Another Quote from "This Moment on Earth"

"A few decades ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) tried to end a malaria epidemic in Borneo by using DDT to wipe out the local mosquito population. Unfortunately, there were unintended consequences, just as Rachel Carson had described in Silent Spring. In the case of Borneo, the DDT also wiped out the wasps that controlled the local thatch-eating insects, with the result that many of the roofs on the Bornean homes started to cave in. Meanwhile, the DDT accumulated in the local lizard population, which caused the cats that ate the lizards to die, thereby unleashing a ferocious infestation of rats. Ultimately, WHO was forced to parachute in 14,000 new cats to control the rats in what was known officially as Operation Cat Drop.The story illustrates the high price of linear thinking. The simple fact is that problems never exist in isolation--nor do solutions. Assuming otherwise invites a host of unintended consequences and leads us where we never intended to go. A lot of what we do in life is like that. We make simple assumptions, we act in a hurry, we forget to worry about the details. And one day we wake up and all the cats are dead."