Introduction to Unanticipated Consequences...
An Explosion of Rabbits, Plastics, and Perverse Incentives
It was 1859, the year that the Melbourne Football Club was started and the colony of Queensland separated from New South Wales to form an independent state. Australia was on the upswing, prosperity and wealth were nearby and clearly coming to the settlers.
And so on a bright October day in Victoria, Australia, Thomas Austin, a wealthy, slightly rotund settler from England released the 24 European wild rabbits that he’d had sent to him from across the world. As an upstanding member of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, Thomas Austin wanted to make Australia fair by making it a bit more like the home he’d left behind in the UK. The Society’s mission was to introduce many species from England to their adopted homeland as possible—especially the cute ones, the attractive ones, and the shootable ones. In 1861, just after Queensland became an independent state, Austin wrote that, in following the programme of the Society, he had introduced hares, blackbirds and thrushes, and that he was breeding English wild rabbits and partridges on his estate. [1] On that October day he introduced 24 breeding rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) on his estate, Winchelsea, in southern Australia near Melbourne to provide game for shooting parties. [2]
From this unlikely start, it took only around 50 years for these cute, but prolific and invasive rabbits to spread across the entire continent wreaking all kinds of havoc.
The results of the release of the European wild rabbits at Austin’s estate was quickly apparent. With abundant food sources, good ground cover and a lack of predators, the rabbits raced across the landscape. Just seven years later, in 1866, hunters bagged 14,000 rabbits on his estate.
By 1880 rabbits had crossed the Murray River and traveled northward to New South, reaching Queensland by 1886. In 1894 they had traversed the vast and inhospitable Nullarbor and flooded into Western Australia.
Some background here: Rabbits took 700 years to propagate this widely after they were introduced into Britain. Much to my surprise, modern rabbits (at least the ones we think of, Oryctolagus cuniculus) are not native to Britain. The first clear records show that rabbits were kept on the Scilly Isles and Lundy Island (in the Bristol Channel) and the Isle of Wight in the 12th and 13th century. There was a kind of rabbit in Britain before the last ice age that wandered the meadows during the Cromerian Interglacial (750,000 to 350,000 BP), but they did not survive the last ice age, exiting Britain thousands of years ago. The current crop of British bunnies seems to have been introduced in the 12th century when the Normans brought them over from France. There is a remote possibility that the Romans introduced rabbits around 0 AD, but if so, they never really took off. The Norman rabbits repopulated Britain, but then took seven centuries to cover the British earth. Meanwhile, the colonisation of two-thirds of Australia, an area 25 times the size of Britain, took only 50 years. The rate of spread of the rabbit in Australia has been the fastest reproduction rate of any mammal anywhere in the world. [9]
While Thomas Austin’s efforts to provide a little touch of rabbity home so far from the downs of England were praised at the time, he has since borne the blame for introducing this pest to Australia where it became ubiquitous and caused overwhelming damage to the environment. Should Austin have known that this would happen? How can we usefully think about the consequences of actions that seem simple enough, but turn out badly?
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A mere ten years after Austin’s rabbit release, the world’s first synthetic polymer was invented by John Wesley Hyatt. He was inspired by a prize of $10,000 offered in 1869 for anyone who could provide a substitute for ivory and thereby remove the growing pressure and cost of elephant ivory. At the time, elephants were being killed for their tusks to supply the ever-growing demand for billiard balls. Even in the Victorian era—not an era known for its sensitivity to ecosystem sustainability—this was recognized as unsustainable extraction of a natural resource. Hyatt found that by treating cellulose (a long-chain of sugar molecule that makes up the cell walls of plant, which he extracted from cotton fiber) with camphor, he created a kind of semi-natural plastic—celluloid—that could be pressed and carved into a variety of shapes. As such, it can be used to imitate natural plastic-like substances such as tortoiseshell, horn, linen, and ivory.
The invention was a game-changer. Natural sources could supply only so many elephant tusks, exotics woods, and expensive metals. The press of the time praised celluloid as the savior of the elephant and the turtle. Plastics could protect the natural world from the destructive forces of human greed. These new kinds of materials, easily synthesized, also helped minimize social and economic constraints that defined natural resource extraction. Now, simple, inexpensive celluloid-made materials, and the wealth they created, became much more widespread. Celluloid was the first commercially successful commercial plastic. But it had its own share of problems (mostly, it’s pretty flammable and shrinks with age as it breaks down over time, when that happens it discolors, cracks, and eventually crumbles). So the search was on for a better kind of plastic.
It would be 51 years later that Leo Baekeland would create Bakelite, the first completely synthetic plastic that didn’t rely on natural precursors (such as cotton-derived cellulose). Working to meet the demands of the rapidly growing electrical industry, Baekeland had been searching for a synthetic replacement for shellac, an insulator that was made from the secretions of the female lac bug on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. Shellac works well, but was expensive, and went bad after some time becoming brittle and breaking easily. By contrast, Bakelite, Baekeland’s new kind of post-celluloid plastic, was not only a good insulator, it was also durable, heat resistant, had a long shelf-life, and could easily be shaped or molded into almost any form. The modern plastics revolution really began with Bakelite.
