this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
250 points (99.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43757 readers
2316 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
China's Four Pests campaign is a great example. As the campaign says, China had a bit of a pest problem. One of these particular pests was the sparrow. The government decided it would be a great idea to launch an "exterminate sparrows" campaign. The only problem was sparrows ate other pests such as bedbugs and locusts.
In short, they sucessfully curbed the "sparrow problem" and replaced it with a "locusts and bedbugs problem". This ultimately upset the ecological balance and further lowered the rice yields. It was a complete disaster
Sounds exactly like a China thing.
I bet lemmygrad would explain how it was actually a good thing, especially for the sparrows.
Like how Florida is going to teach how slavery benefited black people
Yeah, authoritarians gonna authorit.
One of the best examples of unintended consequences, aiding in one of the largest human caused disasters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
I like to call it "The Great Stumble Backwards"
Followed closely by the cannibal revolution
Another good example is when the Soviet Union dammed the Aral Sea in order to create irrigation canals for cotton and other produce in the region. It worked at first and they had a huge economic boom, but this is also one of history's most prominent examples of "Ecological Collapse"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Irrigation_canals
I mean, they did produce the cotton they wanted...
It's less an example of a blunder and more an example of how few fucks the Soviets gave about being "green".
The great leap forward was such a colossal clusterfuck that you can't blame it on any one thing (although most of them would be prevented without the authoritarianism). Literally everything was wrong. Sparrows, lysenkoism, Mao just being evil, backyard burners, rigid chain of command that gave the chairman absolute authority but at the same prevented him from knowing what was going on, everything.
I vaguely remember reading about that when I was younger. I don't know if it's true, but this is what I read.
The peasants and farmers were made to stand in the fields throwing stones at the sparrows, preventing them from landing. The thinking was that the sparrows would die from exhaustion, if they weren't killed by the stones.
What actually happened was that the existing crops were either trampled or broken by the stones, and as the farmers weren't working the fields, nothing grew the following year either.
Like I say, I have no idea whether it's true, or if it was just 80's anti communist propaganda, but it's stuck in my head ever since.
The "why don't we just..." school of public policy.
I'd be shocked if they could actually throw that many rocks, but the basic idea is that the policy didn't work as intended, and that's correct.
Sounds similar to what we did in Australia.