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“Decline is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

Welcome to Health after Oil (HAO), a place for news, opinion, research, discussion, networking, planning and action in response to the unprecedented and sweeping challenges peak oil, energy decline, and population pressures poses to human health and the institutions whose purpose it is to protect and promote human health. We invite submissions -original content and links- about energy and health and related fiscal/economic and environmental and ecological issues. We note in particular that: 1) Climate change and peak oil are indivisible threats, both stemming from reliance on fossil fuels; and 2) The fiscal and economic crisis now enveloping world economies are intertwined with population growth, energy decline and resource depletion. Infinite growth cannot continue on a finite planet.

Rx for Greece: A Dose of Thanatos

Dan Bednarz

In this essay I argue that the rapid decline of Greece’s health system –and socioeconomic conditions throughout the nation- is proximately due to a fiscal/economic crisis that political and financial leaders have chosen to address by imposing draconian austerity measures upon most of the Greek people so as to: a.) protect the wealth, status and power of dominant elites, and b.) shield and resuscitate a moribund financial system. The distal cause of the deterioration of Greece’s health system, however, lies in reaching the earth’s physical limits to perpetual economic growth[i]. Therefore,  attempting to restart growth –the taken-for-granted panacea- is not working and the case of Greece demonstrates that “austerity” has pernicious costs. (Stimulus is a nuanced option not developed here.)[ii] Finally, politicians, corporations and national governments are highly unlikely to recognize that the limits to growth are upon us, while local governments and grassroots citizens movements will by necessity be inclined “cyberneticly” to begin fashioning sustainable health systems (and all socioeconomic institutions) as a way surviving –even if they do not label their situation as entering a post-growth era.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Peak Oil from the Ivory Tower[i]

Dan Bednarz

The September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Public Health offers several papers on peak oil. Ten years ago this special issue would have been revolutionary; five years ago it would have been an urgent warning. Its appearance in 2011, however, leaves this participant/observer[ii] disappointed.

Its central deficiency is its “priestly” style,[iii] which leads to –I believe- a Type III error: asking the wrong question[iv]. This is revealed in three passages from the lead article.[v] The first is a laudatory summary of John Holdren’s[vi] position followed by two additional passages:

Holdren highlighted the dilemma the world faces today: reliable and affordable energy is essential for meeting human needs and fueling economic growth (emphasis added), but the world’s current production, distribution, and use of energy is responsible for a series of difficult, damaging, and challenging environmental problems.

 In the United States, we should encourage federal funders of research (e.g., National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency), industry, and foundations to fund broad-based, interdisciplinary research on the linkages among climate change, energy scarcity, ecosystem degradation, species and biodiversity losses, urban form and transportation systems, and public health.

 We urge close collaboration between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national and international energy and development institutions (e.g., Department of Energy, International Energy Agency, World Bank, International Monetary Fund).

In the social-empirical world I believe we inhabit, meeting human needs and fueling economic growth is incompatible with the thermodynamic, economic, financial (massive debt, political dominance and corruption) and environmental realities brought to the fore or worsened by peak oil. Nor do I expect corporations, politicians, and governmental and international agencies to hear the clarion call sounded by these earnest academics. These bodies have their underside agendas, as evidenced by their vain attempts to maintain the political/economic/financial status quo peak oil is upending. Bluntly, they evince little or no concern for social responsibility or the public good.[vii]

A Comment on: “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production”

A recent Post-Carbon Institute paper, “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production,” (contained in: Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health Agriculture & Transportation) is plagued by irony: the authors’ (Brian Schwartz and Cindy Parker) commitment to protect public health nonetheless defaults into placing business interests ahead of the public interest.

Re-orienting Public Health: Rhetoric, challenges and possibilities for sustainability

(Note: Links to publisher site for full access. Sign-in/paid access may be required without institutional subscription)

Re-orienting Public Health:
Rhetoric, challenges and possibilities for sustainability
Phil Hanlon and Sandra Carlisle
Critical Public Health, Volume 20, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 299 – 309

Abstract: “We make a case in this article for re-orienting public health, based on evidence that societies across the globe are now facing inevitable change for which public health remains insufficiently prepared. We focus on the relationship between different sustainability ideals, displayed through rhetoric and discourse and the reality of a number of challenges in the ‘modern’ world. We briefly describe discernible elements of public and policy rhetoric around sustainability, as an important background for public health efforts, and present two significant public health discourses. We then outline some of the challenges to sustainability; some relate to the powerful social systems and cultural values associated with modernity, while others refer to broader environmental issues. These are not unconnected. We conclude by outlining the possibilities for ustainability, which include a transition to a more sustainable form of society that could lessen global inequalities, combat emerging problems, such as obesity, depression and addictive behaviours, and improve individual and social levels of well-being. We believe that this may well require a change of consciousness for a change of age, so the scope and scale of the required response should not be underestimated.”

