BORN UNDER A BAD SKY by Jeffrey St. Clair
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.