Reading this excerpt from “The Logic of Failure” was basically seeing my entire life as an Environmental Studies major (or anyone who is environmentally conscious) put on paper. So much of the climate and environmental problems today are from people making a quick solution that ends up causing more problems. When thinking about conservation or reparation, you pretty much have to think five steps ahead of yourself to prevent some kind of harmful environmental butterfly effect from happening. It’s headache inducing. Are pesky insects eating your crops? Try pesticide! Oh, congratulations, you’ve contaminated the local groundwater and some of those insects have developed a resistance to that pesticide, meaning you’re now in a lose-lose situation where you can increase the concentration of pesticide (killing more insects but increasing contamination) or try and switch methods (potentially reducing pollution but putting your crops at risk). Humans have made so many of these quick solutions over the last few hundred years that we’ve dug ourselves into an environmental grave. I think my favorite example is the cane toad in Australia; settlers there were having issues with an invasive beetle eating their sugar cane, so they introduced the cane toad to try and control it. They got what they wished for, but cane toads are literal vacuums that will eat anything in sight (conservation biologists have found ping pong balls and other inanimate objects in their stomachs), and soon the toads started threatening native small mammal populations. By not taking the time to ask the important questions and think about long-term repercussions, the settlers cursed themselves with years of ecological damage that still hasn’t been solved.
Forsyth’s article was not what I was expecting. When I read that bolstering students’ self-esteem actually decreased academic performance, I immediately thought that it must be due to some external factors. Maybe the fact that our generation greatly differs from generations past plays a big part- as Forsyth wrote, “The current generation of young adults, who comprised our sample, differs substantially and significantly from previous generations in several relevant respects. Most notably, they have higher self–esteem and lower beliefs in internal control.” (457) But now that we know this information, what do we do with it?
I thought your insight of the actions humans have taken to intervene with the environment to be super intriguing and it made me wonder how do you prevent hasty individuals from implementing more harmful than good “solutions”? Other than looking five steps ahead of yourself, is there any way to ensure your “solution” will have little to no negative consequences? It’s quite scary to think that even if you thoroughly plan, there is still uncertainty of something completely unplanned to become a factor.
As for the Forsyth article, it inspired a conversation of participation trophies in my 102 course. When you ask what we should do with the information, I wonder if participation trophies, which really are made of molded plastic to boost self-esteem, are more harmful than good for our generation?
I liked your connection to environmental issues. As you stated, a lot of issues occur in this realm that are brought about by “good intentions.” People think that they are doing the correct thing either for the environment or for themselves and it ends up having negative consequences. I like the example that you pulled out with the toads. Any time when people bring invasive species into the mix it gets interesting so it surprises me (though not really because people make bad decisions when it comes to the environment) that someone thought the solution to one invasive species was to introduce another invasive species.