On Day 1 in Burlington, considered by many the heart of green business, John Erickson, professor of ecological economics at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, clearly touched a nerve.

FORBES: Are We All Just Homogeneous Globules of Desire?

John Erickson makes something of the comparison between the great tsarist offensive in 1916 under Brusilov and Zhukov's operation in 1944 to clear the Germans from Belarus, showing in the process that the armies of both wars were not the primitive, poorly led, forces often depicted in western literature.

ECONOMIST: 20th-century history

John Kress and David Erickson, who both work at the Smithsonian, have barcoded all 689 species listed in World Economic Plants.

ECONOMIST: Taxonomy