History is peppered with times when our patchy knowledge of natural systems has led to questionable interventions with unintended — and sometimes disastrous — consequences.
Nature is a complex web that humans have barely begun to untangle. And sometimes, when we try, we just wind up making an even bigger tangle. 1. Operation Cat DropIn response to a malaria outbreak in Borneo in the early 1950s, the World Health Organization sprayed the island with a powerful insecticide called DDT. This successfully killed off the mosquitoes that carried the disease, but it also triggered a cascade of catastrophic, unforeseen events.
2. The Emu WarWhen Australian veterans returned from fighting in World War I, the government gifted them land in Western Australia for farming. These holdings started out small, but as the Great Depression gripped the country in 1929, the new owners were encouraged to expand wheat production. To spur the eradication effort and encourage entrepreneurialism, French officials created a bounty for each rat killed of 1 piastre . People could collect the reward in exchange for every rat tail handed over as proof of elimination. But as the death toll rose to tens of thousands of rats a day, officials noticed a strange increase in tailless rats scurrying around the city.
In 1922, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming divided the Colorado River's water supply among themselves. But their estimate of the river's yearly flow was derived from an unusually wet period of time and was never adjusted, meaning the states had assigned themselves higher amounts of water than the river could provide in normal times.
The invasive toads still wreak havoc today, but"there is unlikely to ever be a broadscale method available to control cane toads across Australia," the Australian government said on its website. Carp have spread to the Mississippi River and its tributaries and are on the verge of spilling into the Great Lakes, where they could wreak ecological havoc and tank the annual $7 billion fishing industry. As a preventive measure, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected an underwater electric barrier in Chicago's waterway system in 2013. The design stuns fish as they swim upstream, and their limp bodies drift back down.
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