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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Sarah Shaeffer, MPH, Global Environmental Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Grace Crum Rollins Building, 1518 Clifton Rd., Atlanta, GA 30322, 7076883189, sarah.shaeffer@gmail.com

I propose that that public health must adopt Peak Oil consciousness as a guiding principal if it is to protect human health. In this paper I will illustrate this proposition with a little know yet immensely important aspect of modern society's reliance on oil and natural gas: agricultural production and food distribution. In this way I will show how public health can integrate and utilize the low-entropy concepts of sustainability, permaculture, and local agriculture to address food security as society faces an end to the bubble economy of fossil fuels.

Communities have learned through public health to devise innovative methods of improving their health and well-being without excessive reliance on fossil fuels. Similar types of solutions commonly thought of as applying only to economically underdeveloped nations, are also strategies for modern communities that will soon face food shortages due to oil scarcity.

Peak oil places public health at a crossroads: it must directly address the implications for the end of the oil economy. While public health sometimes chooses to create low-energy use or sustainable methods for solving health problems, it has not been with consciousness towards preparation for oil scarcity. Buying and producing locally and living sustainably is not just for environmentalists or community economic development, it may mean food security and the release of scarce resources for essential health services in the near future.

Learning Objectives:

• The audience will be show how industrial agriculture cannot survive as petroleum becomes scarce, thus placing global food security in danger.
• The presenter will illustrate why public health interventions that do not take macro-environmental changes like Peak Oil into account are likely counter-productive.
• The presenter will exemplify how health interventions can also become resource sustainable both in developed and less developed economies.

Keywords: Management and Sustainability, Environment

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No