The eliminate sparrows campaign resulted in severe ecological imbalance, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.
According to the government, 2 billion sparrows were killed in 1958, and 1 billion in 1959.
It was fun to 'Wipe out the Four Pests'. The whole school went to kill sparrows. We made ladders to knock down their nests, and beat gongs in the evenings, when they were coming home to roost.
It seems to have worked, with very few sparrows reported in China by 1961. On the other hand, sparrows didn't just eat grain, and by 1960 ornithologists began sounding the alarm about multiplying insect pests.
But as I said, that is old news, and most of the articles I have found about it don't radiate objectivity. Lots of "look what happens when people mess with nature" sort of stuff. But now a new paper from Chinese researchers supports this claim and offers some serious estimates of the harm:
How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great Famine—the largest in human history. Combining newly digitized data on historical agricultural productivity in China with habitat suitability modeling methods in ecology, we find that, after sparrow eradication, a one-standard-deviation increase in sparrow suitability led to 5.3% larger rice and 8.7% larger wheat declines. State food procurement exacerbated these losses, resulting in a 9.6% higher mortality in high-suitability counties—implying nearly two million excess deaths.
I suggest a new list of the four pests: tyrants, the lackeys of tyrants, ignorant ideologues, and people who venerate "action" over understanding.
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I suggest a new list of the four pests: tyrants, the lackeys of tyrants, ignorant ideologues, and people who venerate "action" over understanding.
That covers the overwhelming majority of people throughout history. In short, humanity is a pest species.
What good is understanding if no action comes from it?
@Anonymous: Obviously one sometimes has to act, but recent history if full of people who acted because "something has to be done," e.g., Bush II's invasion of Iraq. In my view, most of these actions are mistakes.
Unless you have a clear plan and good reasons to believe that it will work, doing nothing is far better.
Unless you have a clear plan and good reasons to believe that it will work, doing nothing is far better.
Well there goes climate change.
Were COVID lockdowns a good action or simply a "something has to be done" action?
Obviously one sometimes has to act,
Well obviously, but how does one decide if they "must act" or if it's just a "something has to be done" kind of act? How exactly do we differentiate between "action" and action?
Unless you have a clear plan and good reasons to believe that it will work, doing nothing is far better.
And cutting off at the pass here, "Everybody stops using fossil fuels and climate change is fixed, easy peasy" is not a plan with good reasons to believe it will work.
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