American Journal of Public Health special issue on peak oil

I posted the following today at an online discussion forum for public health students at the University of New Mexico. I wanted to alert them that the premier academic journal in the public health field just published an issue examining the impact of peak oil. Because I know several of the public health students (having worked until recently in their building) and I like hanging out with them, and I can't resist proselytizing to people I like.

This time, though, I kept to a more restrained tone than the one I'm apt to use in this here little blog venue, wherein I occasionally dispense brimstone and rivers of apocalyptic flame.

Still, it's nice to see at least one professional academic journal hasn't written off peak oil as a Malthusian-oid delusion.



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"Peak oil?" What's that?

Check out the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health; you can find a brief capsule summary with links to the issue itself at a very cool website (for us wonks of energy and environmental policy) called Energy Bulletin.

The AJPH issue has eight articles exploring various aspects of peak oil, which has garnered relatively little attention among public health practitioners and researchers to date. But it's becoming quite an issue in some segments of the public policy and business communities around the world, most especially (perhaps ominously) in the military leadership of the United States and allied nations.

"Peak oil" refers to the geologically inevitable point at which global oil production reaches its maximum possible rate and then enters permanent, terminal decline. Until recently, geologists and economists thought the peak was decades or centuries away. Now, a growing body of evidence suggests it's happening today. If it is, that might help account for the economic turmoil engulfing the world over the last few years.

Why does this matter? Because, simply put, oil is the lifeblood of modern economies, and everything that happens in them. It is critical not only for transportation fuel but for food production and for a variety of materials and chemicals used in a huge range of manufactured goods, from electronic devices to pharmaceuticals. If global oil production declines, even slightly, the result will be gigantic price spikes in virtually every service and product in human societies -- because all of them depend on cheap oil for manufacturing and delivery systems.

The potential impacts of peak oil on health are dramatic. Hospitals, for example, will be hard pressed, in a permanent oil shortage, to resupply themselves. Food prices will surge along with production and transportation costs. Meaning nutritional needs for multitudes of people will be much harder to meet. Meanwhile, the economic growth that provides tax revenue for public health services will be crippled (more so than it is already).

Ultimately, that's the biggest potential health impact of peak oil. Unless alternative materials and energy systems are available to replace oil (as of today they are not), economic resources for vital public services will simply go away. Those services have been based for over a century on the assumption of permanent economic growth, but our societies now face the prospect of a permanent end to that growth and a new era of long-term economic contraction. Consequently, the advances in medicine and public health of the industrial age will be cut off from their supply lines when and if the global oil production decline begins.

Right now, our health systems aren't prepared for that at all.There is no replacement on the horizon, or conceivable set of replacements, for the energy and materials made possible by cheap oil. Alternative energy and conservation measures have been tried on a small scale, but they aren't ready -- yet -- for global deployment.

One important dimension of public health practice in the coming decades will entail doing something to change that.

For more on peak oil, you can check out this useful primer. Or, if video is more your style, check out this documentary, "The End of Suburbia." It was made a few years ago, but it played a key role in getting the concept of peak oil into the political and cultural discourse.

And, finally, because topics like this can induce paralyzing despair, I highly recommend the Transition Network for an optimistic look at peak oil as an opportunity for far-reaching social transformation.

Too Many Words from the Final Figure of the Four

I was pleased, honored and surprised at the invitation to join this company of fine reader-thinker-writer-geeks. Before continuing with my introduction, however, by way of full disclosure, I must admit (with an appropriate measure of shame), that I've only read the first of Asimov's Foundation books. I promise to rectify the situation with all due haste. Actually, to be brutally honest, I've only been reading Science Fiction in earnest for about four years now. I read Wells and Verne as a child, as well as a couple of the great classics (Fahrenheit 451, 1984) in college, and the Dune books a few years later, but it wasn't until just a few months before encountering Mentat and Kir'Shara that I began seriously to pursue the joys, wisdom and insights of SF.

