl, West Virginia.Courtesy of ILoveMountains.orgMaria Gunnoe.Tom DusenberyWest Virginian Maria Gunnoe won a prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize this week for her work fighting the devastating practice of mountaintop removal mining. It's hard to think of someone more deserving of the prize, which includes a $150,000 award. Gunnoe, 40, has seen her family's ancestral home flooded seven times since coal-mining companies built two toxic-waste ponds above the Boone County property. Mine waste poisoned her well and drinking water. After she began working against coal companies in 2004, "wanted" posters of Gunnoe appeared in local convenience stores, and her daughter's dog was shot.

Despite these obstacles, Gunnoe, a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, has kept up the fight, organizing community members and working successfully for the closure of several mines and for tighter regulations on those that remain open. (Read Jeff Biggers' profile and check out a Grist photo series for more.)

Reached by phone yesterday, Gunnoe sounded alternately energized, calmly optimistic, and as ticked off as ever about what's happening to her homeland. Here are the highlights of our conversation.

Q. First off, congratulations. How do you expect the prize to change your work and how you're able to get your message out?

A. When people find out that mountains are blown up because of their electricity consumption, they tend not to like that. So the awareness is as important, if not more important, than the money.

Q. And what about the $150,000?

A. By the time I pay taxes and pay to have water run into my house, I might have enough left to go grocery shopping. My water is polluted with selenium and other things so I can't use the water that comes into my house right now. We have to buy water in gallon jugs. In order to get city water access I have to get it run in about a half mile from any direction. They want $31,000 to make that happen.

We'll put it this way: the coal industry destroyed our property. They destroyed our water and our access bridges, so just getting access and healthier water into our property could take much of that money. And $150,000 really isn't that much when you're talking about fixing the destruction of the coal industry.

Q. Was there a defining point for you in turning from a citizen into a mountaintop removal activist and leader? How did that happen?

A. It had more to do with the fact that I'm a mother than anything else. I started looking into what my children's future was going to look like, and it didn't look good. The best thing I can do for my children is to educate them and to see to it that they have a healthy world to bring their grandchildren into. And it's not that way right now.

Gunnoe's West Virginia home.Tom DusenberyQ. You're the third woman from West Virginia to win the Goldman Prize. What is it about this part of the country that produces so many tough-as-nails women who fight against mountaintop removal from their own doorsteps?

A. Well, we're fierce mothers. That's the only way I know to explain it. Appalachian women are very concerned about the wellbeing of their children, their grandchildren, and their great grandchildren, because the things that sustain life and culture in Appalachia are being destroyed. The water, air, land, the plant life—everything.

Q. So many people who use that electricity don't live in Appalachia, and get their water from somewhere else. How do you show them the full consequences of the way coal is mined?

A. One of the best ways is to ask them to come to Appalachia and see for themselves. Because you can't fully explain mountaintop removal to people. They need to experience mountaintop removal. It is so big that it's almost like the human mind doesn't have the capacity to absorb the enormity of it.

Another way is to go to iLoveMountains.org. Put in your zip code and it will tell you exactly what mountain was leveled to power your home. It will tell you where the coal comes from that powers your home.

Q. What's the feeling among people on the ground about how the Obama administration will handle mountaintop removal and coal mining?

A. On the ground, there's not much happening. Everything that's happening is on paper. On the ground, mountains are being blown up. If anything, it's exacerbating things by making mining companies move faster. They're afraid they're going be stopped, so they're getting what they can while they can.

Q. Has Obama's Office of Surface Mining signaled that it's going to start doing things differently on these issues?

A. They've not sent clear signals. They're reviewing permits, but there's nothing coming from that. It's better than the Bush admin where they just rubber-stamped permits. The Obama administration has made steps toward reviewing these permits for environmental impact, but there's nothing really happening. The people who live in these communities expect an all-out ban on mountaintop removal coal mining, and we won't give one inch until we get it.

Q. I heard you were meeting with senators this week. Were you able to say that to them or to anyone from the administration?

A. I was able to say that to my senators, and they very much disagree. They think we can have some sort of compromise on this and everybody can come to an agreement of how to do mountaintop removal more "environmentally consciously." But you cannot blow up a mountain and be environmentally conscious. There is no building that mountain back.

Q. What do you make of reports that Obama wants to appoint Glenda Owens, a Bush mountaintop removal architect, to lead the Office of Surface Mining?

A. I have an idea: let's put somebody in charge of the Office of Surface Mining who lives where I live, and let them help set these laws. The people who are running the federal and state regulatory agencies are never the people who are living with the impacts of mountaintop removal. It's almost like they turn a blind eye to it. They don't want to know.

Q. Are enough people in West Virginia and Appalachia waking up to the full cost of mountaintop removal to create real change?

A. Absolutely, especially with the exacerbated mining they're doing now -- they're moving at a pace beyond anything I've ever seen. People are definitely waking up to it, because they're waking up every single morning and every evening with blasting near their homes. Their homes are being shaken off their foundations. Their air is laden with silica dust from the blasting.

And people across the world are waking up to it, too. People are beginning to connect their consumption with the demise of the Appalachian people. And they don't like it.

Q. Anything else?

A. The Appalachian people have been promised prosperity through coal for the last 125 years. And we're poorer now, because we used to be rich in the abundance of the land, and now that's been taken away. And there are fewer jobs than there have ever been here. I think it's time to keep that promise of prosperity in the form of green jobs, which have a real promise for the future. That's the only way we're going to pull ourselves out of this slop.

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For over 20 years, tree-sitters in Northern California have taken a stand for ancient redwoods by camping in their branches and acting as physical barriers to logging. But for now at least, the last trees-sitters have all descended from their perches, thanks to a promise from a timber company that owns huge swaths of redwoods in the area. Pacific Lumber, the largest private owner of old-growth redwoods anywhere, had long been a villain to environmentalists since it was acquired by an especially logging-happy investor in 1986 who quickly stepped up logging of old-growth trees. The company has since gone bankrupt and is now under new ownership as Humboldt Redwood Co.; HRC has promised to avoid clear-cutting and to leave any trees standing that are at least four feet in diameter and at least 200 years old. Before the company's change of heart, though, the threat to ancient redwoods drew in forest activists from across the country who staged regular protests and engaged in direct action to block logging roads so the trees would still be standing by the time a deal was reached to save them.

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For World Environment Day on Thursday, a French climber scaled the New York Times building in Manhattan to protest climate change. Wearing a T-shirt bearing the words "The Solution Is Simple.Org" -- the web address of a one-page site calling for meaningful climate action -- Alain Robert climbed to the top of the 52-story building unroped and without a parachute. Once at the top, he unfurled a banner reading, "Global warming kills more people than a 9/11 every week," and was promptly arrested. Robert is an experienced climber who has scaled some 83 tall buildings all over the world. However, another man who scaled the Times building just hours after Robert is not well known. Renaldo Clarke of Brooklyn appeared much less prepared for the feat, according to bystanders, and has been called a copycat by authorities. After Clarke also reached the top of the building -- a climb he said was a stunt to raise awareness of malaria -- he was arrested and taken to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation; he was soon discharged and taken to jail instead.

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