Take the delisting of the gray wolf in the Western Great Lakes and parts of the Northern Rockies, which was announced during the waning days of the Bush era and upheld by Obama earlier this spring. About 200 packs of wolves live in the northern Rocky Mountains today. But only 95 of these packs are led by a breeding pair of wolves, which is significantly less than half of what most biologists consider to be a healthy number in order to fend off imminent decline and long-term genetic problems for the species.

In Idaho, free roaming wolves have been radio-collared, allowing their human killers to track and gun them down by helicopter. Freed from the protections of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the state plans on permitting hundreds of these wolves to be murdered this coming winter. Only a few environmental groups have stepped up in the wolf’s defense, with the Center for Biological Diversity based in Tucson, Arizona leading the charge.

It’s not just the wolf that’s been hung out to dry. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced they were revoking an 11th hour Bush directive that weakened the ESA listing process. However, shortly thereafter the Dept. of the Interior refused to repeal a special rule that would have granted the polar bear protection from the impacts of global warming. Salazar said his agency does not believe the law was intended to address climate change, even though many policy analysts believe the ESA could be used to limit the issuing of permits for development projects that would potentially threaten the polar bear by emitting additional greenhouse gases.

“The Endangered Species Act is not the proper tool to deal with a global issue — global warming,” Salazar said. “We need to move forward with a comprehensive climate change and energy plan we can be proud of.”

Apparently federal protection should not be granted if the industry’s emissions happen outside the polar bear’s natural habitat. The Obama administration, under Salazar’s watch, is refusing to lead the way in protecting the bear’s dwindling populations. Of course the oil and gas cartels were unabashedly pleased with the decision. So much for thinking globally and acting locally.

“We welcome the administration’s decision because we, like Secretary Ken Salazar, recognize that the Endangered Species Act is not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions,” said American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard. “Instead, we need a comprehensive, integrated energy and climate strategy to address this complex, global challenge.”

That’s not the only recent victory for big oil provided by Salazar’s office. During one of the most ridiculous episodes of the 2008 presidential campaign, the strange tag-team of John McCain and Sarah Palin led their diminutive crowds in spastics of “Drill, baby, drill.” Off-shore oil drilling and a new generation of nuclear power plants represented the sum total of the McCain/Palin energy plan.

Though it seemed like political comedy at the time, this strategy has now been at least partially embraced by the Obama administration. As the clock approached midnight on the final eve of the Bush administration, his Interior Department put forward a rule opening 300 million acres of coastal waters to oil drilling. According to the hastily prepared decree, the leasing was to begin by March 23. Enter Salazar with a maneuver that is typical of the Obama approach to environmental politics. Instead of killing the drilling plan outright, Salazar merely extended the analysis period for an additional six months. The environmental lobby was given a procedural crumb, while the oil hounds still had its long-sought prize on the table for the taking.

Although off-shore drilling is so intensely unpopular in coastal states that even Jeb Bush stood up to his brother’s attempts to expand drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Ken Salazar, accompanied by a consort of oil lobbyists, held four town hall forums this spring on off-shore drilling and left that distinct impression that he was leaning toward what he called a “comprehensive approach” to energy development, in which the oceans will be mined for off-shore wind, wave power and, yes, oil. This is proving to be an administration that doesn’t know the meaning of the word “no”.

Down in Appalachia things are not much better, where the coal extraction industry was recently given the green light to proceed with 42 of its 48 pending mountaintop removal permits. While Obama speaks out about the negative impact of the aptly named mountaintop removal, where whole mountains are blown apart to expose thin lines of coal, he is not willing to take on an industry that continually pollutes rivers and threatens public health.

“If you still have an Obama sticker on your car, maybe think about scraping it off and sending it to the White House with your objections,” says Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero, who is working hard to stop mountaintop removal in West Virginia and elsewhere. “Blowing mountains to pieces is a crime.”

When it comes to CO2 emissions, the EPA has also been more bark than bite. While admitting that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health, the agency will not necessarily move to regulate industry emissions.

White House climate czar Carol Browner and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson initially said that such a declaration would “indeed trigger the beginning of regulation of CO2,” but only weeks later Jackson reversed her belief that industry would be affected by the White House’s admission. Speaking before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Jackson said on May 12: “The endangerment finding is a scientific finding mandated by law . . . It does not mean regulation.”

