Jeffrey St. Clair

Jeffrey St. Clair is an investigative reporter who has written extensively on politics and the environment. He formerly published Wild Forest Review. Alexander Cockburn and St. Clair write the newsletter and website CounterPunch.

"An Indianapolis native, St. Clair is known to many in Indiana as the founder of the forest protection group ForestWatch, which he organized in 1985 in response to a U.S. Forest Service plan for off-road vehicle trails in Brown County near the isolated ridge-top cabin he, wife Kim and family called home. Throughout the Hoosier struggle, St. Clair earned a reputation as a tenacious, unyielding defender of the forest's environmental integrity. He went to work for the Hoosier Environmental Council and wrote the Conservationist Alternative, which became the foundation of the ecofriendly management plan that has guided Hoosier management activities since the early 1990s. St. Clair moved to Oregon in 1990 to work with forest economist Randal O'Toole, editing a newsletter called "Forestwatch." When the two split in 1993, St. Clair started a newsletter called "Wild Forest Review," an early preparation for writing Al Gore: A User's Manual. "Wild Forest Review's" debut coincided with the early years of the Clinton-Gore administration when mainstream environmental groups were positively giddy at the prospect of a Gore vice presidency. Early in 1993, Clinton and Gore came to the Northwest and convened a summit on ancient forest logging and the spotted owl. Their proposed solution, known as Option 9, was among the initial issues covered in "Wild Forest Review." St. Clair was among the first ecojournalists to recognize that environmentalists who embraced Clinton-Gore were abandoning their principles. "Eventually, the national environmental groups were coerced into supporting Option 9, which ensured that old growth forests would be logged for the next 50 years," St. Clair said from his home in Oregon City near Portland. "During the Bush years, these people saw the logging of old growth forests as a crime. Under Clinton and Gore, they saw it as political expediency."

"Environmental muckraking: St. Clair began covering the new environmental movement, which was composed of younger, more militant activists "who challenged the bona fides of Clinton-Gore." He also became a leading critic of the large national environmental foundations and their connections to corporate money. After three years, "Wild Forest Review" folded from lack of funding. But St. Clair's writing on Gore and the North American Free Trade Agreement had caught the attention of Cockburn, whose progressive writings in the Village Voice, The Nation and other publications had always inspired St. Clair. St. Clair and Cockburn now co-edit the political newsletter Counterpunch. In 1998, they collaborated on Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. In 1999, St. Clair and James Ridgeway co-authored A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys. The Village Voice has dubbed St. Clair "America's best environmental muckraker.""

In 2011 Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank will publish GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism.