Parachuting Cats |
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In Borneo in the early 1950's, the World Health Organization was faced with the problem of malaria among the Dayak people in Borneo. They had an answer that was short, simple, and wrong which was to spray DDT all over the place and kill the mosquitoes that carried malaria. The mosquito population declined, the incidence of malaria declined and everybody declared the program a success. They discovered, however, that the roofs of people's houses were falling in on their heads. It seems that DDT had poisoned wasps which parasitized thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps the caterpillars proliferated. They ate thatch in the roofs and the roofs fell in. The World Health Organization found it also had a more serious problem, that the DDT had built up in the food chain. It had gotten into the insects which were eaten by little lizard-like creatures called geckos which were eaten by the cats. The cats died, the rats flourished and the World Health Organization was faced with an outbreak of sylvatic plague and typhus which it had itself created. The World Health Organization was then obliged to parachute live cats into Borneo. The lesson one should draw is that in many instances, the cause of the problems is prior solutions that were not thought out well enough. All things interact, often in ways we don't understand but at the same time, if we understand the interactions better, the solutions we come up with will go further than we might initially have thought. The solutions can then beget even more solutions. |
-Hunter Lovins |
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"More than 2 million Americans become seriously ill every year from toxic reactions to correctly prescribed medications taken properly and 106,000+ die from those reactions." |
| Jama (printed in Washington Post) |
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"The solution to good health lies in eliminating interference from the body, not creating it." |