The Law of Unintended Consequences & Ecologic Change
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
I ended my last post with a hooray for Yale's double overtime win over Harvard on reunion weekend. The post had to do with evolutionary response of living or near living organisms to the threat of ecology caused extinction. That threat imposed upon the game festivities and excitement as indicated in a statement from Yale President Peter Salovey. During halftime at midfield, some students, some alumni, and friends from Yale and Harvard advocated that the two universities divest from endowment holdings containing fossil fuels. President Salovey reiterated Yale's commitment "substantively, relentlessly, and with increasing intensity" through teaching and research to invest in "planetary solutions." He reminded all that there are Yale committees meeting regularly to form a more aggressive "strategy for making Yale a cabon-net-zero campus."
There was a sober reminder that endowments are a tricky and complex matter handled by an Investments Office, that "the University supports shareholder resolutions calling for disclosures that address climate change" and "asks its outside endowment managers not to hold companies that disregard the social and financial costs of climate change and that fail to take economically sensible steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." He ends his note with a reminder that in the fight for the planet's future, we have to find strength in what unites us.
The problem is vast and nothing escapes it. Our national leaders apparently lack the honesty or analytic capacity of academicians, but they clearly see political implications in the form of job losses, industry closings, etc with respiratory, cardiac, inflammatory and neurological, and psychiatric illnesses being on the other end of the seesaw. As consumers we have to find ways to ensure that people who are assigned responsibility are doing their jobs. The major unintended consequence of that particular dereliction is the speeding of our planet's demise. I now see that the game had consequences determined by factors other than the scores.
