One of my favorite quotes is by Alfred North Whitehead, who said, “The vitality of thought is in adventure.Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.” As I think about what Whitehead said, I am reminded of the thousands, if not millions of ideas that have come and gone with respect for our environment.Think back to the following:

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. Reid Bryson, Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity isover. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer. Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000. Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion. Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. Peter Gwynne, Newsweek (1976)

There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken,it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976

Certainly there can be disagreements over what has come before us and what has been projected ahead of us. I “grew up” with Ehrlich, reading his book, The Population Bomb, in my introductory college sociology class. I fondly remember the classroom debates, and the shift that many of us made about getting married and having children. And, today, there are still ardent supporters of slowing the population growth because our planet will not be able to endure much longer. Indeed, you will recall that not long ago, China made it illegal to have more than one child. And today, the planet is facing another problem, a severe decline in the growth rate of the population, so much so that it will impact global productivity and a decline in economic growth. In fact,you can expect there to be a different kind of global war—a global war for talent!But we also predict peak oil, peak food and peak water—that is, we are on a downward spiral for those needs and must change our ways. In future blogs, we will discuss the many studies that have been predicting these trends.

But back to unintended consequences: the State of New Hampshire have put tighter restrictions on development, and it seems to have worked. In the year 2000, 12,000 people moved to New Hampshire, but three years later, that number plummeted by 75%. Yes, it has saved natural resources and conserved land. But it has also had a different effect: affordable housing is more expensive, and property taxes have increased.And, with a slowing population growth and a growing mature workforce, future unintended consequences could be even greater.

But my favorite story of unintended consequences comes to us originally from FY Cheng who in 1963 published a study entitled “Deterioration of thatch roofs by moth larvae after house spraying in the course of a malaria eradication program in North Borneo and retold by Harrison, in 1965, “Operation cat drop”, Animals 5:512-513. You can also read about “cat drop” in Natural Capitalism (1999) on pages 285-286,by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins.

Stay tuned!