Narrowing the distance
between extremes
Writing on energy and carbon, water scarcity, infrastructure, controlled environments, and the design of policy and public capital. One question underneath all of it: what holds when the economics and the environmental requirement collide, and what quietly breaks.
Why the neap tide
A neap tide is when the range is at its smallest. High and low water draw closest together.
The forces are still pulling, always pulling, just not as far apart. Nothing stops for it. The sea keeps moving and the work goes on in every condition. What changes is the distance between the extremes.
I went looking for a word like this as a teenager, hunting for something that described a particular kind of balance, and this is the one I found. It stuck. Among the people who know me it became shorthand for the place where opposing pulls come close to cancelling and something steady is left over.
Most of my working life hasn't been spent in that gap so much as looking for it, and for a long time not deliberately. More by instinct. Early on the work was only economics: margins, inventory, what a branch could carry. Environmental questions came later and sat alongside the commercial ones for years without much connecting them. What became clear as I went on is that neither side pays on its own. Economics alone builds things that shouldn't be built. The environmental case alone builds nothing at all. Projects die in the distance between them constantly. Good ideas that cost too much, honest budgets that don't move anything.
You can't arrange a neap tide. The work I've come to care about is the opposite of waiting for one: narrowing that distance deliberately, until there's a range both sides can live in. That's where a solution survives contact with the real world, and it's the only place I've watched one hold.
What is actually driving this
Six forces shaping how food and resources get produced. None are specific to any one company or sector, and none care what the market currently believes about itself.
Irrigation accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. As aquifers draw down and allocations tighten, the question stops being how much water a crop needs and becomes how many times the same water can be used. Recirculation moves from an efficiency measure to a condition of operation.
Enclosed production trades land and water for electricity. Whether that trade is worth making depends on what the grid is burning and whether the capital cost was stated honestly at the outset. Where the trade is assumed rather than calculated, the arithmetic arrives late.
Public capital shapes what gets built more reliably than market signals do. What a programme funds, what it measures, and what it quietly excludes determine the shape of the industry that follows. Reading subsidy design carefully forecasts better than reading press releases.
Production is becoming a process-control discipline. Sensing, automation, and inference are moving the work from craft judgment toward manufacturing repeatability. The hard problems tend to relocate rather than disappear.
Infrastructure runs on a longer clock than the funds backing it usually allow. Most failures attributed to technology are really a mismatch between build time and the horizon of the money. The engineering was fine. The term sheet wasn't.
Supply chains built for cost are not built for disruption. Treating domestic production capacity as infrastructure, planned and financed on a long horizon, is a different exercise from treating it as a market to enter.
Photobiology treats light as an input to be specified rather than a condition to be accepted: spectrum, intensity, duration, timing. It is one of the few variables in production that can be set with precision, and one of the least understood outside the people who work on it.
The Neap Tide
Essays on the systems above, published independently.
Where this comes from
I run Intravision's Canadian operation as Managing Director and serve as Chief Marketing Officer for the Norwegian group. Intravision builds integrated systems for controlled environment agriculture, delivered as industrial infrastructure rather than as a set of components.
Before that, nine years in electrical distribution in British Columbia, from stores management through to running a branch with full profit and loss accountability. That is where the economics half of this came from. The environmental half arrived later, through a postgraduate certificate in environmental practice and certification as an Environmental Professional, and the two sat alongside each other for years before they started to connect.
Two decades in, the work has meant delivering capital-intensive infrastructure across Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, coordinating mechanical, electrical, controls, biological, and integration workstreams across borders and time zones. Projects at that scale are where you find out which assumptions were load-bearing.
Since 2017 the company has been lead commercial sponsor of an NSERC-funded research collaboration with the University of Guelph, supporting graduate-level research and technology development. In November 2025 the partnership received the NSERC Synergy Award for Innovation, Canada's federal recognition for university–industry research partnerships.
