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Been Brown so Long, It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature

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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.

Capitalism, the free-market and progress give noble aim to the spirit of man. As documented by St. Clair, their gifts include the advent of factory fish trawlers that make a haul of 400 tons of fish, crabs, and squid in a matter of a couple of hours in the Alaska Bering Sea, 40 percent of which is by-catch waste, churned up and spewed back into the sea, some 550 million pounds a year. What are fish after all, next to Almighty Dollars?

St. Clair disposes the myth of the tree-hugger in his common sense description of the wanton destruction of 95 percent of the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, an irremediable teasure. You'll seethe with him at the six figure incomes of leaders of the co-opted and ineffectual environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club. Corporations that "patent" mineral claims for as little as $2.50 an acre by virtue of the anachronistic 1872 Mining Act, and thereby reap millions of dollars of profits off public lands for pennies on the dollar gives animation to the old saw about if you're not outraged!

When Louisiana-Pacific discovers that its newly-patented and supposedly innovative Inner Seal siding emits deadly fumes when exposed to humidity it is quietly shipped off to the mere dusky-hued in Vietnam and Bolivia. Separately, politically connected, L & P profits handsomely in buying cedar off the publicly-owned Tongass Forest in Alaska for $1.50 per thousand board feet and then sells it to Japanese sawmills for as much as $1,500 per thousand board feet. What are American jobs next to corporate profits?

"Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched-earth policy. Sounds like Saddam's Iraq? Think again. This neatly sums up the Bush administrations ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner of the war on drugs." Nice to know St. Clair bothers to keep us informed even if our pathetic media don't.

Through all this and more, St. Clair counsels good humor and optimism. And while the stark immensity of what he reports in this book ought by all rights engender a hopeless despair, through the skill of a singular investigative jounalist and a peerless story-teller, just the opposite is true.

Only in Michener's story of the missionaries' sailors' attempt to round Cape Horn in a storm in "Hawaii," have I found the printed word exceeded as viscerally compelling and dramatic, as in St. Clair's narrative of coming face to face with a rattlesnake in the Mojave Desert.

This is simply the best, most radical, take on environmental politics written in the last decade.

Many so-called environmentalists believe it is only the Republicans that rape our natural resources. Mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters seldom reward Republicans with high marks -- so the Democrats must be more apt at protecting nature they contend.

St. Clair debunks this myth with a lucid style that makes me think that perhaps Ed Abbey has been reincarnated as a radical journalist.

However, this book is not only for environmentalists: it is a must read for anybody who has ever been on a hike or driven a car past a clear cut and wondered "how and why did this happen?"

This collection should be for the environment, what Fast Food Nation has been for our food culture. It is a smart well researched collection of essays. St. Clair knows his stuff and we are all so lucky to have him share it with us.

Don't send in that Sierra Club membership renewal payment just yet, before you read this book!

"Been Brown So Long..." is author Jeffrey St. Clair's best work yet. Consider it required reading for anyone who's ever given money to an environmental group, and especially for environmental activists who want to know which groups are doing the critically important work and which are not. In an era where environmentalism is in decline as a grassroots movement, it is critically important for those who care about the fate of the Earth to examine the nature and cause of this crisis that is perhaps invisible to those who are not involved in movement politics on a daily basis.

One of the most incisive critics of industrial environmentalism today, Mr. St. Clair is, sadly, one of the few writers willing and qualified to dissect the body impolitic of the big enviro groups and their patrons, the Environmental Grantmakers Association and its member foundations chief among them.

Crusading environmental journalist Jeffrey St. Clair has written a devastating tale of corporate plunder, political hypocrisy and ecological loss. The book opens with a description of a wooded canyon in the Pacific Northwest, where osprey soar and cougars still prowl. It ends with a grim portrait of Butte, Montana, a toxic slag-heap of a town that is the country's largest Superfund site. In between, it takes on the Bush administration, the mining and timber industries, the Wise Use movement and the country's private utilities, among other worthy targets.

