The law of unintended consequences

When our ancestors from stone age discovered fire, a mere embodiment of light and heat, the wheels of time accelerated. Thus, increasing the rate of progress of humanity and setting in motion so many different things across the world that would affect us humans throughout the course of our future in more ways than we could have imagined. In simple words, the discovery of fire as explained by the butterfly effect has led the human race overcome huge challenges by giving us many breakthroughs and by creating some challenges as we progressed along.

James Watt, the Scottish inventor from 18^th century when he perfected his design for steam engine after rigorous research and experiments, little did he know that his simple invention would help humanity leapfrog into the future by exerting a superior acceleration on the wheels of time. The 18^th century engineer’s invention helped us in improving our transportation, helped us through our rapid industrialization, improved our farming and today that simple invention has made possible the most complex supply chains we could never have dreamt of back then. A great ‘leap’ for humanity indeed.

When, 

Fitz Haber, the German chemist, received nobel prize for ‘The Haber process’ in 1918, he saved humanity from potential massive starvation. The Haber process, albeit a very simple process used to produce ammonia, came at a time in 20^th century when world population was growing rapidly and traditional fertilizers were failing us in producing enough grains to feed the hungry mouths across the world. This simple process even today remains the industry standard to mass produce ammonia-based fertilizers. A great ‘save’ for humanity indeed.

As the law of unintended consequences goes, for every ‘leap’ and ‘save’ humanity makes it sets in motion its own destruction by turning a blind eye towards the ill consequences of the ‘Leaps’ and ‘Saves’. When we made the ‘leap’ back then with an engine, no one realized that the unintended consequence to it would be pollution. In India pollution has become the third-largest contributor to deaths amongst all health risks we face today. The ‘save’ from starvation in the form of the ‘The Haber process’ is today responsible for poisoning our food chain and increasing humanities woes by making our plants, livestock and water increasingly toxic by the day. Evidence shows us that we are responsible for our problems.

For centuries now, we have been stressing our planet through deforestation justifying that it needs to done for timber, mining of natural resources, infrastructure and whatever reasons. Where has this led us to? By reducing the forest area significantly, we have erased so many apex predators of the face of our earth, and left only a few to keep a check on the growing population of primates. These growing population of primates are the mammals that also incidentally happen to be the carriers of zoonotic viruses. Yes, one among these many zoonotic viruses is SARs-CoV-2, the infamous Coronavirus. This pandemic is the result of us trying to wage a war with mother nature, whose wrath and fury we are experiencing first-hand since the Spanish flu of 1918. Approximately 100 years later, mother nature is reminding the human kind who is in control. Hence, the time has come for us to take a step back and retrospect our actions. Else, the law of unintended consequences would get the better of us.