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Hit & Run: Join the club  

The latest person to take a pop at the seemingly-unstoppable James Cameron juggernaut Avatar ($1bn takings and rising) is Stanton A Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California. He was quoted in The New York Times earlier this week damning scenes in which Sigourney Weaver's character Grace Augustine is puffing on a cigarette. Glantz has criticised the movie for glamorising smoking, and claimed it was factually inaccurate. "I know a lot of environmental scientists like the Sigourney Weaver character," he said. "Not one smokes."

The officious nature of Glantz's complaint aside (Cameron has since hit back to say that Grace was not meant to be a role-model), is his claim strictly true? It doesn't seem to hold water when considering environmentalists in general. Zac Goldsmith smokes scraggy roll-ups. It's a well-known joke among environmental circles that Yvo de Boer, the current executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is a big smoker. Barack Obama, who won near-unanimous backing from environmentalists, has a penchant for the odd gasper. Then there are the actor-environmentalists: Leonardo DiCaprio, who fronted environmental documentary The 11th Hour, is papped puffing. Robert Redford sucked a pipe in his youth, yet has campaigned against the development of tracts of land in the US and abroad. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Glantz.

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