Who is the Sustainable Doctor?
My name is Karen Danenhauer and I’m an Emergency Doctor practicing in New Zealand. I am determined to be a sustainable doctor and treat climate change as the emergency that it is.
My Background
Daughter of an army dentist, I was fortunate to live in Germany as a child. I marveled at the German’s mastery at conserving their resources and wasting nothing. Later, I became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar. There, I really began noticing environmental destruction as native forests are cleared away to make rice fields.
Perhaps because of these unusual exposures, I’m an outside-the-box thinker. This trait serves me well practicing in a rural emergency department. In an ED you quite often encounter problems you have never seen or read about before and you must use your limited resources creatively.
My Motivation
Humanity’s wasteful consumption of resources is clearly starting to wreak havoc on us. As EDs fill with people suffering climate-related illnesses, I feel an urgency to be gentler on our planet, to reverse our destructive trends. And to ensure that my children and grandchildren still have a livable planet.
My first try at fixing the environmental problem focused on plastic waste. I started a business (MamaGaia) recycling plastic into soap dishes to encourage more bar soap use and reduce our single use plastic consumption. But business isn’t my forte and I ended up selling MamaGaia. Instead, I now concentrate on a more familiar realm that also needs improving: the healthcare setting. Did you know that if healthcare were a country, it would be the 5th largest polluter in the world?
Treating the Emergency
It’s not easy to move towards zero carbon emissions at home and at work. What changes need to happen? And where do we even start? How do we fight a system that seems stacked against our longevity? We must not be the weak link that ends humanity. Now is the time to act and as we are living on this planet right now, we must be the ones to do it!
With this blog, I aim to make this transition easier – to educate, to energize and to help cure what ails our planet. Because I’m trained to recognize and treat emergencies, and this is an emergency if I’ve ever seen one.
