Human Capitalism
Parachuting cats into Borneo —
Stopping the waste of people —Curitiba’s web of solutions
— Faster travel without freeways — Sub-ways on the surface
— Simple, fast, fun, and cheap — When garbage isn’t
garbage — No hunger pangs — A place for living —
A symbol of the possible
WHAT DESTINATION DOES OUR SOCIETY WANT TO REACH, A N D H O W
W I L L I T get there? Lessons in what not to do can often be
found in cities, where most officials, overwhelmed by a flood
of problems, try to cope by naming and solving them one at a time.
If they are faced with conges-tion, their answer is to widen streets
and build bypasses and parking garages. Crime? Lock up the offenders.
Smog? Regulate emissions. Illitteracy?
Toughen standards. Litter? Raise fines. Homelessness? Build shelters,
and if that seems to fail, jail the loiterers. Insufficient budget
to fund all these competing priorities? Raise taxes or impose
sacrificial austerity, to taste. Disaffected voters? Blame political
enemies.
Sometimes single-problem, single-solution approaches do work,
but often, as previously described, optimizing one element in
isolation pessimizes the entire system. Hidden connections that
have not been recognized and turned to advantage will eventually
tend to create disadvantage.
Consider what happened in Borneo in the 1950s. Many Dayak villagers
had malaria, and the World Health Organization had a solution
that was simple and direct. Spraying DDT seemed to work: Mosquitoes
died, and malaria declined. But then an expanding web of side
effects (“consequences you didn’t think of,” quips
biologist Garrett Hardin, “the existence of which you will
deny as long as possible”) started to appear. The roofs of
people’s houses began to collapse, because the DDT had also
killed tiny parasitic wasps that had previously controlled thatch-eating
caterpillars. The colonial government issued sheet-metal replacement
roofs, but people couldn’t sleep when tropical rains turned
the tin roofs into drums. Meanwhile, the DDT-poisoned bugs were
being eaten by geckoes, which were eaten by cats. The DDT invisibly
built up in the food chain and began to kill the cats. Without
the cats, the rats multiplied. The World Health Organization,
threatened by potential outbreaks of typhus and sylvatic plague,
which it had itself created, was obliged to parachute fourteen
thousand live cats into Bor-neo.
Thus occurred Operation Cat Drop, one of the odder missions of
the British Royal Air Force. continua >>>>>
