Don’t think that we don’t understand what you’re getting at with your features on political ambivalence, consumer waste and social inequity. The ozone is depleting and various governments are cracking the whip but none of it will matter if we blow each other up before the next election. Um, point taken?

What we don’t understand, however, is why you’ve decided to publish 112 “surface-treated opaque 30% recycled post-consumer fibre” pages (saving by your count a total of 175 trees per issue) when an oversized PowerPoint file would have been more succinct and spared many more hectares of precious rainforest. This medium would have the added bonus of being more user-friendly than your current poorly glued pages, a few of which blew into the Atlantic on my last visit to the beach resulting in who knows what kind of ink toxins being unleashed on unsuspecting jelly fish, minnows and overweight, sun-burnt tourists. I think I heard my laptop let out a sigh of snobiety.

We know that such an alternative had to skim the surface of your collective craniums before you spruced up our nation’s independent newsstands. In dividing the July/August issue into color-coded subsections containing more graphical analysis than an average freshman statistics class, and using pull quotes like, “The plastic bag was emblematic of what our country and planet have been suffering from” did you not consider “Digital not Paper” in face of “Paper not Plastic”? The pseudo clip art, though artistically inclined with mouthwatering minimalism, didn’t escape our attention either thanks to the, again, color-coded text citations; very left-brained of you GOOD.

Excuse us for being more than a little disappointed in your cover story. While approaching current Middle Eastern “conflicts” from the angle of diverse, young war vets' testimonials is an ingenious idea, the creative effort put into the feature seems to have dried up after the initial pitch. Maybe you should have expounded a little further than collective photo captions in getting your point across. This cover feature was the the place to inject some much needed text for those of us befuddled by your bar code-cum-pie graph on page 34.

All that being said, your publication is obviously more environmentally and socially responsible than Kroger brand organics whose packaging recalls your magazine’s earth-toned, san serif design. Props giving Mike Gravel and Peter Watkins time to shine. The “Polling and Rolling!” presidential board game was also a nice touch as we are suckers for interactive gimmicks.

Now $4.95 further in credit card debt (see “House of Credit Cards” by Maxed Out director James Scurlock (not the burger-eating documentarian, the credit card-eating one) on page 104) and not much the wiser on how to change our wicked ways, consider us one less footprint to tempt your eco-friendly-fashion-forward advertisers with. Maybe we’ll check your blog when occasional bouts of SUV-ridden guilt boredom surface to see if you’ve raised that $1 million yet for myriad good causes.

Is this your legacy or all of civilization's from page 84? “Humans are naturally wasteful, and we have been since the start of time.”

Yours,

Tiffany Rainey
ignore Magazine staff

This discourse of Good Magazine was written by Tiffany Rainey for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.