In fact instead of implementing real regulatory oversight to combat the alleged culprits of global warming, the Obama administration has held its campaign promise to tackle CO2 emissions by embracing free market environmentalism, i.e. cap-and-trade. Obama proposes reducing US emissions 83% by 2050 by essentially allowing industry to regulate itself by putting a price on carbon. But many say there is a reason industry isn’t frightened.

“[Cap-and-trade] programs have so many leaks, trap doors, and perverse side effects that they’ll probably do more harm than good,” says Ted Nace director of CoalSwarm, an environmental project of the Earth Island Institute that seeks to shut down the existing coal plants in the US.

“The illusion that a solution is in place will then prevent simpler, more focused solutions from being implemented. An example of this phenomenon is the sulfur trading system. Proponents of cap-and-trade point to it as proof that pollution markets work, but decades after the program went into place I can show you a big database of coal plants that continue to spew inordinate amounts of sulfur dioxide,” says Nace. “A simpler solution to the global warming problem would be to mandate that all the existing coal plants be phased in an orderly, phased manner.”

Not surprisingly, Obama refuses to consider strict regulation let alone a carbon tax to address the country’s big CO2 emitters. Instead, after intense pressure from the pollution lobby, Obama’s approach to attacking with climate change has been whittled down to nothing more than weak market-driven economics that can too easily be manipulated politically. Polluters will be let off the hook as they can simply relocate or build new infrastructure in places where there are few or no carbon regulations.

But by far the boldest stroke of this spring was Obama’s courageous decision to zero out funding for the planned nuclear waste repository at the sacred Yucca Mountain. This vault on earthquake prone lands of the Western Shoshone near Las Vegas was long meant to be the escape hatch for the nuclear industry’s most aggravating problem: where to hide the accumulating piles of radioactive material from the nations 104 commercial nuclear reactors. Sen. Harry Reid says Yucca Mountain is dead. So does Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. But Yucca Mountain has been buried before only to rise up from the grave. If indeed Obama has succeeded in killing it off, this alone will eclipse all of the vaporous achievements of the Clinton era.

Still, appraisal of the true meaning of the Yucca Mountain decision must be countered by the administration’s ongoing promotion of nuclear power as corrective to climate change. Both Chu and Obama’s chief science advisor John Holdren are pushing for federal subsidies for a new generation of nuclear power plants — even though Obama has admitted there’s no safe place to store nuclear waste. Even more disturbing, Holdren continues to hawk the fool’s gold of the nuclear lobby: fusion energy.

In a recent interview with Science, Holdren said: “We need to develop and deploy approaches to nuclear energy that can minimize the liabilities that have inhibited expansion of that carbon-free energy source up until now. We need to see if we can make fusion work. This is a quest in which I’ve been engaged since 1965. Again, I started [my work at MIT] in that domain. At that time, people thought fusion was 15 years away. Now people think it’s 40 or 50 years away. We need to shrink that time scale again by increasing the investment for making that domain.”

This means billions more for the nuclear lobby under the guise of research and development, the pipeline of federal subsidies that has kept the industry alive since Three Mile Island.

Then just last week Obama announced a sweeping overhaul of the car fuel efficiency (CAFE) and exhaust emissions standards, which have languished unmodified for more than a decade. These long-overdue upgrades will force car-makers (if there are any left five years from now when the rules are slated to finally kick in) to curb carbon dioxide emissions by 35 percent and hike fuel efficiency standards from 30 to 35 miles per gallon. While the proposal has been hailed as historic, it has plenty of drawbacks.

For starters, the plan capitulated to automakers by endorsing a national emissions standard, which will likely preempt states, such as California, from adopting even more stringent clean air rules. Obama also gave the auto industry a few more years to come into compliance with these rather modest requirements. No wonder the move was hailed by traditional Motor City defenders such as Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. John Dingell.

Less endearing is the Obama administration’s relentless push to replace oil with biofuels, which will push marginal agriculture lands into production of genetically-engineered and pesticide saturated monocrops, scalping topsoil and draining dwindling water supplies across the Great Plains and Midwest. Overseeing this misguided scheme is Obama’s Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa who has long been a servant of industrial agriculture and the bioengineering industry.

