Surely, I could start naming the famous inventions and the campaigns that preceeded them which all turned bad, but I will mention here only a handful of which I have witnessed myself. Take as an example DDT. The wonderful picture of great and modern way how to get rid off unwanted insects in the fields, as we all know, has turned out to be somewhat wrong. I’ve also witnessed similarly enthusiathic campaign for Sunar – dried milk for babies, which was to completely substitute the natural mother‘s milk and children all around the world would not suffer from hunger and malnutrition any more. Well, where are those supporters of mass consumption of artificial food now? And there is a similar situation with caesarean sections, epidural anesthesia and other „above standard“ services offered by many hospital maternity wards not only in Czech Republic. And despite all the propaganda of those who are depending on it financially, it’s becoming clearer that the consequences are far more expensive and rather the opposite of what they promised to be in the first place. And it
also went wrong for the hormonal contraception.There is increasing number of female gendered fish in seas of Europe due to fact that (not only fish) males are full of artifical female hormones that have been peed out by generations of women using hormonal contraception.
And the situation also went wrong with hamburgers. Shall we say with the beef. Cattle is responsible for 18 percent of the whole production of greenhouse gases. Alltogether that creates more greenhouse gas emision compared to the whole emision production of the transport industry. One of the favourite arguments of vegetarian supporters is: one ton of food will turn into just one hundred kilograms of meat. And our meaty diet will add to that 1,5 tons of greenhouse gasses. The change could be as small as eating just one hamburger instead of two per week and that by itself would be a significant relief for our planet.
It has gone wrong in another field as well; sons of American women who were eating large portions of beef meat during their pregnancies could have later fertility problems. Producers of beef in the USA have been using anabolic steroids to increase muscle growth of their cattle since the 50ties. Largely used hormone called dietylstilbestrol was banned in 1979 but other hormones were put in place to substitute it. Residue of those hormones can still be found in the meat even after cooking it. These hormones and their metabolites can get into bodies of mothers-to-be and subsequently into the bodies of their unborn babies and can affect the development of sex organs in male babies.
And another similar situation with the roads. I have read countless number of articles about all the problems being resolved by building more motorways – unemployment percentage will
decrease, that horrendous traffic jam during rush hours every day and at the weekends will disappear, and there will be less poluted air and less cars on the road.
But the experiences gained in western countries have not only proven this idea wrong but they’ve also proven that the new motorway will not decrease the number of cars on the road driving through villages, towns or streets of Prague but on the contrary the number of cars will gradually increase in the short period of time.
In this regard, this year’s cutting out the trees growing along the roads forming an alleyway in order to prevent accidents on the road seems to be a bad joke. The appropriate official authority had saved some extra money from their budget during the mild winter so they thought of a task to cut out all the trees along the road due to the road safety. This is considered but a complete non-sense by the ecologists and nature lovers and is damaging the typical distinctive picture of the Czech lands. On top of that the practice from our neighbouring Austria shows (as stated by Austrian Curator for the road safety – article in Lidove Noviny from 12th April 07) that the number of accidents has gone up by 35 percent after cutting out trees alongside the roads, in particularly accidents caused by speed driving. Experts for transport questions have concluded that trees growing along side the motorways are important for drivers to be able to estimate how fast they’re driving. Without those trees there isn’t an appropriate measure and a way of telling how fast one is driving and drivers therefore tend to drive way too fast.
Well, it seems to have all gone somewhat wrong, my dear responsible authorities and politicians… I think it went all wrong.