Are Cars the New Tobacco?

(Note: Links to publisher site for full access. Signin/paid access may be required without institutional subscription)

Are cars the new tobacco?
Margaret J. Douglas, Stephen J. Watkins, Dermot R. Gorman, and Martin Higgins
J Public Health (2011) 33 (2): 160-169.

“Public health must continually respond to new threats reflecting wider societal changes. Ecological public health recognizes the links between human health and global sustainability. We argue that these links are typified by the harms caused by dependence on private cars.”

As Health Care Fails, Part I: Power, Knowledge and Resistance

Dan Bednarz

Recently I’ve received comments pointing out the futility of attempting to nudge medicine and public health onto the path of thermodynamically based sustainability. These comments were offered in good spirit, with one doctor telling me, “Mainstream health care’s going to crash. Are you sure you’re doing the right thing trying to reach them? I’ve stopped banging my head against the wall with medical leaders –they don’t give a damn and understand even less. Instead I’m building an alternative health care network.”

These comments have made me ponder the past six years in which there have been some “successes.” Yet they deservedly belong in quotation marks because my message has been largely ignored or, in some instances, absorbed into the culturally dominant paradigm of perpetual economic growth, which is breaking down, or, more directly, collapsing (not suddenly, but in increments of the reduction of social and technological complexity, mostly visited upon the economically vulnerable) for wont of cheap, low entropy energy (Gregor 2011).

Here I use Michel Foucault’s thoughts to reflect on the power/knowledge relationship as the first part of an answer to the question, “What to do about health care and public health as this collapse progresses?” In a subsequent essay I’ll rely upon Pickard (2010) to integrate Foucault’s perspective with complexity theory and ecological science.

“But You’ve Offered no Solutions,” An Illustration of Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis

Dan Bednarz

 Recently I spoke to a gathering of medical and public health students at Columbia University about the contribution the health sciences can make to Mayor Bloomberg’s PLANYC, a vision for a sustainable New Your City in 2030.

Although I had prepared opening remarks on how I was speaking from a paradigm premised upon the end of the physical expansion of the economy, this discussion quickly became an example of Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. This means that proponents of competing paradigms are prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation and, overall, “talking past” one another as they find one another’s conceptual positions and policy recommendations incomprehensible or absurd. The confusion and conflict stem from the incompatibility of the core metaphors around which the intellectual contents of paradigms are organized. In this instance it is the taken-for-granted physical growth of the economy –the core metaphor the students were operating from- versus one where economic activity is constrained by a finite planet with finite resources.

Syllabus: “Building Sustainable Public Health Systems”

Bristol Community College

Fall River, Mass.

Institute for Sustainability and Post-Carbon Education

Dan Bednarz, Ph.D. Instructor

danbpgh@verizon.net.

Instructor’s Note: This is an abbreviated syllabus for this distance learning course, CRN number19029 X HC 33 01, that runs from March 21^st through May 13^th 2011.  The cost is $380. It is a non-credit course; however, once the course has started, students can apply for academic credit. To register click on: http://www.bristolcc.edu/catalog/coursesearch/registernow.cfm

Sustainability: From ‘Terminally Nice’ to ‘Nice and Rough’

Dan Bednarz

I’ve pondered whether to stop describing our vortex of dilemmas as a crisis of sustainability. “Sustainable growth” -and its derivative “smart growth”- has been a successful riposte to Meadows, et al’s1972 The Limits to Growth[i] that has sapped vigor and anticipation from sustainability.

Unquestionably, then, there is much to be said for jettisoning the entire notion of “sustainability.” But what can replace it? English’s massive vocabulary has no ear catching and conceptually suitable synonym. I have decided not to abandon “sustainability” for this and two additional reasons: 1) the concept is firmly planted in the nation’s collective consciousness (more on this below), and 2) it can be recaptured to synthesize the unfolding multi-dimensional (human systems and biophysical) maelstrom we are entering and help us discover ways to create a genuinely viable world.