Recent Posts:
Rare Earths and Wicked Problems
April 8, 2010: To actually accomplish anything complex, and which has multiple goals, the "wicked" aspects of a situation must be considered (a wicked problem is defined somewhere in the Compression Map). But work organization leaders realize that focusing groups on...
Energy Blowout
May 9, 2010: The BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico is bringing home to Americans the risks of exploiting energy sources in difficult environments. This requires technical expertise and expenditure of energy to obtain energy. Techniques and technology...
Fishery Collapses
March 31, 2010: Fishery collapses continue around the world. Remediation is slow. Fishery collapse stories introduce many issues dealing with Compression in other contexts. In 2006 Boris Worm (Dalhousie University - Nova Scotia) made headlines for a day. Extrapolating...
“Entitlement” to Water
March 15, 2010: An piece popped up in the New York Times last week end, dramatizing the problems of maintaining the water system of Washington DC, and noting the waste incurred when maintenance is deferred. You can see it here. Americans differ little from people...
Economic Indicators
Prices, costs, and markets were never devised to tell us how we're doing in a world in Compression, and effects may take years to become so severe that no one can mistake them. The obvious indicator is energy prices. Petroleum spot prices of $60-$90 a barrel seem...
Unhappy Employment
February 6, 2010: Besides the Toyota debacle, four obscure news items cropped up this week. First, many states' unemployment funds are near bankruptcy. Second, the NFL and the players' union hit an impasse negotiating the 2011 contract; could millionaire players draw...
Foiling Malthus
January 20, 2010: Were we successful stabilizing global population at about 9 billion people in a post-expansionary society, say by 2040, how would this play out? What to do may be counterintuitive if we're not to replicate the fate of long ago societies. For...
What is Vigorous Learning
"Vigorous" suggests several attributes of learning. First, that it should be aggressive, and a core part of daily activity. Second, in work organizations, learning is primarily directed to its mission and goals, but not exclusively; organizations must venture "outside...
What is Compression?
Compression refers to: Population growth packing us ever tighter on a finite planet Squeezed resources; they're not unlimited. Compress waste out of all work processes, eliminating everything unnecessary for the purpose. Compress resource footprints for all human...
Operational Objectives of Compression
Objectives Statement: By 2040 globally improve quality of life to an industrial society equivalent using no more than half the energy and half the virgin raw materials as in the year 2000, while reducing known toxic releases to zero. Please reflect carefully on this...
Why We Must Transition into Compression
The case for Compression does not rest on the slow increase in global temperature. It is a multiple-challenge manifesto. Many dangers cannot be anticipated in detail with great certainty, but imprecision is no reason for complacency. Too many distant alarm bells keep...
Expansion is the Opposite of Compression
Expansion is a bonanza mentality; trying to gain a big payback from minimum work or investment. Seldom works out for most of us, but we "go for the gold;" think of consequences later. Compression is a conservationist, total-system, high-performance mentality; no such...
Out of Expansion Economics
About 500 years of global physical expansion has affected everyone on earth. It is still picking up speed, driven by global financial and marketing systems. These descended from early business systems devised to motivate colonial expansion, followed by industrial...
A Precarious Environment
Climate change critics seize on uncertainty of global temperature warming to insist that nothing is really changing. But temperature is only one indicator of the effects of industrial society expansion. Industrial societies became resource-intensive consumption...
Resource Shortages
A few substances may actually be near a limit. An example is rare earths important for electronic gear, like terbium and dysprosium, mined only in China so prices have sharply increased since 2007. In this case, conventional market signals prompt seeking other sources...
Energy and Energy Yield
Most industrial society denizens would like the benefits of cheap energy without any of its downsides. For example,uranium mining and processing has strong opposition almost anywhere it is proposed. For a rundown on this explore: www.wise-uranium.org/ Nuclear fusion...
Oceanic Disruption
Half of all our oxygen comes from the ocean, by a CO2-oxygen exchange cycle not as completely understood as we would like. Climate change is only one risk from excess CO2 in the air. Ocean acidification is another. It alone could be reason enough to reduce the burning...
Over-Consumption Exacerbates Over-Expansion
Not only has population expanded, in industrial societies physical consumption per person expanded too. One measure of excess consumption is solid waste to landfill. In the United States daily solid waste per person rose from 2.7 pounds in 1960 to 4.7 pounds in 2005....
Push Back to Industrial Society
European colonization displaced a lot of people. The rise of industrial societies displaced a lot more. They or their descendants are still here, and displacement is still happening. For example, China's industrial rise displaced millions of people now roaming the...
Vigorous Learning Enterprises
To deal with Compression, working organizations need to migrate toward becoming "vigorous learning enterprises." This kind of self-learning organization has a shallow hierarchy, and much work has to be done by people working together with minimal direction. They need...