What's Cooking?

Some time ago I picked up the book What’s Cooking in Our National Parks, a collection of the ‘best’ recipes submitted to the National Park Service by park visitors.  Ooh, what a mistake.  One of the typical offerings:

Sweet and Spicy Wieners

5 oz. can cocktail wieners
3 oz. grape jelly
2 oz. yellow mustard

Mix together and heat in a pot.  Serves 3.

I would submit that preparing such a dish in one of our National Parks would be an insult to nature.  But that’s just me.

So, what’s cookin’ at EPA?  I just started my quarterly management meetings with senior staff this week and I’m pretty excited about what is going on.  More than ever, people are identifying possible ways to improve how we do business.  After just two meetings, here are some things people are working on:

• Region 5 is discussing with Region 7 how to integrate meteorological, topographic and other information off the Web to better target inspections of animal feedlots.  They do this in the office before going out in the field.  The result should be much greater reductions in pollution in critical watersheds and the faster recovery of natural habitats.

• Region 7 is learning from Region 9 how we can make sure old diesel engines that EPA helps ‘retire’ aren’t ‘resurrected’ someplace else such as Mexico.

• Our enforcement office is determining how some EPA regions are able to more evenly spread out our enforcement related referrals to the Department of Justice.  If we are able to do this across the agency, we could take faster action against scofflaws.

What’s cookin’ at EPA?

Continuous Improvementelli

1 oz. inquisitiveness
1 oz. persistence
3 oz. perspiration
Dash of innovation

Mix and never stop mixing.  Serves 300 million.

Comments

[Rick]

I think that it's great that the EPA is working to operate more efficiently. As we all know, knowledge is power, and this is especially important for the EPA; but maybe more so for humanity.

I think that the sharing of knowledge is a great step towards a better future and I commend those who press this issue.