QUARANTINE BLOG # 181

September 27, 2020

THE BEST LAID PLANS

You will never convince anyone who has ever run up against it – and who among us has not – that Murphy’s Law was not meant as a defeatist principle.

The military engineer who coined it, intended it to be a call for alertness and adaptation in a world which technology makes increasingly unpredictable. So explains Edward Tenner in his book, Why Things Bite Back. This marvelous book, which discusses unforseen consequences of things animal, vegetable, mineral, and human, is testimony that the best laid plans of mice and men frequently mess up.

Cigarette smokers who switch to low-tar-and-nicotine brands, unconsciously compensate for the reduced volume of nicotine by inhaling more often or more deeply. An editorial in the American Journal of Public Health speculates “that the existence of low tar and nicotine cigarettes has actually caused more smoking ... and thereby raised the morbidity and mortality associated with smoking.”

In the original forests of the West, periodic natural fires burned off small trees and brush. The U.S. Forest Service’s Smokey the Bear campaign did not understand that such a fire was invigorating for the forest. Now accumulating vegetation in the forest allows  fire to climb to the crowns of mature trees, where it can spread more rapidly than ever. The new-style forest frequently explodes into flame. Ask California.

The Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef off the Alaska Coast almost 30 years ago, discharging 35,000 tons of crude oil. Tidying up the oil spill produced even more disastrous effects. The cleanup relied heavily on hot water applied by high-velocity pumps which scalded the beach, killing many organisms that had survived the oil. The pumps disrupted the natural sediments of beaches, both gravel and sand, smothering clams and worms. The area still suffers from both the spill and the cleanup.

Red fire ants first landed in Mobile, Alabama in the 1930s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sprayed millions of acres with DDT, spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and left more fire ants than ever. They are so resilient they even migrate as part of insecticide shipments. Spraying campaigns may have promoted an even more ominous trend that already dominates Florida: densely spaced supercolonies, as many as five hundred per acre, each with a hundred queens or more, resulting in peak densities of over 500 fire ants per square foot.

During the New Deal the U.S. Soil Conservation Service advocated kudzu, a vine native to Asia, as a plant that could restore devastated Southern cotton lands. The Soil Conservation Service paid farmers $6 to $8 per acre for planting it. Without diseases or North American insect enemies, it thrives, pulling down telephone poles, shorting high-voltage lines on long-distance electric transmission towers, and spreading over bridges. Growing at the rate of one foot per day, it now covers about 7.5 million acres.

All of the above examples and more, Mr. Tenner reported. He did not describe the most momentous unforseen consequence of all time.

Almost 2000 years ago, the Apostle Paul, referring to all the forces of evil, wrote: “None of the rulers of this age understood God’s secret wisdom, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Without the crucifixion of Jesus, there would have been no resurrection. Without His resurrection, there would have been no hope.

Their miscalculation was always in God’s eternal plan. Murphy never had a chance!

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