Under Vilsack, the biofuels project is poised to move far beyond burning corn and soybeans for fuel. They want to chop down national forests and burn the public’s trees inside a new generation of biomass power generators. This insidious and little noticed program will be marshaled by biomass booster Homer Lee Wilkes, a little known urban planner from Madison, Mississippi. Wilkes was Vilsack’s surprise pick for the powerful slot of Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment, a position which among other responsibilities places Wilkes in control of the U.S. Forest Service.

So look for a new wave of timber sales on federal lands, sanctified in the name of fighting climate change, categorically excluded from full environmental analysis and enthusiastically supported by so-called collaborative groups who will be first in line to cash in on the lucrative logging contracts. Coming soon to a national forest near you for a return engagement: greens with chainsaws.

Al Gore has made an impact.

Too bad the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache, no buzz. The purported solution to the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry’s most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation’s outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company’s Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.

The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power around the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called “full scope safeguards” spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act.

The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of “dual use” technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the president that “China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction” worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be “a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants” and will be “a great opportunity for American vendors” — that is, Westinghouse.

A day later, Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.

In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made “a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies.” Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as “a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future.” Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way “to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development.”

The atom lobby during the 1990s had a stranglehold on the Clinton administration and now they seem to have the same suffocating grip around the neck of the brightest star in the Democratic field today: Barack Obama.

In 2006, Obama took up the cause of Illinois residents who were angry with Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator, for not having disclosed a leak at one of their nuclear plants in the state. Obama responded by quickly introducing a bill that would require nuclear facilities to immediately notify state and federal agencies of all leaks, large or small.

At first it seemed Obama was intent on making a change in the reporting protocol, even demonizing Exelon’s inaction in the press. But Obama could only go so far, as Exelon executives, including Chairman John W. Rowe who serves as a key lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Lobby, have long been campaign backers, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars dating back to Obama’s days in the Illinois State Legislature.

Despite his initial push to advance the legislation, Obama’s office eventually rewrote the bill, producing a version that was palatable to Exelon and the rest of the nuclear industry. “Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Illinois, where the nuclear leaks had polluted local ground water. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”

Inevitably the bill died a slow death in the Senate. And like an experienced political operative, Obama came out of the battle as a martyr for both sides of the cause. His constituents back in Illinois thought he fought a good fight while industry insiders knew the Obama machine was worth investing in.

Obama’s campaign wallet, while rich with millions from small online donations, is also bulging from $227,000 in contributions given by employees of Exelon. Two of Obama’s largest campaign fundraisers include Frank M. Clark and John W. Rogers Jr., both top Exelon officials. Even Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, has done consulting work for the company.

During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of C02 emissions “on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable — and realistic — for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry’s top trade publication, praised the senator. “Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of ‘common sense solutions.’ And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the senator is keeping an open mind.”

Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of their more eye-grabbing numbers don’t check out. For example, as noted in a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuke industry claims that the world’s 447 nuclear plants reduce C02 emissions by 30 percent. But existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total C02 emissions, hardly a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. As you go up the nuclear fuel chain, you have carbon dioxide emissions at every single step — from uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction to the transportation of the radioactive waste.

Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather than renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, atomic power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that “even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for C02-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem.”

Clearly Senator Obama recognizes the inherent dangers of nuclear technology and knows of the disastrous failures that plagued Chernobyl, Mayak and Three Mile Island. Yet, despite his attempts to alert the public of future toxic nuclear leaks, Obama still considers nuclear power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants. The atom lobby must certainly be pleased.

We are not supposed to exist.

According to the political Steinberg map of the nation, we come from no man’s land, fly-over country, the unredeemable middle, where political progressives are as rare as a Hooters in Provo, Utah.

We are children of the wasteland. The rural outback. Where folks carry guns and use them. Where fenced compounds and utopian communes exist side-by-side with a cyanide heap-leach gold mine. Out here cell phones don’t work. Not yet, anyway. And some of us would like to keep it that way.

Frank grew up on the wheated plains of eastern Montana. St. Clair hails from the humid cornfields of central Indiana. These states span the glaciated heart of the continent, a region carved and ground-smooth by the weight of ice. From a distance, the terrain of the Great Plains appears homogenous. From a distance so do its politics and demographics. You must look closer to discover the diversity, the radical nuances.

