Burtynsky is generally known for his large-format prints of man-made landscapes like quarries, factories or dams. He has also recently released his film, Manufactured Landscapes, and founded the environmental site WorldChanging.Org.

Being a general fan of the man, I couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity to see him speak when my recent trip to San Francisco happened to coincide with his presentation as part of the Long Now Foundation’s lecture series on long-term thinking.

As well as showing many of his fantastic photographs, Burtynsky was charged with looking into techniques for preserving images for 10,000 years. His recommendation was to use an obscure and little-used technique called Carbon Printing, which is done commercially by less than a dozen small shops worldwide. It’s particularly expensive, labour intensive, and difficult, but the final product is incredibly stable and resistant to degradation. The ink is literally crushed stone of different colours suspended by gelatin. The Magenta stone is only obtainable from a small mine in Germany, and the gelatin used by the process is so pure that the small shops employing the process need to band together to commission special small batches from gelatin manufacturers, because nobody makes anything with the purity needed on a regular basis.

Resilience Theory attempts to analyze what makes ecological systems resilient, and use that as guidelines for applying it to a huge variety of other fields. The goal is to make systems resilient to unknown future shocks which might disrupt the system. One of the central tenets of the idea is that we won’t necessarily know what those disruptions will be, but we know that certain conditions will be more resilient to shocks than others. It is an extremely cross-disciplinary approach that attempts to explain phenomena in a wide variety of areas.

For example, ecological systems are generally most resilient when they exhibit large amounts of biodiversity. If the environment changes suddenly, chances are higher in a widely diverse system that at least some members of that system will be able to adapt into new niches.

Monocultures can be extremely effective for a time, but failures in the system can often be catastrophic. The Irish, for example, thrived for a time almost exclusively on potatoes, until the potato blight destroyed a huge portion of the crop and led to the starvation of millions. Many businesses thrive doing one thing extremely well, only to suffer when the market changed (think Polaroid, for example, which is slowly collapsing because of their reliance on the instant film market, which is itself in rapid decline).

This concept could also apply to many other facets of society. Our utter reliance on oil might soon prove to be an excellent example, as our supply looks ever more depleted, and rising costs look to make oil and its byproducts more expensive. We are utterly dependent on cheap oil for transportation, heating, and agriculture, but we aren’t working as hard as we could to create viable alternatives. Resilience theory posits that moving away from our dependance on oil would be good not just for the environment, it would also make our society more resilient to unknown shocks. We should have known better than to be so utterly reliant on something as unstable as oil.

This is just the very tip of the iceberg - the field looks at different states of equilibrium and attempts to show how and why systems balance themselves in different states, and how systems can often tip very quickly from one self-organized state to another. If global warming increases temperatures much more than 2 degrees centigrade, it’s worried that a bevy of further events - evaporating methane reserves under the arctic, desertification of the Amazon rainforest, and changes in reflective albedo could usher in a sort of quick flip to an even hotter state of equilibrium in a very short time. By all accounts it is extremely important to avoid hitting that point. The closer we move to it, the greater our risk.

A diagram showing two hypothetical steady states as balls lying on a curved surface. If the ball is pushed beyond a certain point, it might be pushed past a peak, at which point it could fall into a different trough.

An important aspect of Resilience theory is to study how and why these sudden shifts, or regime changes, take place. A standard maximization approach on a system (let’s say fisheries) may, in an attempt to get the highest possible yields, come closer to a threshold of regime change than they otherwise should. Resilience theory makes a point of studying how this works, and urges caution in such areas.

“Our focus should not be on constancy,” says father of resilience study Buzz Holling, “but on variability. Not on single equilibrium, but on events far from equilibria at the stability boundaries. That’s where the action was, that’s where evolution took place. That’s where the turbulence of nature occured upon which adaptive changes created new species, or new policies . . . these systems have multi-stable states, and they can flip from one to another. And if you don’t attend to the boundaries of stability, you’re losing the game. Variability is extremely important . . .”

