The Sickening Side of the Food Industry

The Sickening Side of the Food Industry

Last week, I noted the private sector is the key player in the provision of a healthy diet. But the food industry also makes a great deal of money from the production and marketing of unhealthy food. It is estimated that globally, unhealthy diets account for about 11 million premature deaths annually.

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A Polycrisis Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

A Polycrisis Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

The ­polycrisis, according to the UN and Cascade Institute, includes the climate crisis, war, extreme ­economic inequality, financial ­system instability, ideological extremism, ­pernicious social impacts of digitalization, cyber attacks, ­mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced ­migrations and an escalating danger of nuclear war…

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Robots Will Have To Pay Taxes

Robots Will Have To Pay Taxes

I don’t know when I first heard the suggestion that robots should pay taxes, but it was some time in the 1970s, and the idea came from Japan. The concept was certainly in the air by the 1980s. Matt Novak, who writes the Paleofuture blog (about “the history of the future”), wrote in 2014 about an article in the March-April 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine.

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Continual growth is completely unsustainable and heightens inequality

Continual growth is completely unsustainable and heightens inequality

Last week I discussed some of the problems that result from our focus on the economy rather than on ecologically sustainable human and social development. This week, I turn to a more in-depth exploration of the impacts of continual economic growth, and in particular the way in which growth, if unchecked, will dramatically increase inequality.

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We need to get over our obsession with the economy

We need to get over our obsession with the economy

I recently came across an eloquent and powerful passage by Carl Sagan, the famed cosmologist, written in response to an image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, from beyond the planet Neptune. The Earth was just a pale blue dot, which inspired the title of his 1994 book from which the following passage is quoted. Sagan wrote: “You see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us…

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We just overshot our fair share of Earth for 2023

We just overshot our fair share of Earth for 2023

Just a few days ago, Canada overshot its fair share of Earth’s biocapacity and resources, as measured by the ecological footprint in 2018, the latest year for which data is available. By March 13, Canada had already consumed its fair share of the Earth’s bounty for the year. Collectively, humanity passed its 2022 Earth Overshoot Day on July 28.

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Learning self-care should start in school

Last week, I suggested self-care should be a strategic priority for Canada’s health system. Done well, it can reduce unnecessary demand for professional care while at the same time improving outcomes, empowering patients and enhancing personal and community capacity for caring.

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Public policy as if health matters

Public policy as if health matters

Back in the early 1980s, building on the work of others, I came up with the concept of “healthy public policy,” which has since been taken up by the World Health Organization and many national and provincial governments. Canada even has a National Collaborating Centre on Healthy Public Policy.

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Time for a radical re-think of health care

Time for a radical re-think of health care

Having worked as a family physician in primary care, as a public-health physician in health planning and as a medical health officer, as an advisor and consultant on health promotion to the World Health Organization — mainly in Europe — as a medical consultant in population and public health at B.C.’s Ministry of Health…

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