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| Keith Farnish | |
| Where will you go when the sewers clog up? Where will you go when the porcelain finally cracks? Where will you go when the Toilet Duck quacks its last?
Let’s go back to the beginning… Keith Farnish is a writer, philosopher and radical environmental campaigner who lives in Essex, UK with his family and his garden. His book, Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis, was published in September 2009 by Chelsea Green in the USA. The book is available for free via amatterofscale.com. He is also author of The Earth Blog where the above article first appeared. He also runs the anti-greenwashing site The Unsuitablog. |
Dan Bednarz, PhD
Originally published in Orion Magazine, July/August 2007.
(Author’s note: I am reposting on this website some essays originally published elsewhere over the past three years.)
The scale and subtlety of our country’s dependency on oil and natural gas cannot be overstated. Nowhere is this truer than in our medical system. Read the rest of this entry »
An interview of Dan Bednarz by Didi Pershouse of The Center for Sustainable Medicine.
“There is no doubt that the amount of resources– not just oil, but other resources too– flowing into health care is going to start shrinking. But here is mainstream health care with this vociferous appetite to grow and grow and do more and more research for arcane and esoteric technological improvements. A lot of that stuff is going to go away…”
Link: http://sustainablemedicine.org/2009/07/peakoilandsustainablemedicinepart1/.
Dr. Jessica Pierce is a writer and bioethicist. She has published a number of books, including Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Contemporary Bioethics: A Reader with Cases (forthcoming in October, 2009) Morality Play: Case Studies in Ethics and The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care. Dr. Pierce is Associate Faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Center for Bioethics and Humanities. She lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her website is www.jessicapierce.net.
The first sentence of The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care reads, “The foundation of human health rests on healthy, stable ecosystems.” One rarely encounters this view expressed in medical literature, yet it lies at the heart of creating a sustainable modern healthcare system.
By far the majority of analyses of the American healthcare focus narrowly on reform –slight to dramatic- through rebalancing the (allegedly) three core issues of the 1) cost, 2) coverage and 3) quality of care. Pierce and Jameton locate medicine in the context of ecological sustainability, which correctly subsumes –not negates- these three issues.
As is often the case when great social change is occurring, few scholars see it coming and also offer a cogent outline of the ethical challenges posed by such momentous upheavals. Pierce and Jameton’s is one of those books.
For example, typically “medical ethics” is devoted to issues stemming from the (allegedly) sacrosanct value of what’s best for the patient. Questions about humanity’s organic connection to and responsibility to the natural environment are not asked or are given short shrift. These authors show how the earth is not a passive, inert and inexhaustible repository of goodies for medicine to dip into at will at no cost or consequence.
This book articulates an alternative discourse integral to the viability of healthcare in the 21st century, as its chapter titles evidence:
1) The Challenge of Environmental Responsibility; 2) Linking Health and Environmental Change; 3) Population and Consumption; 4) Environmental Aspects of Healthcare; 5) The Green Health Center; 6) At the Bedside; 7) Global Bioethics and Justice; and 
New Ways of Thinking About Bioethics.
Click here to listen to Jessica’s discussion with Dan Bednarz
Dan Bednarz
A recent issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association, March18, 2009) contains two commentaries by leading researchers on the social determinants of health, a broad catalog of factors shaping human health which:
“Include[s] the lifelong importance of health determinants in early childhood, and the effects of poverty, drugs, working conditions, unemployment, social support, good food and transport policy “(Wilkinson and Marmot 2007).
The authors present the fiscal/economic crash of 2008 as an opportunity for health professionals to educate governmental officials and other policy-makers about the far-reaching effects of these factors. Well and good; but isn’t it astounding that they DO NOT consider whether the socioeconomic meltdown is a threat to the social determinants of health -or, for that matter, to public health systems? Let’s try to give an answer to why this is so in light of my contention that the world faces the intertwined problems of Bad Money (Phillips 2008), the financial and economic unwind, and the Bottleneck (Wilson 2002), the connected set of ecological constraints -especially peak oil- humanity can no longer defer to the future. Read the rest of this entry »
Dwindling supplies of fossil fuels are transforming “business as usual” in our world. Although we still hear mainstream pundits and media tell us the economy will improve in late 2009 or early 2010, the massive contraction of economic activity throughout the world informs us otherwise. Two areas of great importance and little-considered challenges are public health and medicine. To stimulate attention and action in these areas, Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA is planning a one-day, first-of-its-kind regional conference entitled Public Health and Medicine at the End of the Oil Age: Challenges and Opportunities. It is sponsored by the college’s Institute for Sustainability and Post-carbon Education and supported by the college’s Center for Business and Industry. The director of the Institute, Nancy Lee Wood, Ph.D., says that the conference aims to bring together anyone and everyone concerned about the future of public health and medicine in this era of fossil fuel decline and fiscal/economic decline. “Public health and medical systems will experience significant challenges in the face of the impending world-wide energy crunch,” she said. “This day-long conference will address the threats to medicine and public health – threats which are beginning to affect us all.”
The conference is to take place on Tuesday, April 14, from 9 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the college’s main campus in Fall River in the Jackson Arts Center. The conference fee of $75 includes an all-organic lunch and refreshments, as well as the addresses and workshops. Continuing Education Units are available for nurses, social workers, and other healthcare providers. Information is on the Website at www.bristolcc.edu/postcarbon . Read the rest of this entry »
Bethany Schroeder
Through an ongoing application of fiscal resources, professional collaboration, and continuous assessment, the legislative, medical, and social work communities of Tompkins County have created a network of health services that largely complement one another. The degree to which the network remains integrated as peak oil and climate change influence the region will be a matter of planning, depending on the approach the community and its formal and informal leaders take.
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Editors Note: This essay was written by Michael W. Foley (TOD user greenuprising), a former professor in the social sciences. He wrote the following for The Oil Drum and we thank TOD for permission to post it here.
A sizable subset of what some on this site call “doomers” are convinced that the demise of the petroleum economy will bring social breakdown and a violent struggle of all against all. Some are even preparing for the chaos to come. I’m convinced we have to take end-of-affluence scenarios, including the scarier ones, seriously. But it can help everyone confront these possibilities if we try to think more intricately about how people might respond. In particular, we need to face head-on the question whether social breakdown and violence are inevitable.
Editors Note: The following excerpt is from an interview published on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Website. The full article can be accessed here.
Tim Parsons, director of Public Affairs, discussed the “peak oil” theory, or the point at which the maximum production rate for the world’s oil is reached, with Brian Schwartz, MD, professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences and co-director of the School’s Program on Global Sustainability and Health. Once the peak is passed, oil production is expected to decline continuously. (Learn more about peak oil here.) Schwartz explains how future demand for energy could impact on our society and our health.
Question: What will be the impact of peak oil on our economy and our daily lives?
Answer: Petroleum and other fossil fuels are essential to all aspects of our daily lives. It is a very unique source of energy that cannot be replaced. Oil does work for us. It moves us around in automobiles and planes and it powers heavy machinery. The transportation sector cannot currently function without it. Oil is heavily used in food production and distribution including everything from fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation to agricultural machinery, transportation and refrigeration.
Editors Note: The following two articles appeared in Public Health Reports / January-February 2009 / Volume 124. They appear here through the kind permission of the Journal. Mainstreaming articles discussing these issues are an important step for education and acceptance.
Energy and the Public’s Health: Making the Connection (PDF) – Michael T. Osterholm and Nicholas S. Kelley
Rarely does a scientific article come along that begs to be read by a much broader audience than the subscribers of a niche journal. Frumkin and colleagues have achieved such a feat in this issue of Public Health Reports. Their article, “Energy and Public Health: The Challenge of Peak Petroleum,” should be required reading for every public policy leader, business executive, health-care provider, and general public health professional. It makes a connection between an old world where the use of carbon-based energy was largely related to wood burning and simple crop production, and a current world that is growing closer to exhausting the fossil fuel stores created by many millions of years of geologic processes. Frankly, it’s quite hard to imagine that we have largely cannibalized the “easily obtained carbon-hydrogen bound energy” that is as much a part of our planet earth’s history as is evolution. But the depletion is happening, just as Frumkin and colleagues have detailed…
Energy and Public Health: The Challenge of Peak Petroleum (PDF) – Howard Frumkin, Jeremy Hess, Stephen Vindigni
Petroleum is a unique and essential energy source, used as the principal fuel for transportation, in producing many chemicals, and for numerous other purposes. Global petroleum production is expected to reach a maximum in the near future and to decline thereafter, a phenomenon known as “peak petroleum.” This article reviews petroleum geology and uses, describes the phenomenon of peak petroleum, and reviews the scientific literature on the timing ofthis transition. It then discusses how peak petroleum may affect public health and health care, by reference to four areas: medical supplies and equipment, transportation, energy generation, and food production. Finally, it suggestsstrategies for anticipating and preparing for peak petroleum, both general public health preparedness strategies and actions specific to the four expected health system impacts…
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