Holling also cites a somewhat predictable cycle of boom, bust, and renewal which can be applied to everything from businesses, to forests, to ocean fisheries, to politics. Holling describes a business becoming very effective at one thing, specializing, becoming dependent on than one thing, becoming too rigid and resistant to change, going bust and then rebuilding itself with a new board and new direction as being rather similar to a forest maturing from a diverse polycultural grassland, into an old growth forest before being gutted by a forest fire and reverting back to small and diverse growth.

As oil becomes ever more expensive, the peak oil theory is making our car-centric suburbs look like more of a burden than a blessing. Urban planners like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander have been criticizing suburbs for decades, though mostly for social rather than economic reasons. I personally couldn’t imagine myself living in a cookie-cutter house in the suburbs, or living in a place that was more than a few minutes walk to a park, café, community centre, bakery, subway, restaurants, and grocery store.

This is a photo I snapped out the window of the plane as we were landing in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s a suburb, but it isn’t suburban in the North American sense. It’s small enough to easily walk across, yet large enough to have a station on the regional commuter rail line (and trust me, there isn’t much that the Germans seem to love more than their trains).

Oily Speculation

The New Yorker on why the current massive spikes in oil prices are not related to speculators, as many people seem to be indicating. The American Congress is hard at work promising a quick fix by reigning in speculation, we should have reason to believe that there won’t be an easy solution to the problem. Via Big Contrarian.

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Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

Simple and quick.

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Hybrid Car Porn

Some supposed upcoming hybrid cars from most of the major manufacturers. Aside from the Prius, this crop is mostly still-rather-bad hybrid SUV’s and unrealistic concept cars, which generally have no bearing on what comes to market (case in point: the “green” Hummer O2 concept from last year, which was ridiculous beyond words, and yet garnered much attention).

The Long Views Blog has pointed me to an interesting list of the oldest companies in the world. It’s interesting to see the factors which allow a company to last for so long. They are generally small, family-owned, extremely specialized, and renowned for the quality of their products.

The first one on the list that I recognized was #32 cymbal-maker Zildjian, which was founded in Istanbul in 1623, which was followed closely by Kikkoman, a soy-sauce maker founded in Japan seven years later.

Wired has a report on the recent collapse of the SUV and truck market in the U.S., which have taken a rather sharp nosedive these past few months. Some analysts seem to believe it’s a change that’s here to stay. Jesse Toprak on CNNMoney is quoted in the article as saying “Even if gas prices go down for a month or two, consumers are not going to rush back out and buy SUVs. This appears to be a permanent shift”. While I don’t think oil prices are going to go down any time soon, I’m not so sure that people wouldn’t rush back to SUV’s and trucks if they did. In any case, a few months of sales don’t mean a whole lot. North Americans love big things, and I’m not so sure the mental shift can happen that fast.

I would be happy to see North Americans adopt a more European outlook on cars (and houses, and food for that matter) in going for quality over quantity. Pictured here is the Mercedes A-Class , a luxury subcompact sold in the European market. They were super-popular in Germany, but go directly against the North American penchant for size over everything else, which, as mentioned, seems just as prevalent in our homes and on our plates.

I would be pleased to see an overnight shift to compacts, hybrids, and bicycles. This is, however, more likely going to be a slow move to small trucks, so-called “crossovers” like the amusingly aptly name Buick Enclave, and mid-size cars.

Sometimes a practice becomes so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed. Case in point - hotels pretty much always try to charge you a whole lot for extra services. All hotels seem to do it. The proverbial 6 Euro bottle of water in the mini-bar is a great example. Sure, it makes money for the hotels in the short run, but it makes them come off as greedy, at least in my eyes.