Hyatt’s and Baekeland’s successes led major chemical companies to invest in the research and development of new polymers, and a wave of new plastics soon joined celluloid and Bakelite. While Hyatt and Baekeland had been searching for materials with specific properties, the new research programs sought new plastics for their own sake and worried about finding uses for them later. Over the next twenty years, chemical engineers would create dozens of new kinds of plastics (both plexiglass and polyethylene were invented in 1933; Nylon, 1935; polystyrene, 1937).
They might not have anticipated that plastics would become such a common substance that broken bits of plastic would literally cover the earth, from the moment of birth (when microplastics invade the placenta) [3], to the highest mountain peaks [4] and the deepest parts of the ocean. [5] [8] Could Hyatt and Baekeland have anticipated such widespread distribution of the breakdown products of the plastics industry?
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In 1937, just as plastic inventions grew like rabbits in Australia, the German-Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, was digging for early human bones in Java. He had employed teams of local Javanese workers who were paid by the piece of bone they discovered. Four bones? 40 cents. At a dime per bone, this was a decent wage. This had the intended primary effect of finding bones and bone fragments that von Koenigswald could never have found on his own. But buying the bones piecemeal meant that the workers quickly found they could maximize income by breaking large fossils into smaller pieces and selling each to the paleontologist. [6]
This is a classic example of a perverse incentive, that is, an incentive to do some particular kind of behavior that is leads to misguided behavior that often is the opposite of what the incentive was set up to accomplish.
Interestingly, perverse incentives aren’t limited to humans—this is very much like what dolphins have learned to do. At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, the dolphins are trained to pick up litter that falls into their pool and trade it to a handler for a fish treat. One dolphin, Kelly by name, has learned this cleanup procedure all too well and gone one perverse step farther. When a largish piece of paper falls into the pool, Kelly stashes the paper under a rock for safekeeping. When a trainer next appears poolside, Kelly goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of the paper to give to the trainer. After a fish treat, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another reward, and so on, perversely breaking the large paper into smaller pieces, snagging multiple rewards [7]
*
In all three cases—a rabbit explosion in Australia, the mass distribution of plastics around the world, and the drive towards perverse interpretations of incentives—the consequences of these actions are profound, and unanticipated. But wait… Really?
Could they have been anticipated? Almost certainly. We have long known that introducing animals into a new ecosystem without any established predators or checks of any kind is just asking for trouble. Likewise, pollution effects have been known since the Romans, although not on a global scale, but the effects of disposing of amphorae (or plain old human sewage) at scale was well known. [10] And perverse incentives have been clear ever since humans (and other animals) understood how to game the system.
A key insight is that it’s clear that there aren’t a million different kinds of unanticipated consequences—there are a million stories about them, but once you start pulling them together and looking at the collection, it seems there’s only about 20 major categories of these UCs. These three are the most common: 1. Perverse consequences; 2. Population Explosions; 3. Hypersuccess effects.
I’ve been collecting these stories for years, and I now realize that there are common threads, common factors that will help us understand (and possibly forestall) the worst of the unintended effects.
What are the next 17 UC categories? That’s what we’re about to find out.
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[1] "The Acclimatisation Society". The Argus, 21 April 1864. p. 7.
[2] David Krogh (2010), Biology: A Guide to the Natural World, Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company, p. 658.
[3] Ragusa, Antonio, Alessandro Svelato, Criselda Santacroce, Piera Catalano, Valentina Notarstefano, Oliana Carnevali, Fabrizio Papa et al. "Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta." Environment international 146 (2021): 106274.
[4] Napper, Imogen E., Bede FR Davies, Heather Clifford, Sandra Elvin, Heather J. Koldewey, Paul A. Mayewski, Kimberley R. Miner et al. "Reaching new heights in plastic pollution—preliminary findings of microplastics on Mount Everest." One Earth 3, no. 5 (2020): 621-630.
[5] Van Cauwenberghe, Lisbeth, Ann Vanreusel, Jan Mees, and Colin R. Janssen. "Microplastic pollution in deep-sea sediments." Environmental pollution 182 (2013): 495-499.
[6] Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution
By Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis, Roger Lewin. p. 77 (BTW, you’ll often read this story framed as “paleontologists in China searching for fossils.” Maybe that happened too, but I can’t find the source, whereas this episode very clearly DID happen in Java, which is not China.)
[7] Why dolphins are deep thinkers. Guardian, July 3, 2002. (Science section) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
[8] Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic
L. Lebreton, B. Slat, F. Ferrari, B. Sainte-Rose, J. Aitken, R. Marthouse, S. Hajbane, S. Cunsolo, A. Schwarz, A. Levivier, K. Noble, P. Debeljak, H. Maral, R. Schoeneich-Argent, R. Brambini & J. Reisser. Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 4666 (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
[9] Davis, Susan E., and Margo DeMello. Stories rabbits tell: A natural and cultural history of a misunderstood creature. Lantern Books, 2003.
[10] Havlíček, Filip, Morcinek, Miroslav. Waste and Pollution in the Ancient Roman Empire. Journal of Landscape Ecology (2016), Vol: 9 / No. 3.
this is dandy stuff...don't do too much though