01 setembro 2009

"I have one word for those environmentalists who would drag us back to the 18th century: Dentistry."

Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary

My take is that yes, of course with population levels as they are and consumption as it is, we are too many. Clearly we need to stabilise population, but my sense is that reducing our footprints to one planet which we need to do anyway and which Transition Initiatives are a powerful tool for achieving, makes it possible for us all to co-exist at present population levels. At the recent Food and Farming in Transition event here in Totnes, Vandana Shiva answered this question beautifully. I’ll transcribe it and post it here. Anyway, as the title suggests, this is not a post about population. There is, I would argue, an even greater taboo than population among the peak oil fraternity (and sorority), which is talked about even less, and avoided at all costs. Dentistry.

I remember Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s ghastly press secretary, saying something like “I have one word for those environmentalists who would drag us back to the 18th century. Dentistry”. Modern dentistry is very oil dependent, and painless dental work is something we have come to take for granted. In the surgery of the dentist I went to in Ireland he had, as a conversation piece, a dentist’s chair from the 1920s and some old implements. I think it was to impress upon the visitor how lucky they were to be in his comfy padded seat with all his amazing implements.

Ben Brangwyn, co-founder of the Transition Network doesn’t have great teeth, and is fascinated by peak oil, and so therefore has many opportunities to lie with his mouth open pondering the oil dependency of dentistry. Having scoured the internet and found that indeed, dentistry is the final peak oil taboo, with pretty much nothing in print out there, he decided to do some investigating. What follows is his report, which is, I think, a first. At the end he invites your comments, please use the comments box here to discuss any issues around this that you want to.

**Peak Oil and Dentistry.**

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