These two scenes have been compared a lot recently.
Left: US evacuation, 22 Gia Long St. (Saigon) 29 April 1975. Credit: Hugh Van Es/UPI. Right: US embassy (Kabul) evacuation 15 August 2021. Credit: Rahmat Gul
A little known story about the one on the left is that a large tamarind tree grew on the US Saigon embassy compound. The US ambassador used the symbol of the tamarind tree to represent the solidity of US support for South Vietnam.
And in some ways, the April 1975 fall of Saigon (a scene known to be avoided by two generations of US politicians) was much like the August 2021 fall of Kabul turned out to be. Continue reading “The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)”
Recently, a story about species introduction and bad outcomes made the news. I had to write about this, but for a different reason than you might expect.
This story seems to have appeared in hundreds of news outlets over the past few days:
In 2012 a government initiative relocated 26 Tasmanian devils to Maria Island, a small island off the Tasmanian coast. The Tasmanian devil population has been in decline for years, due to a facial tumor cancer that spreads when they bite each other.
Unfortunately, Maria Island was also home to 3,000 little penguins — small, slow-walking birds that nest on land. (This species is actually called the “little penguin” as well as the “little blue penguin” and the “fairy penguin.”) With a new predator introduced, the penguins were all eaten. Continue reading “Disasters, Ugly and Cute”
Some systems look like one-way roads. Here I’ll call one-way system roads those which seem inclined to move in one direction, even if the endpoint is difficult to predict, and where it is difficult to return to the earlier state. In some cases an intervenor slows movement down the one-way road or lengthens the road itself.
Let’s look at depletion of forests to make charcoal, the search for oil, the possibility of world wars, opioid and social media addiction, and presidential election cycles.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I wrote about how disease spreads several times well before the recent coronavirus news. And then I wrote threepostson that. I’m hardly alone in my interest on this topic.
But apart from what we’re going through now, infectious diseases generally don’t get as much attention as I think they deserve. In terms of unintended consequences, I’m interested in the impact of disease on human decision making and where things went wrong, or well, in the past. As for the potential impact of COVID-19 in the near-term, some minds are changing in the midst of political, business, social, and educational impact.
And then there is the look back in history. When I recently learned the story of a European plague year’s impact on Dutch “tulipmania,” the modern and historical protective images intrigued me as well.
Left: a protective white suit used when dealing with extreme infectious environments. Right: European plague doctor “Doctor Schnabel” (Dr. Beak). Doctors stuffed sweet smelling flowers and herbs into the mask’s beak to protect against noxious fumes believed to transmit disease. Also note the waxed coat, hat, and gloves.
Vultures: Why are vultures dying in large numbers around the world? What else happens when the vultures decline? And let’s ask the question few are comfortable asking: How much is a species worth?
A unintended consequence pattern I’m watching that seems to determine which problems get attention and action: are they visible/simple or hidden/complex?
What is highly noticeable, and maybe in some sense bad, gets more blame than it deserves. But the bigger problems are unseen.
Further to this, people take actions on the noticeable things (or problems) when only one step is required to see an impact. People avoid other, perhaps more important, things that require multiple steps for there to be impact.
This is an evolving thought that I call “The Kudzu Effect” for some of the parallels to the vine’s history. Here are just a couple examples. I’ll return to this idea in the future.
After last week’s post I became interested in the way acclimatization societies created unintended consequences from non-native species introduction around the world. Those societies sometimes introduced species without thought to impact on the local environment. More recently, governments developed environmental protection regulations to protect endangered species. These regulations have had Cobra Effect type second-order effects as well. Let’s look at why and what we could do instead.Continue reading “Importing Risk and Risky Regulations”
So far I’ve only written about human systems and the unintended consequences that arise from them. But the “natural world” is complex also. We are just beginning to understand the interconnections of living and non-living things. Environmental ecosystems can also be pushed in one direction or another by human intervention and other activity. That means plenty of second-order effects.
Ecosystems are often complex beyond our ability to appreciate them, but on the surface they can seem simple. Maybe this is why there have been so many attempts to alter ecosystems by adding to them or subtracting from them. The impact of those additions or subtractions can tough to know in advance, but the impact can be estimated and controlled. Beyond intentionally changing an ecosystem, there are also all of the non-human changes that occur.
