Dan Bednarz

Public health, thermodynamics and the cat food commission

A previous article discusses the future of health systems operating under neoliberal ideology as it comes a cropper in a world undergoing degrowth. Here I consider how this thrusts public health into in a “Which side are you on?” dilemma likely to separate its institutional administration from its frontline professionals –and the public it is meant serve- as part of the …

Neoliberalism, degrowth and the fate of health systems

There are unprecedented and widely unappreciated dangers posed to public health, nursing, medicine and allied health professions by the ongoing global economic contraction. This is a multilayered and, frankly, emotionally difficult topic to digest. Before discussing how health systems are affected we first lay out the larger social-ecological context of modern society’s predicament. This …

Crafting Resilient Health Systems: An Introduction

During the 20th century an indispensible yet unrecognized factor allowed the health sciences to attain dizzying levels of organizational complexity and achieve countless life saving and prolonging breakthroughs. The health professions drew upon ever-increasing amounts of human and natural resources, particularly energy...Therefore, the complexity of modern health systems and their …

A review of the Localization Reader

The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift, by Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen, aims at the work and struggle ahead for those who realize that the modern world is arrantly unsustainable. The book is scholarly yet accessible, practical and action oriented. It faces the nitty-gritty issues raised by natural resource depletion, and, overall, the sundry predicaments posed by …

Goodbye to Bad Knowledge

A year ago I asked, “How to understand health care’s inability to recognize that modern society has reached the limits to growth?” Since then I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to write on the urgent and bedeviling question, “What are the nuts and bolts of organizing a “small is beautiful” health system?” Here I want to lay the ground for exploring this second question while weaving in final …

Bad knowledge and the promise of the university (response to Immanuel Wallerstein)

In a recent blog-post sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus … of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.”...Wallerstein has developed a world systems model of modernization …

Rx for Greece: A dose of Thanatos

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 …

Peak oil from the ivory tower[i]

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 disappointed.

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.

As health care fails, Part I: Power, knowledge and resistance

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.