Rebecca Tarbotton, head of Rainforest Action Network, dies at 39 | Grist

Tarbotton teamed up with leaders of other environmental groups to call for direct action and “big, brash, nonviolent climate protests.” In a 2010 opinion piece in Grist, she joined with Bill McKibben of 350.org and Philip Radford of Greenpeace USA to make this argument: “We’re making progress, but not as fast as the physical situation is deteriorating. Time is not on our side, so we’ve concluded that going forward mass direct action must play a bigger role in this movement, as it eventually did in the suffrage movement, the civil-rights movement, and the fight against corporate globalization.”

She put her money where her mouth is, getting arrested at the big Keystone XL protests in front of the White House last year.

The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012

It was also a year that featured the planet's first superstorm