Nightwatch over Nature : People, Natures and Politics

From clear-cutting in the rain forests of Brazil and the Pacific Northwest to the recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain, radical environmentalist Alexander Cockburn draws together for the first time a collection of essays culled from both his popular "Beat the Devil" columns in The Nation as well as other sources.These pieces draw together two essential themes of Cockburn's work: the relationships between the First and Third worlds in terms of crops such as timber, tobacco, silver, opium and indigenous Third World struggles, and the First World's mainstream environmental organizations, with their very different and often contradictory programs. Analyzing the conceptions of nature that underlie these contrasting visions, Cockburn in these essays addresses the ugly Malthusian strain that runs through much of environmental thinking, and discusses the social relations of such "natural" disasters such as the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Oakland, California, fire.Cockburn has written on environmental issues over the past 20 years, on topics as diverse as the decay of the national Green organizations in the United States to the consequences of the recent outbreak of mad cow disease. As a counterpoint to his explorations of true enviromentalism, Cockburn in one essay provides a tragi-comic, detailed chronicle of the relationship between the environmental movementnational and grassrootswith the Clinton administration. This wide-ranging and erudite book concludes with an original essay on meat consumption, in which Cockburn traces from the Book of Genesis to the crisis of mad cow disease.