HERE'S THE THING I still can't figure out about Barry Clausen. Environmentalists like Brock Evans, David Brower, Asante Riverwind, and Mitch Friedman will fight for 10 or 20 or, in Brower's case, 50 years, and in the end they can hold up enormous chunks of public wilderness that still exist because of their toil and sweat. These places have names: The Grand
Canyon. Dinosaur National Monument. North Cascades National Park. Loomis National Forest. Clausen has spent ten years fighting radical environmentalists, ten long years chasing after a day of justice that may never come. And what does he have to show for it? A long list of names, dates, subjects, telephone numbers, and occasional guest spots on right-wing
radio shows. For him, it can only come back to one thing. All the embarrassing, credibility-destroying depositions and transcripts that environmentalists trot out to claim that he should not be trusted—those may all be true. But just because Clausen may be everything his enemies say he is doesn't mean some of what he says might not be right.
Barry called the other day. "Listen," he said, "I'm getting a lot of calls on this Leonard Peltier stuff, and I'm trying to figure out where they're coming from. A lot of Native American organizations are contacting me." Having spent the past decade fighting ecoterrorism, Barry's fight for justice is widening. In his spare time he's been looking into the
Peltier case, and he claims to have turned up some startling new information that could clear the celebrated American Indian Movement organizer convicted of murdering two FBI agents in a shoot-out near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1975. In typical form, he wouldn't tell me what he's got—"It'll be in my next book," he says—but whatever it is,
Peltier's advocates want no part of it. Clausen's reputation so precedes him that a few months ago the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee gave this reply to his offer of help: "We would rather see Leonard rot in prison than take information from you."
The rise of underground anti–genetic engineering groups has also expanded Barry's sphere of influence. Last year he was invited by GenCon, a consortium of scientists working on genomics research, to speak at a conference on agricultural terrorism—during which, he adds, he met with "six government intelligence officials; they wanted to pick my
brain, swap information." Who, exactly? "Can't tell you that."
"What he does is not all that popular," says Thomas Frazier, director of GenCon. "It's difficult for Barry to get funding because he's on the wrong side in terms of foundations. They all love to fund the environmentalist causes." But, Frazier says, as one who's seen radical activists spread disinformation far and wide during the past year, "it's
important to provide some resistance to this bullshit."
And so it goes. Barry has nearly completed his second book. He spoke with a couple of New York publishers about putting it out, he says, but in the end decided to print it himself. Every day he works on it a little more, pruning the chapters, getting the facts straight, tightening the prose. He's not sure exactly when it'll come out, but it'll be soon,
he promises. The working title? Burning Rage. 
Contributing editor Bruce Barcott wrote about the Poacher King in the October 1999 issue.
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