But once I did so, SF changed my life. Quite literally.

If it hadn't been for SF, I'd be about three months away from a solid six-figure salary right now, happily ignoring most of the environmental, economic and political turmoils around me. Instead, I'm not even a quarter of the way through at least four years on a grad student stipend and am, on my worst days, a doom-and-gloom junkie, and on my better days a raving leftist radical.

It was Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series that really woke me up, convinced me to care about politics, economics, emerging information technologies, corporate power, workers' rights and welfare, energy crises, freedom of expression, etc. It wasn't just his books that affected me though; it was also his blog posts and their comment threads, through which I was able to interact with him on an ongoing basis while reading. This opportunity to engage directly with the author and follow his commentary on real world events lent extra power to the punch delivered by his books... and compelled me to honestly examine my beliefs, priorities and career trajectory... and ultimately to throw a big fucking wrench into the works.

There were other influential works of SF as well. Iain M. Banks' books rubbed my face into the horror and lunacy of war, the futility of torture, the extremes of sentient suffering (both physical and psychological) and the dream of a Utopian intergalactic system of government that sparkled with hope in spite of the selfish, flawed beings on which it was built.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy was more practical. It provided plausible flesh and bone to my emerging view of the world and society... and helped me to visualize the imminent destruction of this planet that I love. It also gave me a vision of what a human society should (and maybe even could, one day) be. And it helped me to imagine what a path (however narrow and unlikely) from here to there might look like. Most of my current opinions on politics, economics and business were formed while reading these books.

Paralleling my exploration of the SF realm, however, have been my readings of Kir'Shara's blog posts (including those written under a previous alias) and my real-life conversations with both Kir'Shara and Mentat. They (as well as others, both live and in print) have provided bridges between the all-too-relevant SF in which I immerse myself and the dissappointingly-not-fictional political and environmental reality that is destroying our world.

The intent of this post was to introduce myself briefly, however, and I think that I've already failed. In his post below, Mentat made mention of his superhuman skills of procrastination. It is quite possible that mine are even greater (note, for example, that I'm the last of the four to post). I also tend to ramble on in a long-winded fashion and incorporate too many themes into a single post. But Kir'Shara knew all of my literary shortcomings in advance, so you, dear readers, may address your complaints to him.

Of greater interest than my failings, however, may be my potential offerings. What have I to contribute to this merry band? I'm a thirty-something grad student pursuing advanced training in public health (environmental health, specifically). I took a rather circuitous path to get to my current position. I studied international health and development thinking that I would save the poor people of the developing world from disease. I started medical school with similar ambitions. I finished medical school disillusioned with the medical profession and disgusted with the way in which physicians in this country are forced to practice. I started a pathology residency thinking that I'd found an interesting and lucrative way to pass the days before retirement. I wasn't exactly content with this, however, and eighteen months into the four-year program, when I experienced the above described SF epiphany, I'd already determined the following: 1) the current medical system is unsustainable, even in the best of circumstances and 2) fighting disease through diagnosis and treatment is a losing battle -- prevention is our only chance. These ideas, combined with my increasing recognition of, and concern about the doom of our global environment landed me in my current program, where I hope to find ways of improving health through identification and elimination of environmental hazards. This too is a losing battle, but at least there's the possibility of fighting for the health of thousands of people at a time rather than for that of just one... at the expense of the neglected thousands.

I recently encountered a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright:

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

I think I know how he intended it, but the more I consider it, the more alternate meanings seem to surface, some of which are appropriate to the medical and health care realm as a whole, and some specifically to me. Maybe I'll write a post about that quote sometime.

As for today... now that I've rambled on about myself for long enough, I'll give you a preview of a post that will likely appear in about two months. Today I started reading Mark Hertsgaard's new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. I'm to write a review of it for one of my classes, and it looks as though it will prove quite relevant to this blog.

More on that (and possibly other things) soon.