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Will KIA’s ads give car sharing a boost?

Last night, mindless TV called. An ad came on that I've seen before, but never focused on. It's for the KIA Sportage (which I really want to pronounce with a lovely French accent), and shows a series of people driving the same car, tossing the keys to each other as they go. Wow: car sharing hits prime time! This is almost as good as hybrids on Alias.

I know, I know, I'm being too literal. KIA's point is simply that this vehicle works for all kinds of different people. But along the way, the company makes sharing a car look pretty darn zippy. Maybe it'll get viewers thinking ... (naw -- see first line).

Evangelical enviros leery of associating with, uh, enviros

Richard Cizik, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, is heavily hawking the notion of "creation care" these days.  (That would be God-flavored environmentalism, for those not in the know.)

Three weeks ago, he chatted up the concept with NPR's Scott Simon (whom I wholly adore, but that's a topic for another post).  

This past weekend, he got his mug and his pitch in The New York Times Magazine, via a Q&A with Deborah Solomon.  An excerpt:  

Q: What is wrong with [the] term [environmentalism]?

A: It's not the term. It's the environmentalists themselves. I was recently speaking with the leadership of the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, and I told them, ''Gentlemen, I respect you, but at this point don't plan on any formal collaborations.''

Q: Why? Because they lean to the left?

A: Environmentalists have a bad reputation among evangelical Christians for four reasons. One, they rely on big-government solutions. Two, their alliance with population-control movements. Three, they keep kooky religious company.

Q: What is your idea of a kooky religion?

A: Some environmentalists are pantheists who believe creation itself is holy, not the Creator.

Q: And what's No. 4?

A: There's a certain gloom and doom about environmentalists. They tend to prophecies of doom that don't happen. Look at the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," in which New York City freezes over.

The evangelicals don't want to play with the enviros, and -- sad, but true -- that's probably smart strategizing. The Christian right already knows how to get Bush's attention, and Rove's devotion. Can any green groups say the same?

Conservo-pundit Jonah Goldberg reveals the right’s lazy misunderstandings of enviro issues

Smirky columnist Jonah Goldberg's latest column in National Review Online is virtually worthless as a source of information, but it does provide good insight into the relationship of the modern conservative punditariat to the environment and the environmental movement. In the end, they feel obliged to say they care about the environment, but it doesn't particularly interest them, and as long as someone, anyone will reassure them that everything is peachy, that's enough. And of course, if there's one thing modern conservatives have in spades, it is an embarrassment of media sources devoted to telling them what they want to hear.

Goldberg uses the occasion of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to riff on what is the core modern conservative position on the environment, namely: The rest of the world is polluted, because they are poor and socialist, but the U.S. and Europe are doing just fine, because they are rich and capitalist. There's a germ of truth in this, of course, but what Goldberg is utterly insensate toward is the basic fact that pollution, global warming, and overfishing do not respect national borders. Wait, he believes in that stuff, right?

And let's be fair, unlike the situation in America and Europe, there are some enormous environmental problems in the world. Even if you're a global-warming skeptic, there's no disputing that such problems as overfishing are real.

Sigh.

More slogging under the break.

Ballast Off

Judge rules EPA must regulate ballast water, control invasive species In a court decision called “a slam dunk for healthy oceans” by the Ocean Conservancy’s Sarah Newkirk, a federal judge ruled last week that the U.S. EPA must regulate ballast water carried by ships entering U.S. waters. The ruling reverses the agency’s exemption of ballast […]

Easy Encomium, Easy Go

EPA earns enviro praise by updating cancer guidelines to protect kids Here’s a rarity: Enviros actually praised a Bush administration move last week. The U.S. EPA earned the plaudits by announcing that it will update its nearly 20-year-old chemical-assessment approach for evaluating potential human carcinogens, to account for differences between adults and children and between […]

Umbra on getting up to speed on enviro issues

Dear Umbra, I am new to the environmental movement, and I was wondering how you keep track of the major issues within it, because there are so many! Also, do you have any books to recommend on the history of the environmental movement? NaomiVictoria, British Columbia, Canada Dearest Naomi, Grist, of course! In addition to […]

Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association, answers questionsNo

Norris McDonald. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I’m president of the African American Environmentalist Association. What does your organization do? What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission accomplished”? The African American Environmentalist Association, founded in 1985, is one of the nation’s oldest African American-led environmental organizations. We are dedicated to protecting the […]

Talking better is great, but doing things differently is more important

It's not hard to understand why framing has taken on such totemic significance among progressives. Where the modern right sees itself involved in a knife fight -- the goal is winning -- progressives tend to be enamored of process and analysis and reasoned argument. They want to persuade. This is, perhaps more than any other single reason, why they keep getting their asses kicked.

Framing has taken particular hold of the progressive blogosphere, which is chock full of logophiles, people who love, above all else, words.

George Lakoff is not the solution to our problems

I keep thinking I'm done talking about framing (done framing framing?), but like the man said, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

More below the fold, for those who are not sick of the subject.

The seal massacre, in its full gory

I'm an environmentalist, not an animal-rights activist. Sometimes the two labels go hand-in-hand; sometimes they clash. Personally, I place a priority on healthy ecosystems (including the survival of whole species in their native habitat) over an individual animal's right to exist no matter where it may find itself.

So from that vantage point, the fracas over Canada's annual seal hunt doesn't seem to me to be an "environmental" issue, if we're pigeonholing. Seals, as I understand it, are not endangered.

But, trust me, you don't have to attach any activist label to yourself at all to be revolted and horror-struck by the hunt. The International Fund for Animal Welfare is posting new video footage daily of the mass killing -- and, despite the fact that some of it is set to cheesy, melodramatic music, the images of young seals being bludgeoned and skinned are stomach-churning and heart-breaking. And infuriating. Steel yourself and take a look. "Highlights from 2004 hunt" (shouldn't that be lowlights?), which you can access after registering, are particularly gruesome and illustrative.

As The Guardian notes, this year's particularly large hunt is being justified in part by the claim that seals are eating too many fish, wholly ignoring the fact that the Canadian government has long sanctioned unsustainable fishing practices. Yet another example of humans pushing a species to the brink, then using its scarcity as an excuse to massacre its natural predators. That's a fucked-up cycle.