It has been a rough summer, tinged by despair. In the aftermath of the Gulf calamity and the Senate’s failure to act on a chronically overdue climate and energy bill, we can be forgiven for wondering: are we going backward or forward? For me, the feeling of futility was heightened by the freakish summer weather, the signs of global weirding: insanely hot temperatures, historic droughts and wildfires worldwide, fierce thunderstorms, tornadoes in strange locations -- including New York City, where I work.

Clearly, this is a pregnant moment for people who care about the planet. We have faced other crises before and responded effectively. But what now?

NRDC’s founder, John Adams, has written a memoir, A Force for Nature: The Story of NRDC and the Fight to Save Our Planet, with his wife, Patricia Adams, and our articles editor, George Black. As NRDC celebrates its 40th anniversary, the book offers an instructive lens through which to view the contemporary state of the environmental movement. (You can sample it in our special 16-page insert.) What can we learn from NRDC’s successes? Have we arrived (yet) at the next transformational moment?

We asked another environmental luminary, contributing editor Bill McKibben, to grapple with these very questions. (We made the same request of contributing editors David Gessner and Craig Canine.) NRDC president Frances Beinecke gives us her first interview since her appointment in June to President Obama’s national commission on the Gulf disaster, and Peter Lehner, NRDC’s executive director and author, with Bob Deans, of In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction, adds his perspective. McKibben’s unequivocal view: we must urgently mobilize a mass movement, as we did 40 years ago. Why did lawmakers listen then to the vox populi? In part, because their political lives were at stake. An activist base of young people, already primed by the antiwar and civil rights movements, responded en masse to the calamities then unfolding (the Santa Barbara oil spill, the conflagration on the Cuyahoga River). A comparable contemporary mass movement has not yet materialized, but McKibben explores how it might.

A renowned Buddhist master once said that the dawning of enlightenment does not arise from a sudden drenching but as the result of a long, slow journey through a mist that eventually soaks you to the marrow. Our air, our rivers and oceans, our food, our outdoor sanctuaries of woodlands, seacoasts, and mountains -- and therefore our physical and spiritual well-being -- all face dire threats. The cascading effects of our actions as individuals (or as “consumers,” as we are often described), and our collective actions as a society, have grown more vividly apparent. We have truly reached a point where the gravest environmental threats are not localized but affect every living being on the planet.

And precisely because none of us can escape -- there is nowhere left to escape to -- the demand for profound change may be the only realistic alternative that remains.