Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

“Unlike many other laws, the laws of nature are all strictly enforced.”

Ashleigh Brilliant

In the early 1950s, malaria had broken out in parts of Borneo. To help, the World Health Organization went in and carpeted the entire area with the new, miracle, state-of-the-art pesticide, DDT, to kill the mosquitoes that carry and transmit that disease. The DDT did kill the mosquitoes and reduce cases of malaria, but it also killed the local wasp population. As it turns out, those wasps feed on a type of caterpillar which in turn feeds on the thatch with which the locals built the roofs on their homes. Without wasps to keep them in check, the caterpillar population exploded. Suddenly, inexplicably, peoples’ roofs began collapsing. In the meantime, the local population of geckoes was eating the insects that were poisoned with DDT, absorbing it into their own bodies. The geckoes weren’t killed quickly by the pesticide, but they did become lethargic and an easy catch for the local cats, that ate the geckoes with gusto, absorbing the DDT from the geckoes’ bodies and dying right away. Once the cats were gone, the rat population, carrying disease-laden fleas, boomed, bringing an outbreak of typhus and plague, far more dangerous and deadly than the malaria they were dealing with originally. Finally, in desperation, and bringing the whole circular fiasco to a close, the Royal Air Force was compelled to perform an air drop of cats into the villages to stave off the rats. Eventually things stabilized and returned to a modicum of normalcy. If it weren’t so tragic, this Keystone-Cop-like episode would be funny.

The Borneo Cat Drop is a classic example of what happens when humans approach a problem using short-term thinking. Unfortunately, short-term
thinking is how we approach nearly everything. Our pattern is clear and repeats itself through history. We see a symptom and we react to the symptom only, ignoring the system as a whole when whole-system thinking is what’s needed.