Fact No 1: The Earth is not dying. It is being pilfered killed.
Fact No 2: The bad guys are giant corporations which are hiding under the skirt of American liberty and justice.

Major corporations have not only not protected the environment, but when given the chance (or, rather when given the chance to create such chances), they have only engaged in a plunder of environmental resources. Investigative reporters James Ridgeway of the Village Voice and Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch narrate shocking stories tales of mindless, irresponsible environmental-spoilage and with a smattering of depressing photographs and graphics. This book is not about ecological pontification -- it is out-and-out investigative reportage. What is presented is not a collation of studies and seminars by environmental technocrats -- it is, to repeat, an exposé of rich people trying to become richer still at the cost of the planet.

The last century has been that of corporations. These corporations have made light of democratic controls and engaged in a callous and irresolute plunder of natural resources and added to the toxic burden whenever and wherever they could. As there is little point in being just prophets of doom, Ridgeway and St Clair go about making their point empirically. They name rip off the mask of the bad guys and say in as many words what they have done.

John Bryson, chief executive office (CEO) of Edison International, for instance. Ridgeway and St Clair list Bryson's "most imaginative sideline" as co-founding the Natural Resources Defense Council. Edison's subsidiary Mission Energy is building dirty coal-fired plants in Indonesia.

Another bad guy is Charles Hurwitz, CEO of Maxxam, who made a lot of money by holding to ransom the Headwaters redwood grove in northern California for nearly half a billion dollars. With growing resentment about the apprehension that Maxxam would devour the entire forest, the Clinton administration agreed cough up $480 million to acquire Headwaters. And guess what, the administration knew all along that the market value was less than $100 million. If that is not all, companies owned by Hurwitz owed the government nearly $2 billion for the collapse of a savings and loan. Somebody made a killing down the line.

Jim Bob Moffett of Freeport McMoran, a mining giant which operates the world's largest gold and copper mine in Indonesia, is as bad. Local indigenous people accuse Moffett's company of poisioning their rivers, killing fish and forests. The Indonesian army is said to have inflicted untold misery, committing gruesome human rights abuses in the bargain, to quell all anti-Freeport McMoran remonstrations. When asked to comment on his company's environmental misdemeanour, Moffet is supposed to have quipped: "It's equivalent to me pissing in the Arafura Sea." How morbidly torpid can one be.

There are other equally derision-worthy folks. Ira Rennert, now building the largest residence in the United States, on Long Island, controls 95 per cent of Renco Group. This group owns Magnesium Corp -- the largest source of air pollution in the US. Another person named is Donald Pearlman, a former high official in the Reagan energy and interior departments, who "is by far the energy industry's most effective lobbyist in fighting climate control rules".

Ridgeway and St Clair feel the bad guys must be named (and nailed, too). One must know who the enemy is, particularly so if the enemy is not an outsider. It is these environmental bad guys who have been corroding the system from inside. They also hit hard at greenwashers who stick at nothing to have the green label stuck on their lapels.

The authors' crusade while being directed at the environment bad guys, is two-pronged. They offer a glimmer of hope as well. The subtitle of the book is " And a Few Ideas on How to Stop Them". These ideas come from grassroots success stories. The hope does not lie with monolithic environmental organisations located in the megacities, but in these smalltime, smalltown groups who have been taking the giant corporations headlong, undeterred by the magnitude of the counter-resistance they are likely to encounter.


What Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter and Robert Weissman of Multinational Monitor wrote:
In the dominant celebrity culture, explanations of societal phenomena that focus on institutions, laws and processes tend not to resonate with the public. Increasingly, it seems, events and trends are understood and reported as the products of individuals: Bill Gates creates the computer revolution, Boris Yeltsin leads Russia to a purported democracy, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, flanked by Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers guide the world economy through turbulent times to a prosperous future. Well, say reporters James Ridgeway and Jeffrey St. Clair, let's apply the personification-of-social-developments approach even-handedly. In A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys, Ridgeway and St. Clair name names of the worst polluters, deforesters and despoilers of the wild, and the top lobbyists they employ to pass laws, gut regulations, broker deals and win tax breaks to legitimise their poisoning and destruction of the environment. "You can focus on institutions and laws until you're blue in the face," Ridgeway says, but no one will pay attention. © Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman