Everyday, everywhere, everyone is affected by “The Law of Unintended Consequences” which the cynical term “Murphy’s Law.” In many cases previously invisible consequences are more aptly termed “ignored” than unintended, and “law” implies a certainty about human understanding of the nature of things that carries its own unintended (ignored) consequences.
In our nation nearly three percent of scientists and approximately half the population discount the findings of the ninety-seven percent of educated, concerned scientists who agree on causes, consequences and crises of human caused global warming (also known as anthropogenic climate disruption) and their unintended (ignored) consequences. The willful ignorance of the discounters, popularly known as ‘deniers,’ gives Murphy a bad name.
Like all human dynamics, unintended consequences are as old as human history, but the term was popularized by Robert Merton, a professor at Columbia University and the founder of the sociology of science. Merton also coined the terms “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophesy.” The term grew out of Merton’s 1936 paper “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Acton” in which he emphasizes that “purposive action…is exclusively concerned with ‘conduct’ as distinct from ‘behavior.’ That is, with action that involves motives and consequently a choice between various alternatives.” He pointed out that action is not always based on reason and that motive affects rationality. The motives driving human caused global warming deniers are clear—the comfort and convenience of the most powerful sectors of modern civilization at the expense, among other components of the web of life, of the less developed nations of the world and the future of all the people of the world, including your and my grandchildren. ‘Irrational’ is a polite term to describe such thinking and the motives that allow it, whether expressed by disgraced ex-politicos like Dick Cheney, those still in the game like Senators James Inofe of Oklahoma and Michael Crapo of Idaho, or the frothy ramblings of media meteorites like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity or asteroids like Sarah Palin. Neither they nor you nor I will miss out on the unintended (ignored) consequences they so blithely deny.
Unintended consequences come in many forms, a few of them beneficial. The two and a half mile wide demilitarized zone between North and South Korea was put in place in 1953 at the end of the Korean War. Despite its name it is the most heavily militarized border on earth. Because humans do not inhabit the zone it has become one of the richest, most diverse natural habitats in the world, home to several endangered and rare animal and plant species and an environmental/ecological haven.
Most unintended consequences are more like the ones from Idaho’s four Lower Snake River Dams built in the 1950s to supply irrigation, hydropower and navigation from Lewiston to the Columbia River. Today they supply little of either, cost taxpayers millions of dollars every year, and have decimated the salmon and steelhead populations of Idaho and turned the once lovely Snake River into a fetid canal.