St. Clair metes out criticism in a decidedly non-partisan way. While giving Reagan and Bush officials a series of well-merited thrashings, he is equally relentless in detailing Clinton/Gore era wrongs. Nor does St. Clair have much patience for the environmental lawyers who drive BMWs, populate corporate boardrooms, and negotiate politically-expedient compromises. "Institutional environmentalists," he calls them, with disdain, "corporate-tolerant greens."

The book is hard-hitting and opinionated, but fair. If you want to understand what's been happening to the nation's mountains, forests, rivers, and wild creatures over the past couple of decades, you should read it.

This book was full of welcome surprises. (...) But this book describes in gripping detail another war, a war against the planet. It's an uncompromising assessment of the forces, political and economic, pushing the plunder. First, it's girth. This is a big book, but a fast, if at times disturbing, read. It covers a lot of ground from the
rise of corporate-friendly environmentalism under Clinton to (...), from the plight
of Native Americans (...) to the annihilation of the fisheries of the Pacific
Ocean. It singles out the US military as one of the world's biggest polluters, journeying to Alaska (where an atom
test cracked the crust of the earth) to the swamps of South Carolina (where the Air Force lost an H-Bomb...yes, it's
still missing). Second, the book plays no favorites. St. Clair, almost alone among environmental journalists, exposes
the hollow core of the Clinton/Gore team, charting in grim detail each gift to oil companies (24 million acres in the
Arctic), mining companies (millions to Noranda and Phelps Dodge), big timber (restarting logging of ancient forests),
real estate developers (clearing the way for subdivisions in endangered species habitat) and the sugar barons of south
Florida (yet more incursions into the Everglades). He also unveils the complicity of the big green environmental
groups, who reveal themselves to be beholden to the Democratic Party and obedient to the small group of foundations
(largely former oil industry fortunes, Pew, Rockefeller, W. Alton Jones) that set the timid agenda for the movement.
The story is unsettling, but the read is redeemed by St. Clair's deep love for the Earth, it's wild places and
creatures, and the new grassroots movement that has emerged as the planets frontline defenders.

Jeffrey St. Clair is best writer on environmental politics in the U.S. This book solidifies his place as one of the natural world's most important champions in an age of shameful betrayals, disastrous compromises and naked assault against the public interest.

He combines keen intellect, relentless investigative skill, extraordinary political insight and the courage to see the worst for what it is without losing heart. Every page is animated by an unequaled love of nature that simply will not let St. Clair abandon himself to despair, even though he produces significant evidence that the situation is far worse than most of us have yet realized.

Fortunately, this is one fighter who won't quit and whose vigilance will inspire anyone who reads this book. Here you will find heroes who literally gave their lives to save the last old growth forests, traitors who sold out the environmental movement, politicians in bed with polluters, and ordinary people holding the line against corporate greed.

My first thought on reading this book is that I want my sons to have it. If you buy one book about the environmental movement and what has become of it and what it might yet become, let it be this one. If reading St. Clair doesn't make you want to take a stand, I don't know what will.

It's not mere corruption that has permitted the vicious and relentless pillaging of America's natural resources. Rather it is politics and business as usual. Jeffrey St. Clair explains the issues, names the villains and heroes, and narrates the stories with splendid compassion, wit, anger and lucidity. Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me is absolutely essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand what is happening on and to the American land.

Bruce Jackson
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture, University at Buffalo

In this compilation of wonderfully written articles, author Jeffrey St. Clair gently guides the reader through the harsh realities of the corporate world's devious and unrelenting assault on the environment. And he does it with remarkable wit and optimisim, and a keen eye for the most relevant details. Chilling in its accumulation, *Been Brown So Long* is the definitive account of how our natural heritage has been, and is being, squandered by the lords of power and greed.

But the book itself smelled GOOD! It is a very interesting read and an eye opener as well. An eye might just even pop right on out of your head matter a fact! Though it shouldn't, just look around at our world today and our exploited environment. Some issues may just be speculation at the least, but it is definitely a great book for the critical reader.