Even the Republicanism of Indiana, sired as it was by the rigid Lutheranism of German immigrants, is wildly different from the libertarian, anti-government Republicanism of Montana and the Rocky Mountain Front. They are not one. Except on the two-color map of American politics, or Barack Obama’s electoral playbook, which writes off this vast region almost completely.

Neither of us fit in the geo-ideological matrix contrived by the mainstream political establishment. Neither do thousands of others, left, right and anarcho-libertarians, who reside in the forgotten midsection of the nation.

And not all of us are children of Ken Kesey and Ed Abbey. Some follow in the footsteps of David Koresh, Reies Tijerina, Randy Weaver, Elvira Arellano or Mary Dann.

A Red States rebellion is breaking out. It’s been going on for some time. Since Reconstruction in the South and even longer in the West. The true West of Wyoming and Utah, Idaho and Arizona. Where the stakes are high and the odds are long. And the battles are waged over the essentials of life: water, food, wilderness, human liberty.

Take abortion. Largely cast as an urban issue by the flyover press, the real crisis and militant resistance is happening in Utah, South Dakota, Mississippi and Idaho-states where unwanted pregnancy rates are high and abortion clinics are sparse and marked for extermination.

Consigned to death row, the loneliest and most forbidding place in America? Fighting for your life against the conveyor-belt execution industry of Texas is qualitatively different from the struggle in Illinois or California where activists and Ivy-league trained litigators are lined up to give aid. In the grim chambers of the row of interior America you can’t expect to enjoy the right to a competent lawyer, a fair judge or crusading journalism students. It’s just you against the death machine.

Or try being an environmentalist in the toxic towns of Libby, Montana or Tonopah, Nevada, where cancer rates are soaring, the death threats don’t stop at prank calls and the cops are more likely to kick your ass than rush to your defense. It’s a lonely and dangerous struggle. But people are doing it. Thousands of them. Fighting as if their lives depended on it-which, of course, they do.

Out here there are no fixed blueprints for resistance. No organizational flow charts for how to plot a rebellion. No focus groups or pulse polls or field-tested PR strategies or genteel formalities for grant applications. Marx would be confused. The human spirit is the best guide. When Peabody Coal announces its intention to evict your grandmother, dynamite her hogan and strip-mine the family sheep pasture, you don’t have time to consult Weiden and Kennedy for how to spin it to your advantage or wait around for a year on the infinitesimal chance that Pew Charitable Trusts might drop you a few
bucks. You must act. As a group if you can, unilaterally if necessary. Militantly if you must.

While the Forest Service sparks a chainsaw in the outback of Wyoming no progressive from Vermont is going to stop them from ravaging the countryside. That job is left to the people who inhabit the places that are under assault day in and day out.

When the ATF or FBI come busting through your kitchen door, rousting you at gunpoint from your bed, roughing up your children, accusing you of being a rightwing crazy, an illegal immigrant or an animal liberation terrorist, the ACLU isn’t likely to speed to Wallace, Idaho to bail you out of jail and make your case a cause celebre for constitutional rights.

In fact, the FBI could burn down your house, incinerate dozens of women and children, and good liberals in New York and San Francisco will say you had it coming. They already have. See Waco and Ruby Ridge; Cove-Mallard and Wounded Knee.

This is the game plan the Feds have used since the inception of our so-called constitutional republic, and there have always been bloody consequences. Smoke out the non-conformists, or better yet, murder them. Of course there is a silver lining for the rest of us, and that’s that these brave rebels are the true heart of the nation. The people who bring about real change. They are the freedom fighters. They are the sons and daughters of César Chávez and Leonard Peltier. Without them, the government’s assault on its citizens and the environment would largely go unchecked.

Voting on Election Day, seen as one of the only ways to democratically vent our collective disgust, doesn’t always do much good. In fact most of the dissidents in Red America don’t vote at all. And for good reason. They know the system is rigged. Besides, they don’t trust the government or its policies anyway. They see what it has done for their families and loved ones, and that’s not much. They recognize they didn’t enjoy the benefits of those federal tax cuts. They know their hardware shop went under because Wal-Mart moved to town. They see that their Grandpa lost the family homestead because industrialized farms began receiving huge subsidies from Washington. And they sure as hell don’t trust the so-called liberal establishment. Why should they? Life under Hillary’s husband wasn’t any better than it has been under Bush.

