DAN BEDNARZ

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.

My attempt to introduce –from the inside- peak oil as a public health threat illustrates how a regime of truth controls the agenda of schools of public health.

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.'s 1972 The Limits to Growth that has sapped vigor and anticipation from sustainability.

Anna L. Peterson’s “Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire (EE) concedes that is it is our nature to hope, even “when nothing in our world indicates progress is possible” (Pg. 1). She’s not a Pollyanna, noting there are no “valid arguments to justify moral and political hope… This book is about the connection between ‘that which is hoped for’ in our everyday lives and the possibility of [bringing about] this good on a larger and more lasting scale”.

The Gulf of Mexico oil blowout carries the emotional wallop and learning potential of a near-death experience. First, it certifies that the age of cheap and plentiful oil is over. Second, it reveals that our collective faith in technology to overcome any challenge posed by nature is a dangerous delusion. Third, it may be the event that sets our nation on the path to genuine economic and ecological sustainability.

Forecasts of Pittsburgh’s future cite education and medicine, complemented by entrepreneurial “green energy” and high-tech ventures, as engines of 21^st century growth. However, the country is entering its third year of economic contraction and fiscal crisis.

How should we think about the conundrum of mounting threats to the health of the public with declining resources to meet these threats?

While reading Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman’s Marketing Metaphoria: What deep metaphors reveal about the minds of consumers, (MM), I recalled a healthcare consultant who told me, “You really should market peak oil, but you’ve got to give folks some good news to win them over.” I laughed and replied, “Are you kidding? I’m not selling whiter teeth”...

All those earnest health policy analysts laboring over the pros and cons of a Public Option have made an unacknowledged ethical decision about how to allocate resources –distribute medical care and, in fact, life chances. They intellectually/ethically are constrained from asking Mitroff and Silvers’ question.

From Bill O’Reilly to Bill Moyers there is consensus that a return to growth is the remedy for what they see as an economic recession. Their political divisions arise over how to rekindle demand and consumption, with the right favoring a market led recovery and the left typically advocating massive government stimulus spending.