I was just reading an article about 'green deserts' and it was talking about finding a solution to something that in the end turns out to be a new problem later on down the line.
The example was that as population grew 100 years ago we found a solution to help agriculture keep up…
Spurred by predictions that the world would run out of food, innovations began to take shape. Chemists figured out how to pull nitrogen literally from thin air (and got the Nobel Prize for it in 1918), a major step in developing the synthetic fertilizers that subsequently enabled crop production to grow by leaps and bounds.
Something that wins the Nobel prize is a big deal, but today we know that the synthetic fertilizers are a big problem in many ways.
I wonder how many of today's solutions are going to end up being actually the cause of bigger problems in the future, or if we got better at looking at the impact that comes later?
