Articles by Lisa Hymas

Semi? He thought they said Demi

Two months ago, we mocked Ashton Kutcher for buying a behemoth, 10-mile-per-gallon (on a good day) International CXT, or commercial extreme truck.

Now, Kutcher's mocking himself. "My semi? It's the most idiotic thing I've ever purchased," he's quoted as saying in, ahem, In Touch Weekly. (I was flipping through it in line at the co-op, OK?)

ContactMusic.com reports that he may auction the beast off.

"It's a weird boy's dream," he said by way of explaining his stupidity. "Growing up in Iowa, all these kids in my school who had money would go out and buy these Toyota pickup trucks and put these huge wheels on them, and I would go, 'Oh man, I've got to have one of those.'

"So when I saw this truck in the newspaper, I knew I had to have it ... Then I got it, and I was like, 'Son of a bitch, I should have looked at it first.' I didn't realize it was that big."

A first: Black man to head up NWF board

Jerome Ringo will officially take the helm of the National Wildlife Federation board this week, making him "the first-ever African-American to hold such a leadership position with any national conservation organization," according to the group.  

Congrats to Ringo and kudos to NWF, but damn, what does it say about the green movement that we're only just now marking this milestone? No wonder activists lament the lack of non-white faces in environmental circles.

Ringo told Lester Graham of the Great Lakes Radio Consortium that times are changing: "We're not where we want to be with respect to minority involvement in conservation, but I can guarantee you we're not where we were. Years ago when I got into the environmental movement, there were very, very few minorities involved."

As Graham explains it, Ringo "says he first got involved in environmental activism because he knew of chemical releases that were being emitted from a refinery, and some of those chemicals could cause health problems for the people who live nearby -- most of them low-income African-Americans."

Ringo in his own words again: "We have to readjust our priorities from just quality of life issues like where next month's rent is coming from, how do we feed our family. Environmental issues have to be within our top priorities because, as I tell the people in 'Cancer Alley,' Louisiana, what good is next month's rent if you're dying of cancer? So, we've got to be more involved in those quality of life issues and make environmental/conservation issues one of those key issues in our lives."

The real meaning of “roadless”

While shilling for drilling during last week's Senate debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) claimed that oil development would have a negligible effect on the area: "When we talk about the roadless areas we have available for exploration, we mean it. We do mean that we are going to put down an ice road that will disappear when the summer comes."

Bizarrely, as Felicity Barringer of The New York Times points out, roadless might not mean what you think it means.  

"[T]he term 'roadless' does not mean an absence of roads," Interior Department officials wrote in a recent environmental impact statement about drilling in another region of Alaska. "Rather, it indicates an attempt to minimize the construction of permanent roads."

The sheer inventiveness of the Bushies' Orwellian contortions is awe-inspiring.

Norton and the 1002 — I mean the Arctic Refuge

In her New York Times op-ed ballyhooing the Bushies' plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Gale Norton uses an interesting new tactic.  

I'm not talking about arguing that the drilling footprint would be small. (Though she's quite crafty about making that claim, noting that "the world of Arctic energy exploration in the 21st century ... is as different from what oil exploration used to be as the compact supercomputers of today are different from the huge vacuum tube computers of the 1950s. Through the use of advanced technology, we have learned not only to get access to oil and gas reserves in Arctic environments but also to protect their ecosystems and wildlife.")

Rather, I mean her repeated reference to the "1002 area," which she describes as "a sliver" of the refuge. Some enviros get pissed when the refuge is referred to as ANWR, believing that the acronym depersonalizes it and strips it of evocative power. (If you can't manage to get out all four words, they say, shorten it to Arctic Refuge.) The administration, in referring to the tract where drilling would take place as the "1002 area," sucks even more life from it. Really, how riled up are the masses going to get about protecting a four-digit sliver?  

Norton manages to squeeze five mentions of "1002" into a brief 650-word op-ed. This is just the beginning of a new admin framing strategy. Expect lots more 1002 in the future.

(Media Matters for America, in a post from earlier this month, refutes some of the refuge-related arguments put forth by Norton, other admin officials, and their cronies at Fox News.)