Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that by creating a magnificent failure you plant the seed.

The environmental movement like all political processes reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow very gradual disasters in the making.

Are you kidding? I'm a terrible cook but John is a really great one. Literally I never cook. The whole time we were dating I prepared two officially romantic meals. Both of them were such disasters that he begs me never to go into the kitchen again.

That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision but never once have I seen him break his cool lose his composure or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters.

In the U.S. alone weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.

We have become a society that can't self-correct that can't address its obvious problems that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.