Design thinking: Take heed of the Law of Unintended Consequences
Things happen. Thing we intend to happen. Things we do not intend. Unintended things happen so often they have a law to describe them: The law of unintended consequences. That is why in our work as permaculture designers and educators we do well to take this law seriously. As Operation Catdrop should have.
WEEDS, swales and parachuting cats. What could they possibly have in common?
The answer: one thing.
The weedy permaculture myth
Let’s call it the weedy permaculture myth. It doesn’t happen much now, however a while ago the story linking permaculture practitioners with outbreaks of weeds would resurface like a platypus coming up for air after a long dive.
Like so many stories repeated over time, this one took on a life of its own, especially among people involved in environmental restoration work like bushland regeneration. Like so many stories repeated over time until they are mistaken for truth, the weedy permaculture myth mistook correlation for causation. Correlation was permaculture’s reconsidering the role of weeds and their ecological functions in a landscape. That was mistaken for causation, for permaculture practitioners being responsible for the spread of those weeds.
The law of unintended consequences
Untrue though it was, the weedy permaculture myth highlights something we always need to consider when modifying natural or any other system in our permaculture designs: the law of unintended consequences.
The myth also has value in highlighting the fact that permaculture draws heavily on systems thinking in its work. Or, is should. Ideally, permaculture is the application of systems theory to the design and construction of systems that support human settlement in city or country. It has an important application in permaculture as applied to social systems as well.
The law
Let’s think about this law of unintended consequences. In our design work, we can approach it through applying an important questions to the components of our design: what if?
What if we do this… what could happen? Sure, this won’t reveal every potential consequence but it will give us a few to design contingencies around.
Here’s a couple examples of how the law of unintended consequences operates. The first is hypothetical, the second actual.
The swale
A swale is a water detention ditch excavated aling the contour. Its purpose is to detain, not drain water to allow it to infiltrate the soil profile.
- what if we excavate a swale to retain and infiltrate water into the soil to irrigate our crops? Could this have any potential unintended consequences?
- would the swale perform differently if our soil is clay or sandy?
- would it overflow during periods of prolonged rain? Could it cause erosion if it overflows? Would we have to excavate overflow channels to drain excessive water? Would they become erosion rills?
- would the flooded trenches of the swale create saturated bogs or pool water and create habitat for mosquito larvae?
All of those things could become unintended consequences that we have to plan contingencies around in our design.
The track
A different example. In 2015–16, the Tasmanian national parks service spent millions of dollars to build a walking trail—the Three Capes Track—on the Tasman Peninsula in the south-east of the state.
Reportedly an excellent three day walk, it is not the track but the apparent failure to take a systems thinking approach to planning it that is the issue. Not all potential users appear to have been considered and, if they were, the parks service made moral judgements about who would access the walk.
The unintended consequences comes through its social impact. Anyone with a spare $500 can do the walk, as many have. But not everyone potentially interested in the three day bushwalk has an income that offers the discretionary expenditure of a spare $500 per person. They are excluded from the walk. Sure, they can do part of the walk on adjacent trails and partly on the trail itself, but they cannot overnight in the accommodation at the end of each day or camp nearby.
The law of unintended consequences, acting through the high price the parks service levies for the three day walk, manifests as the social exclusion of low-income and fixed-income bushwalkers, those without the required level of affluence to afford the fee, and bushwalkers living on a pension. Had a more socially equitable approach been taken, people on a limited, lower income might have been able to access the track.
The strange tale of parachuting cats
Now, a lesser-known example of the law in operation. The description comes from the Operation Catdrop web page.http://catdrop.com/ A video illustrating how this actual scenario rolled out, and linking it to systems thinking, is found at: https://youtu.be/17BP9n6g1F0
The story unfolds like this…
“As part of anti-malarial campaign in the northern states of the island of Borneo in the late 1950’s, the World Health Organization sprayed DDT and other insecticides to kill the mosquito vector for malaria.
“During this campaign, DDT was sprayed in large amounts on the inside walls and ceilings of the large ‘long houses’ that housed an entire village in these areas. As a consequence of this effort, the incidence of malaria in the region fell dramatically.
“However, there were two unintended consequences of this action. There was an increase in the rate of decay of the thatched roofs covering the long houses because a moth caterpillar that ingests the thatch avoided the DDT but their parasite, the larvae of a small wasp, did not.
“Also, the domestic cats roaming through the houses were poisoned by the DDT as a consequence of rubbing against the walls and then licking the insecticide off their fur. In some villages, the loss of cats allowed rats to enter, which raised concerns of rodent-related diseases such as typhus and the plague.
“To rectify this problem in one remote village, several dozen cats were collected in coastal towns and parachuted by the Royal Air Force in a special container to replace those killed by the insecticides.”
This illustrates quite well how a lack of knowledge — ecology was not all-that-well known as a science in the fifties, and a lack of systems thinking — systems dynamics and complexity science were largely unknown then, and the science of cybernetics (the theory of feedback and control in systems) was in its infancy — led to a cascade of connected impacts on both wild and domestic animals that could not then be foreseen. It triggered the imaginative solution of Operation Catdrop. That worked.
Underlying this fable was the failure to see the malarial mosquitoes in their connections to a wider system.
Unintended consequences are a characteristic of many government policies and actions. It is no secret that systems thinking sees little use in government. As permaculture designers, the law of unintended consequences is something to keep in mind.
More permaculture reading
The 11 shortcomings of permaculture
Permaculture’s 10 best initiatives
The apology: A response to David Holmgren
The chimera of permaculture introductory courses
Do small actions amount to much?
Permaculture 3.0 on facebook
Citizen Journalism: a rough guide to telling stories in word and image
By Road & Track: Places, people and encounters in life
