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  • Home > The Case for Compression > Precarious Environment
Currently viewing the category: "Precarious Environment"

Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes

On April 10, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
coli

This political as well as scientific issue has hung around for more than 50 years. About 80% of all antibiotics in the United States are fed to animals as disease prophylactics and as a growth stimulant. Recent developments promise to revive this dispute.

Antibiotics have been used in animals as long as [...]

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Building Microbiomes?

On March 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Indoor air quality

Leading edge research in the Built Environment is exploring the distribution of microbes found inside buildings. Many researchers have investigated other contaminants, but not microbes. Because we spend 90 percent of our time in buildings, the Built Environment has a major influence on health. Learning about it cuts across many fields, but [...]

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Spectrum Crunch

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
smart-phone-use

CNN is running a series on the impending shortage of spectrum to carry the increasing demands of smart phones. Without action, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anticipates the shortfall to be serious by 2014. Fast growth in phone traffic presages the issues of Compression in many other domains, but happening in [...]

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Indoor Air Environments

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Indoor air quality

Indoor environments have opportunities to use Compression Thinking. Indoors is where we live, where the EPA estimates that we spend 90% of our time  – not counting time in vehicles. Inside most buildings, air is more polluted than outside.Hazards are serious enough that the EPA has an Indoor Environments Division. [...]

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Water Treatment

On February 6, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Waster Water

Will Rogers once advised audiences to “drink upstream from the herd.” That usually worked in a thinly populated world. Running water and soil percolation remediated low bioloads. Heavy metal contaminants weren’t as widely distributed.

Today we have to help nature deal with high bioloads and pervasive industrial chemicals, but Read Full Article →

Biomes and Biodiversity

On January 4, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Microbe

Other than “cute” animals going extinct, biodiversity gets little public attention. Preserving biodiversity is essential for many reasons that sum up to life itself being unable to exist without it (yawn). Publicized studies cover macro-diversity we can see, but implications are so opaque that we’re angry if countermeasures crimp our livelihood. For [...]

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Insidious Toxins

On September 8, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression-Thinking-frog-endocrine-disruptors-mutation-640

September 8, 2011

Environmental toxins are more complex than any busy person can be expected to follow. Even biological specialists unable to grasp the scope of these risks tend to issue messages that are contradictory generalizations from limited observations. That’s one form of the reductionist thinking plaguing the modern world because all of us have [...]

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Green Goo; Yellow Sea

On July 28, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
green-algae-in-the-Yellow-Sea-250

July 28, 2011

You have to know your algae. They exist in great variety from single cells to giant kelp. The mere sight of pond scum clouding clear water in summer displeases most of us, but algae blooms expanding all over the world are also a perverse resource “footprint” of the [...]

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Of Jellyfish and Cooling Water

On June 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
nuclear-power-plant-250

June 30, 2011

In Scotland the Torness nuclear generating units have been shut down until at least July 5 to clean out jellyfish clogging the intake filters for cooling water. In France, as in the summer of 2009, unofficial channels report that nuke generators are going through rolling shutdowns because a [...]

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Hormesis and Non-Linearity

On April 12, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Hormesis_dose_response_graph-250w

April 12, 2011

Hormesis is an example of non-linear thinking clashing with linear. Hormesis, in general, is that the effects of a substance at high and low concentrations may be very different. Vitamins like A, C, and D and several metallic elements are well known examples. Essential to life in minute concentrations, they are fatal [...]

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Compressing the Food Crisis

On March 11, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression-Thinking-Compressing-the-Food-Crisis-250

March 11, 2011

In February, the UN’s Global FAO Food Price Index pushed further above its former peak in July 2008, the same month that oil prices peaked above $140 a barrel. The 2008 peak subsided quickly because it was partly speculative trading, but not before food riots broke out in various places; [...]

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Down and Dirty

On January 27, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
food-agriculture-250

January 27, 2011

Soil, teeming with microbes and mystery, like sex, still works about as it did millennia ago. When managing soil, technology gives us more options, but not wisdom. If we use it only to prop up soil until it wears out, we’re foolish. Depleted industrial farm soil must be revitalized to grow a [...]

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World Grain Supply — 2010 and Beyond

On August 16, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

August 15, 2010

World grain prices are up sharply since June. U.S. prices rose for several days ahead of the USDA’s much awaited projection of this year’s global grain harvest, issued on August 12. Excess heat cut this year’s harvest in Central Asia. Russia and the Ukraine, which are normally grain [...]

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The Nigerian Muddle

On June 25, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
niger-river-men-in-boat-300x225

June 25, 2010

Nigeria’s muddle is more like the muddle we all face in Compression than the oil spill in the Gulf. Nigeria sits on a lot of oil, sweet crude preferred by American refineries. About 40% of Nigerian oil exports go to the the U.S., and it accounts for about [...]

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Titanic Syndrome

On June 15, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Credit-NOAA-Institute-for-Exploration-University-of-Rhode-Island-or-NOAA-IFE-URI-300

June 15, 1010

Bad news from the Gulf continues to flow. Much of it is about which culprits to blame and who pays. Stock caps, bonuses, and dividends are at risk. Liability lawyers circle their own version of black gold. This fiasco point up how a huge economic superstructure is built on the ability of [...]

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Endocrine Disruption

On June 3, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
toxic-640

June 3, 2010

Worrywart’s are beating endocrine disruptor drums louder and louder. In very small concentrations these are known to adversely affect glandular functions and chemical balances in animals. Accumulating evidence suggests that endocrine disruption may seriously affect humans, for instance, by cutting sperm counts. Well-known effects on animals [...]

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The New Fable of the Bees

On May 3, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
bee-640x480

May 4, 2010:

The Fable of the Bees, written by Bernard Mandeville in 1705, is a poem which observed how each bee serving its own interest contributed to the common good. Adam Smith took up Mandeville’s themes, which are the bedrock of capitalist philosophy to this [...]

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Fishery Collapses

On March 31, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

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 the rate of global fishery collapses, his curve went to zero in 2048. No fisheries [...]

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A Precarious Environment

On January 4, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

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 societies, underpinned by mining, extraction, manufacturing, and disposal. Industrial agriculture displaced small-holder, diversified farms. People urbanized and suburbanized. We developed [...]

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Oceanic Disruption

On January 4, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

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 of fossil fuels.

The ocean is actually [...]

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