The resistance isn’t always about revolution; it’s about maintaining a semblance of dignity in a world where such a thing is in short supply.

That’s why there has been a resurgence of organic farming in the Red River Valley of North Dakota where farmers like Todd Leake are fighting Monsanto and supporting their families through farmer’s markets and community supported agriculture. If you want to learn about the negative effects of genetically modified crops, you don’t need to consult a study by a scientist from Berkeley, just talk to the Nelson family of Amenia, North Dakota who stood up to Monsanto after the company sued them for patent infringement.

Or take a trip down to Colorado where feisty environmentalists are fighting the moneyed interests of billionaire Red McCombs who is trying to build yet another sprawling ski resort in the heart of the Rockies. These radical greens are fighting McCombs in the courts and may soon plant their bodies on Forest Service roads to block his bulldozers. Since we’re here, may as well take a trip due west to the outback of Escalante, Utah, where Tori Woodard and Patrick Diehl routinely receive death threats for their environmental activism. A few years back, a band of local yahoos vandalized their home, threw bottles of beer through their front windows, kicked in the front door, trashed the garden, and cut the phone line to their house. It takes real guts to stand up in the distant belly of the beast, where defending the Earth usually results in a face-to-face confrontation with a bulldozer, a taser or a shotgun.

Down in Texas, not far from where the government burned the Branch Davidians alive, anti-death penalty advocates spared the life of Kenneth Foster, who was to be put to death for a murder he didn’t commit. Or traverse Interstate 10 to New Orleans where passionate groups of local citizens, without much help from the Federal government are slowly rebuilding their forgotten neighborhoods. Many lost everything in the devastating, preventable Katrina floods of 2005. But they refuse to give up. Since we are in Louisiana, why not roll on over to the tiny town of Jena where protests rage on over the racist incarceration of six black youths who were unfairly imprisoned for beating a white kid.

This book offers a just a few snapshots of the grassroots resistance taking place in the forgotten heartland of America. These are tales of rebellion and courage. Out here activism isn’t for the faint of heart. Be thankful someone is willing to do the dirty work.

Nope, we’re not supposed to exist. But here we are, in the flesh, with mud on our boots and green fire in our souls—living examples of what Greil Marcus calls the Invisible Republic. Deal with it.

Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon’s partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way. For the past five decades the federal government, defense contractors and the chemical industry have joined forces to block public health protections against perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been shown to effect children’s growth and mental progress by disrupting the function of the thyroid gland which regulates brain development.

Perchlorate, which are salts derived from perchloric acid, has been leaking from literally hundreds of defense plants and military installations across the country. The EPA has reported that perchlorate is present in drinking and groundwater supplies in 35 states. Center for Disease Control and independent studies have also overwhelmingly shown that perchlorate is existent in our food supplies, cow’s milk, and human breast milk. As a result virtually every American has some level of perchlorate in their body.

Currently only two states, California and Massachusetts, have set a maximum allowable contaminant level for perchlorate in drinking water. But the EPA won’t follow these states’ lead. In the Colorado River, which provides water for over 20 million people, perchlorate levels are high. The chemical is most prevalent in the Southwest and California as a result of the large number of military operations and defense contractors in the region.

In 2001 the EPA estimated that the total liability for the cleanup of toxic military sites would exceed $350 billion, or five times the Superfund Act liability of private industry. But the federal government has been complacent and allowed perchlorate to run rampant throughout our water supplies. This negligence and lack of regulatory oversight has left the Pentagon, NASA and defense contractors free to set their own levels, trimming the high, but necessary costs of restoring groundwater along the way.

While the situation has become dire in recent years, it was the Clinton administration that didn’t do nearly enough to begin cleaning up these sites and certainly did not keep a close eye on how the Pentagon spent the money it received. During the 1990s the Defense Department spent only $3.5 billion a year cleaning up toxic military sites — much of that on studies, not actual work. In 1998, the Defense Science Review Board, a federal advisory committee set up to provide independent advice to the secretary of defense, looked at the problem and concluded that the Pentagon had no clear environmental cleanup policy, goals or program, which led lawyer Jonathan Turley, who holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, to call the Pentagon the nation’s “premier environmental villain.”

“If they can spend $1 million on a cruise missile, it seems kind of ridiculous they won’t spend $200,000 to see if our food is contaminated with rocket fuel,” says Renee Sharp, a scientist with Environmental Working Group. But if the Clinton program was chintzy, the Bush plan has been downright penurious.

While Bush has boosted overall Pentagon spending by billions, the administration has simultaneously slashed its environmental remediation program. Moreover, the Bush defense plan has called for “new rounds of base closures” to “shape the military more efficiently.” Efficiency is usually a code word for sidestepping environmental rules.

These military sites, which total more than 50 million acres, are among the most insidious and dangerous legacies left by the Pentagon. They are strewn with toxic bomb fragments, unexploded munitions, buried hazardous waste, fuel dumps, open pits filled with debris, burn piles and yes, rocket fuel. An internal EPA memo from 1998 warned of the looming problem: “As measured by acres, and probably as measured by number of sites, ranges and buried munitions represent the largest cleanup program in the United States.”

When a site gets too polluted, the Pentagon has chosen simply to close it down and turn it over to another federal agency. Over the past three decades, the Pentagon has transferred more than 16 million acres, often with little or no remediation. The former bombing areas have been turned into wildlife refuges, city and state parks, golf courses, landfills, airports and shopping malls.

Serious contamination of streams, soil and groundwater is a problem at nearly every military training ground. The sites are often saturated with heavy metals and other pollutants as well as unexploded weapons. The Government Accountability Office’s list of the kinds of unexploded munitions left behind on many training sites reads like a catalogue for a Middle East arms bonanza: “hand grenades, rockets, guided missiles, projectiles, mortars, rifle grenades, and bombs.”

But the government has gone to great extents to cover up its deadly legacy. In 2002 the Pentagon, defense contractors and perchlorate makers persuaded the editors of a prestigious journal to rewrite an article on the chemical’s health effects without the lead author’s knowledge or consent. Then in 2005 the White House loaded a National Academy of Science panel, which was set up to assess the health risks of perchlorate, with paid consultants of the rocket fuel industry, which, not surprisingly, recommended that exposure levels be set many times higher than the lower doses recommended by numerous independent research studies.

“Perchlorate provides a textbook example of a corrupted health protection system, where polluters, the Pentagon, the White House and the EPA have conspired to block health protections in order to pad budgets, curry political favor, and protect corporate profits,” Richard Wiles, Executive Director of the Environmental Working Group, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 7 during a hearing held by committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who would like to see national safety standards for perchlorate in drinking water.

“All the pieces needed to support strong health protections are in place,” said Wiles. “This is a nightmare of epic proportions for the Department of Defense and its contractors, and rather than address it head-on, they have spent 50 years and millions of dollars trying to avoid it.”

The first Gulf War had a horrific effect on the environment, as CNN reported in 1999, “Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing some 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May 1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline. The amount of oil released was categorized as 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world record oil spill. The cost of cleanup has been estimated at more than $700 million.”

During the build up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Saddam loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they claimed were the U.S.’s underlying motives for attacking their country: oil. The U.S. architects of the Iraq war surely knew this was a potential reality once they entered Baghdad in March of 2003. Hostilities in Kuwait resulted in the discharge of an estimated 7 million barrels of oil, culminating in the world’s largest oil spill in January of 1991. The United Nations later calculated that of Kuwait’s 1,330 active oil wells, half had been set ablaze. The pungent fumes and smoke from those dark billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on human and environmental health. Saddam Hussein was rightly denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields.

However, the United States military was also responsible for much of the environmental devastation of the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the U.S. drowned at least 80 crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, partly to uphold the U.N.’s economic sanctions against Iraq. Vast crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and sea birds while wrecking havoc on local fishing and tourist communities.

Months of bombing during the first Gulf War by U.S. and British planes and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the U.S. hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than 15 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire. Iraqi physicians call it “the white death”-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq’s forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan as “a humanitarian crisis”, that made detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren’t soldiers. They are civilians. Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the tailings. They could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons, designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and bunkers.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal bits when inhaled stick to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begin to wreck havoc on the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems and leukemias.

It didn’t take long for medical teams in the region to detect cancer clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, tripled in five years following the bombings. But it’s not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and U.N. peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer.

The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses. First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by peace activists, environmentalists and Iraqi propagandists. When the U.S.’s NATO allies demanded that the U.S. disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the Pentagon refused. Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever.

Speaking of DU and other war-related disasters, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the environmental consequences of the Iraq war could in fact be more ominous than the issue of war and peace itself. Despite this stark admission, the U.S. made no public attempts to assess the environmental risks that the war would inflict.

Blix was right. On the second day of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq it was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set fire to several of the country’s large oil wells. Five days later in the Rumaila oilfields, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze. The dense black smoke rose high in the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that the U.S. invasion had again ignited an environmental tragedy. Shortly after the initial invasion the United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) satellite data showed that a significant amount of toxic smoke had been emitted from burning oils wells. This smoldering oil was laced with poisonous chemicals such as mercury, sulfur and furans, which can cause serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.

According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris, like that of the first Gulf War, has created a toxic sea surface that has affected the health of birds and marine life. One area that has been greatly impacted is the Sea of Oman, which connects the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf byway of the Strait of Hormuz. This waterway is one of the most productive marine habitats in the world. In fact the Global Environment Fund contends that this region “plays a significant role in sustaining the life cycle of marine turtle populations in the whole North-Western Indo Pacific region.” Of the world’s seven marine turtles, five are found in the Sea of Oman and four of those five are listed as “endangered” with the other listed as “threatened”.

The future indeed looks bleak for the ecosystems and biodiversity of Iraq, but the consequences of the U.S. military invasion will not only be confined to the war stricken country. The Gulf shores, according to BirdLife’s Mike Evans, is “one of the top five sites in the world for wader birds, and a key refueling area for hundreds of thousands of migrating water birds.” The U.N. Environment Program claims that 33 wetland areas in Iraq are of vital importance to the survival of various bird species. These wetlands, the U.N. claims, are also particularly vulnerable to pollution from munitions fallout as well as oil wells that have been sabotaged.

Mike Evans also maintains that the current Iraq war could destroy what’s left of the Mesopotamian marshes on the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Following the war of 1991 Saddam removed dissenters of his regime who had built homes in the marshes by digging large canals along the two rivers so that they would have access to their waters. Thousands of people were displaced. The communities ruined.

The construction of dams upstream on the once roaring Tigris and Euphrates has dried up more than 90 percent of the marshes and has led to extinction of several animals. Water buffalo, foxes, waterfowl and boar have disappeared. “What remains of the fragile marshes, and the 20,000 people who still live off them, will lie right in the path of forces heading towards Baghdad from the south,” wrote Fred Pearce in the New Scientist prior to Bush’s invasion in 2003. The true effect this war has had on these wetlands and its inhabitants is still not known.

The destruction of Iraqi’s infrastructure has had substantial public health implications as well. Bombed out industrial plants and factories have polluted ground water. The damage to sewage-treatment plants, with reports that raw sewage formed massive pools of muck in the streets of Baghdad immediately after Bush’s ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign, is also likely poisoning rivers as well as human life. Cases of typhoid among Iraqi citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking water.

That number has almost certainly increased more in the past few years following the ousting of Saddam. In fact during the 1990s, while Iraq was under sanctions, U.N. officials in Baghdad agreed that the root cause of child mortality and other health problems was no longer simply lack of food and medicine but the lack of clean water (freely available in all parts of the country prior to the first Gulf War) and of electrical power, which had predictable consequences for hospitals and water-pumping systems. Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the U.N.’s U.S.-dominated sanctions committee, a high proportion were integral to the efforts to repair the failing water and sewage systems.

The real cumulative impact of U.S. military action in Iraq, past and present, won’t be known for years, perhaps decades, to come. Stopping this war now will not only save lives, it will also help to rescue what’s left of Iraq’s fragile environment.

This was first written for Cindy Sheehan’s independent antiwar campaign against Rep. Nancy Pelosi. For more information please visit CindyforCongress.org.

But the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache no buzz. The purported solution to the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry’s most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation’s outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company’s Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.

The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power, not only in the US, but all over the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called “full scope safeguards” spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act. The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of “dual use” technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the President that “China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction” worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be “a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants” and will be “a great opportunity for American vendors” — that is, Westinghouse.

A day later Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.

In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made “a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies.” Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as “a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future.” Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way “to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development.”

The atom lobby during the 1990s had a stranglehold on the Clinton administration and now they seem to have the same suffocating grip around the neck of the brightest star in the Democratic field today: Barack Obama.