I didn’t realize how bad things were until I stayed in a hotel that doesn’t do it. I recently had the pleasure of staying in the Hotel Excelsior in Frankfurt, Germany. It wasn’t the nicest hotel - it was pretty average in most ways. It was cheap and well located, but not fancy in the least. The difference came from the extras. Free internet in the room, free coffee and cake in the lobby at all times, free newspapers, free phone calls within Germany, and most impressively - free mini-bar.

After a long day strolling around Frankfurt, it was extremely satisfying to come back to two-bottles each of mineral water (sparkling and non), juice, pepsi, and even beer. The cost was negligible for the hotel, but it made us feel like they were taking care of us rather than gouging us for money.

Now, I understand that none of these were truly free - they were included in the price of our room. The important factor was that all the costs were up front - there we no hidden fees.

I have to imagine that it makes sense for the hotel as well - they go from being just another low cost hotel to “that hotel with the free mini bar”, a small distinction, but one that people will talk about.

Neatorama has an article on business blunders, which is pretty much a different take on a list from Forbes I posted a few weeks ago. The bad decisions are all examples of short-term thinking. Take, for example, the story of Schlitz, formerly the number one beer in the U.S.

[Schlitz President Robert] Uihlein cut the amount of time it took to brew Schlitz from 40 days to 15, and replaced much of the barley malt in the beer with corn syrup - which was cheaper. He also switched from one type of foam stabilizer to another to get around new labeling laws that would have required the original stabilizer to be disclosed on the label.

The results were predictable - the new beer tasted terrible and people quickly stopped drinking it. By the time the issue had been remedied, Schlitz had started its slide to obscurity.

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software recently posted an article about the Five Whys philosophy. Afterwards, there has been a spattering of posts on the subject by a variety of bloggers. Joel is far from the first person to advance the idea of Five Whys, but he is one of the most recent writers to spread the meme. He is also now one of the highest results on google for the keywords “Five Whys”.

This blog is ostensibly about long term thinking, and the Five Whys philosophy is central enough that I named the blog after it . The essence of the philosophy says that you should try to get to the root of your problem by asking why five times, in order to find the root of the problem.

Many people responding to Spolsky’s article seem to have been overly caught up in is the actual number of whys in the saying. Five might work in a some cases, but not all. The specifics here are less important than the concept - which is to drill down as much as possible to find the root cause. It could take a single step, it could take five, or it could take fifty. The point should be that you should really keep asking why until you can’t anymore.

While Five Whys is a snappy and easy encapsulation of the idea, the real root of it is to keep asking questions all the time. In a sense, I think it is more productive in the long run to put more of our effort in making sure we’re asking the right questions rather than trying to find the answers to the questions we already have. If we’re patient enough, pretty much any question we have will eventually be answered.

As Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED conference and coiner of the term Information Architect, put it:

When the emphasis is placed on finding answers, we stop thinking about the innocent questions and start pretending we know the answers.

A good book or blog post will give answers to questions that you already had, but a truly great one will leave you questioning everything.

ComputerWorld has an interview a business analyst on the long-term nature of Google’s business. The company’s stated goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, a goal which CEO Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying would take 300 years. In addition to talking long term, they have implemented some things which are encouragingly far-sighted.

A good example is their declining to split their stock, which is currently trading just slightly better than $475 per share. Splitting the stock 2 to 1, for example, would create twice as many shares each worth half as much. This is usually done to make the stock easier to buy. It’s hard to speculate why Google doesn’t do this, but it seems that the high price is intended to stop or discourage short-term investors - a play straight out of Warren Buffet’s playbook, the stock in whose company is currently hovering around $130,000 per share. In addition, they do not provide any guidance to investors regarding their expected quarterly performance, a small but important step to help investors look further than 3 months ahead.

The last long-term strategy I’ll mention is Google’s famous allotment of time for personal projects. This has lead directly to GMail, AdSense, Google News and several others. The company allows their engineers to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. This can let even the lowest level employee contribute to the company, and perhaps more importantly gives the employees an allotted time to daydream about the future of the company.