It's the Life Support System, Stupid.
BY
MICHAEL DONNELLY
"They say we can't win without the Big Greens and the funders. Yet, that's the only way we've ever won."
Mike Roselle, co-founder Earth First!
Jeffrey St. Clair's book, "Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green To Me" (Common Courage Press, 2004) is a 400-page verification of Roselle's statement.
After a brilliant "Opening Statement," the book starts out with an edited version of Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein's summary of the events that led to the modern environmental movement and giving credit where due, surprisingly for many, to our "greatest environmental president" Richard M. Nixon, and, not so unexpectedly to the great Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his allies.
The summary goes on to chart the rise and fall of the Big Greens as they tepidly challenged Republican-led depredations and then completely collapsed in a spasm of Clinton sycophancy -- illustrated perfectly by their surrender of the grassroots' Ancient Forest victory.
From there, it's the same thing over and over again in campaign after campaign. St. Clair charts how local activists rise up to challenge corporate assaults on nature only to see the Groundhog Day-like script repeat -- the Big Greens and their foundation masters come in, take credit for the grassroots' hard work, use the issue to raise funds and then cut a Democrat and corporate-friendly "compromise."
There are so many issues covered here, it could very well be the definitive history of every ecological issue since the first Earth Day.
Wilderness issues appear first, as they did for the early environmental movement's heroes like the arch-druid, David Brower. Contrast Brower's life-long dedication to all things wild with the sorry tale of Eastern millionaire G. Jon Roush, then president of the Wilderness Society, who clearcuts ancient forests on his own hobby ranch in Montana's Bitterroot Valley - an act called "roughly akin to the head of Human Rights Watch being caught torturing a domestic servant."
The slaughter of Yellowstone's bison, the strip-mining of the oceans, the suffocating of salmon streams and the murder of activist David Chain all come under much needed scrutiny.
The toxic nature of Big Ag is dissected early on, as are the predations of Big Oil, King Coal and the conscienceless Nuclear industry.
Excellent uncovering of the continued assault on America's indigenous people, their remaining lands and barely hanging on culture is perhaps the books most necessary section. These stories have been all but ignored in the mainstream press. That the spineless Democratic Party Senate "leader," Tom Daschle (D)-SD is able to get Big Green support for yet another raid on Paha Sapa (the Black Hills), the sacred lands of the Sioux is just about all one needs to know about the rot that permeates the Democrats and the DC-based environmental establishment. That the sorry deal on the Black Hills is being used by the Bush administration as the template for "post-fire" logging assaults all over the West shows exactly where the bankrupt pro-Democrat leanings have led.
Stories about military pollution and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and what's happened to the good people of Fallon, Nevada are the creepiest in the book. It's enough to make one throw up one's hands and run for a cave in the hills.
But, in the end, hope is all over the place. As St. Clair notes time and again, real activists are valiantly working to hold off the predators and their political and nonprofit enablers. Reading their stories and realizing that there are hundreds of folks out there who are fighting for the fate of Gaia, is the antidote to the despair one easily could get locked into.
This is an important tome. Unlike so many other cautious tomes written about environmental issues, it names names and has the facts to back it all up. It also names places - places that deserve better. And, hopefully, with this fine compilation out there, we'll see more support for these special places and an even greater vision motivate generations to come.
