Here at TrackerNews, where our unofficial tagline is “One Damn Thing After Another,” the focus tends to be on the grim. Floods, droughts, plagues, blights, quakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, climate change, pandemics, drug-resistance, fake drugs,  oil spills, nuclear accidents, dead bees, dead trees, melting ice, rising seas, acidic oceans, aging populations, e-waste… Lather, rinse, repeat.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of humor. Indeed, sometimes humor is the only thing that keeps us going. So when a music video on the evils of single-use plastic bags came flying in through the email transom, we perked right up (thanks Chris Palmer!). “A Plastic State of Mind,” co-winner of  this year’s Eco-Comedy Video Competition (who knew “eco-comedy” was a genre?), blew us away while hitting a bull’s eye on mission: We promise—we really do—to bring our canvas bags into the store, rather than forget them with a means-well shrug in the car. Or this could happen:

The March 11 earthquake off the east coast of Japan was one for the record books. Now rated a 9.0 on the Richter scale by the Japanese Meteorological Society, up from what was still a rather gobsmacking 8.9 initial estimate, the temblor known locally as Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan is officially tied for fourth in the official record books.

But in many ways, this was an earthquake like no other.

Nearly 60 million people felt direct shaking. The breakdown as measured by theModified Mercalli Intensity scale, which is calibrated to measure surface impact rather than seismic energy: “2.14 million (VIII – Severe), 29.96 million (VII – Very Strong), 19.69 million (VI – Strong) and 7.07 million (V – Moderate).”

Then the tsunami hit, a 30-foot killer wave weaponized with debris, racing inland with pedal-to-the-metal speed, flattening buildings, drowning fields, swamping towns, shredding lives.

This being Japan, where all phones are smart and digital cameras abound, the catastrophe was documented in staggering detail. In near real-time, images raced across the planet even faster than the tsunami. We watched in collective global horror as dark water oozed across the land, snuffing out all signs of life and civilization in its path. From Tokyo came video of chandeliers shaking, computers tumbling, books falling. We felt people’s terror in the crazy angles of videotaped escapes. We cried out as shards of glass rained down on frightened office-workers.

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.Wildfires have consumed hundreds of square miles. In Moscow, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. (update 8/8/10:Peat fires send Moscow pollution levels soaring, a third of the wheat crop lost, exports temporarily banned)  (update 8/10/10: Russians defend nuclear sites from fires) Or…

The bottlenose dolphin swimming the Gulf of Mexico was “splattering oil out its blow hole.” The obscenity of such a thing was too much for marine conservationist, author and founder/director of the Blue Ocean Insitute, Carl Safina,whose voice broke as he told the story in the middle of a lecture at the TEDxOilSpill conference. No matter what BP may promise in its ubiquitous ads, there is simply no way to make something this horrible “right.” But as speaker after speaker noted, BP could start making things at least a little less wrong by coming clean with information.

The TEDxOilSpill Expedition team – photographers Duncan Davidson and Kris Krug, videographer Pinar Ozger and writer Darron Collins – were kept far from the water’s edge by BP’s private security firm, Talon,  whose staff controlled the beaches. When Collins literally crossed the line by stepping over a miles-long orange boom dozens of yards from the water line, he was accosted by a team right out of “Monsters Inc.,” who set about washing his feet and decontaminating his shoes with great flurry and fanfare.

Despite my general rule that once a day is designated for a cause, the cause is likely lost (or at least in serious trouble), I found myself rooting mightily last Saturday for Solarday. Missed it? It is only in its second year, but with global aspirations and the power of the sun on its side.

The power of new sun that is, not the fossil kind captured by plants millions of years ago and transformed into oil, coal and gas. Old sun is best left underground, underwater, under salt seals, in mountains and far, far away from tail pipes and smokestacks. Old sun warms the Earth in all the wrong ways. New sun offers a way out of Dodge.

The “teachable moment” in the Gulf, now stretching into its third month and threatening to stretch for years, frames the debate in the starkest of terms: oils spills versus sun spills. Which one would you prefer to soak up?

We have loads of clean / cleaner energy options beyond solar (photovoltaic, water heating):

If only there were a rewind button.

From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…

• jaw-dropping 5,000 barrel revision

• horrifying 19,000 barrel update

• are-you-kidding-me? 25,000 barrel recalculation

• and an it’s way-way-way-more-than-the-Exxon-Valdez admission

…the bad news on the BP catastrophe has gone so far off the dial, it has zoomed past “worst case scenario” to “pretty much the worst case ever.”

Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands.

Leave it to an 8 year-old. Specifically, the 8 year-old son of Jim Warner, managing director of design consultancy Brandimage, who took one look at a plastic bottle his dad had helped create and said, “Oh. You make trash.”

Once the sting of that nasty little unvarnished truth wore off, Warner set to work to make not just a better bottle, but a better approach to bottling altogether. And with the 360 Paper Bottle, he may have hit the eco-ball straight out of the cradle-to-cradle design park.

When the Great Somali Pirate story broke into the headlines last week, the media’s first reaction was to make a joke of it. Pirates are Jack Sparrow, popcorn, a night on the couch for a cable-movie marathon and one of the best film scores ever. Piracy is a fake Fendi. Yes, buckles are swashed (if not copied), alcoholism is a job requirement, and mythic monsters are part of the scenery. But pirates areheroes. The villains are the bloodless bureaucrats driven only by corporate greed. Ask any little kid: Who wants to be the tea-sipping dressed-for-success executive from the East India Company for Halloween? Who wants to swill a bit o’ rum and sing about rotten eggs as Captain Jack?

While the pirates of Disneyland swaggered around an imaginary 17th century Caribbean, the 21st century pirates of Somalia, a rag-tag bunch of 1,500 men with nothing to lose and millions of dollars to gain, patrol the Gulf of Aden, holding the world hostage. Still, it is difficult, at least for me, not to take a moment to savor the image of a supertanker stowing $100 million worth of a climate-threatening fossil fuel literally stuck in the water—a perversely green turn of events.