How Humans can F*ck things up!
A story about how we always fail to learn from our mistakes…
How does disrupting the natural ecosystem can cause problems, really big problems?
Incident 1: The 4 Pests Campaign in China
It started back in 1958 by the beginning of the era of the communist ruler Mao Zedong who wanted to turn the country from an agrarian country into an industrial country. the country was suffering from many diseases and infections like Plague and Malaria, so the big man decided to start a campaign to kill all the rats and the mosquitos in a very smart “well-thought-out” plan to control the spread of the diseases but this didn’t stop here! He thought let’s add flies, we can all agree that flies are so annoying, right?
Then he later thought okay those sick people need a lot of food but how we can feed all these sick people while they are fighting over their food with sparrows? Yes, you heard it right, SPARROWS those cute little birds are eating all the grains we need to feed our sick people, and this gotta stop!
A single sparrow can eat up to 4.5 kg of grains/ year, they did some math and came with an equation that we can feed up to 60,000 people by killing only 1,000,000 sparrows. A cheap price don’t you think? Turned out not that cheap as may have guessed.
This 4 Pests campaign caused the elimination of 1.5 billion rats, 11 kilograms of mosquitoes, 100 million kilograms of flies … and wait for it 1 billion sparrows.
Of course, as you guessed sparrows weren’t only eating grains, they were eating insects and especially locusts (a grasshopper species) which now with the killing of a billion sparrows are eating all infecting all the grains and further complicated the problems the country was facing between 1959 and 1962 in a period which is known as The Great China Famine. The elimination of sparrows is estimated to cause the killing of 15 to 30 million people caused by the government not being able to deliver reserved food to millions of people affected by flooding, drought, and the fact that there is a margin of 15 million humans that we don’t know if they have died because of it adds even more layers of terror.
You would think that now we definitely and without a doubt have learned our lesson, NO NO NO….!
When the SARS epidemic hit back in 2004 the Chinese government ordered the mass extermination of mammals from civet cats to badgers in relentless and mostly successful trials to mess up the natural ecosystem.
I have a theory that has nothing to back it up but I think that maybe as a result of the great Chinese famine, the government introduced some laws to permit the consumption of wildlife and even regulated it using the wildlife markets which made the human consumption of animals that weren't really domesticated possible.
Incident 2: The man who blindly loved Shakespear
the story starts back in 1890 when an English man named Eugene Schieffelin who lived in New York city. the man really loved shakespear and he wanted to bring on something that he really loved in New York city, the man wanted to make it feel like home you cannot blame him, or can you?
He though what a better idea than bringing starling from Britian here in New York City so he released 60 starlings in the central park and later 40 more in the year after. within a few years only 32 starlings survived (not so good for the poor starlings?) but that didn’t continue, the number started to grow gradually (lucky you Schieffelin) before the decade was out the stalling were very common across New York City. by 1950s, they reached California and today we have a total of 200 million starlings in North America spread from Mexico to Alaska. And it all started by this Shakespear pieace:
“Nay, I ‘ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer’, and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.” Hyperbole in Act I, Scene III of Henry IV, Part I
Those bretty starlings ate all the corps including wheat and potatoes, they are very aggressive even attacked other birds species, they shit absolutely anywhere and it smells horrible. And there was this one horrible accident where a plane crashed killing 62 of the 72 passengers after a 10,000 stalings fllew into a plane as it took off destroying its engine.
At that time many of the leading American newspapers had headlines like in the New York Times, “one of the costliest and most noxious birds on our continent” and the Wahington Post once described them “arguably the most hated bird in North America”.
Why did we fail to learn from our mistakes?
That we will know in my next piece, good cliffhanger, Is it not :D
My Sources:
Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips
