Publication Date: December 1, 2007 | Series: Counterpunch
"Movement reporting on a par with Mailer's Armies of the Night"—Peter Linebaugh, author of Magna Carta Manifesto and The Many-Headed Hydra.
Hold on tight as you open the pages of Born Under a Bad Sky and follow journalist Jeffrey St. Clair as he leads you through a landscape of horrors and wonders, scenery all the more strange because the setting is our own bruised world, in our own fraught era.
Enter a world that is part Bosch and part Bierstadt. This is not only a savage philippic against the foulers of Nature's temple, but—and this is where St. Clair worthily follows in the tracks of Stegner and Abbey—an homage to the planet itself. There is beauty as well as horror here.
These urgent dispatches are from the frontlines of the war on the Earth. Gird yourself for a visit to a glowing nuclear plant in the backwoods of North Carolina, to the heart of Cancer Alley where chemical companies hide their toxic enterprise behind the dark veil of Homeland Security, and to the world's most contaminated place, the old H-bomb factory at Hanford, which is leaking radioactive poison into the mighty Columbia River.
With unflinching prose, St. Clair confronts the White Death in Iraq, the environmental legacy of a war that will keep on killing decades after the bombing raids have ended. He conjures up the environmental villains of our time, from familiar demons like James Watt and Dick Cheney to more surprising figures, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (father of the cancer bond) and the Nobel laureate Al Gore, whose pieties on global warming are sponsored by the nuclear power industry. The mainstream environmental movement doesn't escape indictment. Bloated by grants from big foundations, perched in high-rent office towers, leashed to the neoliberal politics of the Democratic Party, the big green groups have largely acquiesced to the crimes against nature that St. Clair so vividly exposes.
All is not lost. From the wreckage of New Orleans to the imperiled canyons of the Colorado, a new green resistance is taking root. The fate of the grizzly and the ancient forests of Oregon hinge on the courage of these green defenders. This book is also a salute to them.
"This is what the true West looks like. It's not for the faint of heart."—Susan Davis, author Spectacular Nature. "Beautifully written!"—Clancy Sigal, author Going Away, screenwriter Frida "Who else can combine Rachel Carson's wisdom, I.F. Stone's erudition and Edward Abbey's sass?"—Michael Colby, editor of Broadsides. "The Upton Sinclair of Oregon City."—Jeff Baker, The Oregonian "A stunning, passionate book that takes you into the world where nature's beauty is being savaged by the corrupt industrial-political complex."—Kirkpatrick Sale, author After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination "Born Under a Bad Sky provides a sense of hope as an antidote to the despair over what humans have done to the environment."—Paul Krassner, editor The Realist, author One Hand Jerking
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Award-winning investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch and author of 11 books, including the best sellers Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press; Al Gore: a User's Manual; and Five Days That Shook the World. He lives in Oregon City, Oregon.
Jeffrey St. Clair (born 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an investigative journalist, writer and editor. He is the co-editor, with Alexander Cockburn, of the political newsletter CounterPunch, and a contributing editor to the monthly magazine In These Times. He has also written for The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, The Nation and The Progressive. His reporting specializes in the politics surrounding environmental and military issues.
St. Clair attended the American University in Washington, D.C., majoring in English and history. He has worked as an environmental organizer and writer for Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project and the Hoosier Environmental Council.
In 1990, he moved to Oregon to edit the influential environmental magazine Forest Watch, published by the libertarian economist Randal O'Toole. In 1994, he joined journalists Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein on CounterPunch. He now co-edits the newsletter and the popular website.
In 1998, he published his first book, with Cockburn, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, a history of the CIA's ties to drug gangs from World War II to the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. This was followed by A Field Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with James Ridgeway), Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, Al Gore: a User's Manual, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky.
Jeffrey St. Clair lives in Oregon City with his wife Kimberly Willson, a librarian, and his two children Zen and Nathaniel St. Clair.
Jeffrey St. Clair is a sane voice in a chaotic, cruel world.
The most articulate, passionate writer covering environmental issues in America today, no other author matches St. Clair's deep understanding of our noxious political landscape, nor his unwavering commitment to preserving what's left of the embattled American West. He's been in the muddy trenches for decades, covering the savage forest battles of the Pacific Northwest as editor of Forest Watch and the eminent Wild Forest Review, and his wisdom shines herein.
This latest collection of reports from the frontlines should be atop the reading lists of all who want to understand what it is going to take to push the environmental movement forward, when the fate of our little blue planet seems to be sinking, with the barons of industry drunk at the helm.
Most of the book is made up of hard-hitting articles regarding the destruction of the environment and exposes of those determined to continue that destruction. Many, if not all of them have appeared in print before. The jewel of the book lies in the last 116 pages of narrative. Titled "The Beautiful and the Damned," this section is St. Clair's beautifully rendered tale of a trip down some of the US West's best known rivers. A poetic offering to the river gods and a stinging indictment of those who would defy them, the final section of Born Under a Bad Sky takes the volume far beyond its muckraking beginnings and underpinnings. In doing so, St. Clair has created a classic narrative of writing that simultaneously includes and transcends the best of the travel and nature writing genres. Seemingly inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, Aldo Leopold and the sheer beauty of the natural surroundings it describes, "The Beautiful and the Damned" does more than end Born Under a Bad Sky with a flourish, it conveys it into the genuinely sublime. While the history and events discussed in this book are not pretty (in fact, they are pretty damn depressing at times), St. Clair's writing describes them in a style that he has become known for. Hard-hitting with the occasional humor, he lays out the facts of his subject matter and then reels in the reader with prose that captivates the reader like the best blues narratives. You get the story and you get it with an emotional force and truth you'll rarely find in the New York Times.
From the timber wars in the Pacific Northwest to the oil war in Iraq, journalist/activist Jeffrey St. Clair documents the bipartisan assault on wilderness, wildlife, and people being committed in the name of economic progress. If you are at all concerned about global warming, air pollution, deforestation, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, child labor, public health, and the fate of grizzly bears, coho salmon, bald eagles, African lions and elephants, then you need to read this book. Fans of Terry Tempest Williams, Brian Tokar, and Derrick Jensen will love this amazing collection of essays. Thank you AK Press and CounterPunch for publishing yet again another timely, informative, and important book!!!