Barack, for the second quarter in a row, has surpassed the fundraising prowess of Hillary Clinton. To be sure small online donations have propelled the young senator to the top, but so too have his connections to big industry. The Obama campaign, as of late March 2007, has accepted $159,800 from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator.

The Illinois-based company also helped Obama’s 2004 senatorial campaign. As Ken Silverstein reported in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s, “[Exelon] is Obama’s fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects … the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default.”

“Senator Obama has all the necessary leadership skills required to be president,” says Frank M. Clark, chairman of Exelon’s Commonwealth Edison utility.

These gracious accolades come from one of Exelon’s top executives, despite the fact that Obama proposed legislation in 2006 that would require nuclear plant operators to report any hazardous leaks. While introducing the legislation Obama noted the failure of Exelon to report a leak of radioactive tritium into groundwater near one of their Illinois plants. But the senator’s criticism of nuclear power goes only so far.

During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of CO2 emissions “on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable — and realistic — for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry’s top trade publication, praised the senator. “Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of ‘common sense solutions.’ And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind.”

Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of their more eye-grabbing numbers don’t check out. For example, as noted in a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuke industry claims that the world’s 447 nuclear plants reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent. But the true villain behind global warming is carbon. Existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total CO2 emissions, hardly a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather than renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, atomic power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that “even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem.”

Clearly Senator Obama recognizes the inherent dangers of nuclear technology and knows of the disastrous failures that plagued Chernobyl, Mayak and Three Mile Island. Yet, despite his attempts to alert the public of future toxic nuclear leaks, Obama still considers atomic power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants. The atom lobby must certainly be pleased.

Call it the eco-economy. Virtually all major corporations now claim they are going “green”. Toyota dealerships cannot keep the hybrid Prius in stock. Apple, after heavy lobbying from Greenpeace and others, declares they are going to make their computers environmentally friendly. Genetically modified corn, which produces ethanol fuel, is being hawked by Monsanto as an alternative to petroleum based gasoline. Ethanol advocates are calling their program “Fuels for Profit”, while they sip McDonald’s organic coffee. The environmental movement has been corporatized.

Big green groups are not helping the situation. Their hands are tied by both the large foundations that pay their rent and the Democratic Party to which they are attached at the hip. They long ago gave up on challenging the system. Most groups today are little more than direct mailing outfits who have embraced a sordid neoliberal approach to saving the natural world. The true causes of planetary destruction are never mentioned. Industrial capitalism is not the problem, individuals are. Not the government’s inability to enforce its weak regulations. Not big oil companies, or coal fired plants. These neoliberal groups argue ordinary people are to blame for the impending environmental catastrophe, not those who profit from the Earth’s destruction.

Meanwhile, on the ground, grassroots environmentalists engaging in arson as a response to unfettered sprawl and our car addicted culture are dubbed terrorists by the Federal government. Despite their extreme and counter-productive methods, the cases are quite informative. In our post-9/11 world young eco-radicals are viewed by the FBI and corporations as if they are as dangerous as bin Laden. All activists, no matter their cause, should take heed. It is the first step in cracking down on radical activism.

Torching SUVs in the middle of the night, unfortunately, will not bring about any massive radical change, except, perhaps, in our “anti-terrorism” legislation. There are militant direct actions that are prevailing, however, from Paul Watson’s crusade to protect the wild creatures of the sea, to the environmentalists who stake out in trees for weeks at a time, to the grandmothers who chain themselves to logging trucks, despite the dangers.

Such actions, coupled with the organization of the working class, could help steer the environmental movement in the right direction. The philosophy of the great wilderness advocate Bob Marshall may prove to be quite prescient in the age of foundation driven conservationism. Marshall believed wilderness was for the regular folks. He believed wilderness was a “minority right” and argued that elitism inside the movement would be inherently corrupt. He’s right. The burdens of a coporatized society are great, not only for our forests and rivers, but to the workers who are consistently exploited and poisoned for profit.

Marshall believed the radical trade unions and socialized forestry was one answer to countering the destruction of the wild places he loved so much. Now is the time to once again embrace such an environmental ethic. Wilderness, that living symbol of freedom, exists for all to enjoy. It is not ours to exploit. The salmon and grizzly bears deserve better.