Articles by JMG

A picture worth many thousands of words

This ranks up there (and could have been included) with Bill Maher's terrific book, When you ride alone, you ride with Bin Laden.

The privileged attitude of the motorhead

A Washington Post columnist:

Ecosystems are nonlinear

Here's a disturbing study that seems to mimic nothing so much as my mother-in-law's theory that small brownie pieces cut from the edge of the remaining mass of brownies left in the pan ("the efficient frontier," an economist might call it) don't have calories, because each little tiny mini-slice hardly changes the amount of brownie left at all.

On the one hand, the example cited is not particularly objectionable: Researchers claim to have found a mangrove where you can remove 20% of it with little reduction in flood control capacity -- meaning you can use that 20% for factory farmed shrimp and such.

The attitude of this article is in sharp contrast with that of Aldo Leopold and others, who would suggest that recognizing nonlinearity is a good first step, but that wisdom, or even an approximation of it, doesn't begin until you recognize that this ...

Got any ideas for a better Toxic Release Inventory system?

As the letter below indicates, OMB Watch has spent a lot of time on defense since the Supreme Court installed "W" (they use W so he can spell it properly) in 2000. The group fights for government openness and accountability and supports the nonprofit sector.

One of their campaigns has been to preserve the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), one of the most useful things ever to emerge from the era of unashamed environmentalism. Just knowing that the TRI was out there led corporations to huge reductions in toxic releases.

Naturally, gutting TRI was high on the Bush junta's agenda. But it seems like most of the bad ideas have gone away, and OMB Watch is now looking for ideas for making TRI even better, now that the Democratic majority runs Congress.

So get creative -- how would you like to see information displayed? What would be most useful for your town?