Articles by Lisa Hymas

In case you weren’t convinced about the horrors of dioxin …

just look at the face of Ukranian presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko (before and after photos here).  Yikes. The bizarre case of his poisoning has brought renewed attention to this frightening substance, a byproduct of herbicide manufacturing, paper milling, waste incineration, and other nasty industrial processes.  

As BushGreenwatch points out, the Bushies are dragging their feet on curbing dioxin pollution, both domestically and internationally. "They've done nothing in regulations, and I don't see anything on dioxin moving on the federal level in the next four years," said Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice and an activist who made a name for herself by fighting for justice at Love Canal.

One might think this ghastly, high-profile assassination attempt -- complete with very public, physical evidence of the horrific damage dioxin can do -- could provide a needed kick in the pants. But don't hold your breath.  

Bushies gut national forest rules

Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration announced that it's making the biggest overhaul to forest-management rules in some three decades. The news made the front page of today's New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etc. -- but ya gotta know it'll slip by unnoticed by a great many folks stuck in whited-out airports in the Midwest and teeming malls everywhere else.  

It's been a while since the Bushies pulled one of these announce-an-environmental-abomination-when-no-one's-looking stunts, but they returned to the tactic with a real doozy this time.  

"A key wildlife protection that has governed federal forest management for more than two decades will be dropped under new regulations announced Wednesday by the Bush administration, and requirements for public involvement in planning for the country's 192 million acres of national forest will be dramatically altered," write Bettina Boxall and Lisa Getter in the L.A. Times.  

A clear eye from Britain

Leave it to the British Independent to cut to the chase and succinctly summarize the environment-ravaging agenda of a second Bush administration and its cronies in Congress. Even the title of its article succinctly summarizes it: "Bush sets out plan to dismantle 30 years of environmental laws."

Reporter Geoffrey Lean notes that three laws in particular are in the admin's sights:

1. the Clean Air Act,
   
2. the Endangered Species Act (as Amanda Griscom Little has reported), and
   
3. the National Environmental Policy Act.
   

Brilliant bit of Bhopal activism

On this, the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, hats off to Andy Bichlbaum for a brilliant bit of activist theater.  

Yesterday, the smooth-talking wag posed as a representative of Dow Chemical -- which in 2001 bought Union Carbide, the culprit in the deadly Bhopal catastrophe -- and got himself on BBC World TV news, where he announced that Dow was taking responsibility for the world's worst environmental accident and would pay $12 billion to victims to make amends.

Of course, it was all a charade.