Unintended Consequences

One of humanity's greatest weaknesses is an inability to foretell the consequences of their actions. We don't look very far into the past to see what our past mistakes were or even recognize them for the mistakes they were. We also don't look far into the future, so we think very much in the here and now. This has led to some dismal failures in the past. Perhaps this is what is meant by the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". We start with good intentions, but we don't have all of the information to work with. This leads to unintended consequences.

During China's Great Leap Forward, the party leadership decided that they would tackle four pests and eradicate them forever. Those pests were rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. From 1958 to 1962, China waged war on these four to eliminate hunger and disease. They went into it with the very best of intentions. We're going to focus on the sparrows. The first three pests are pretty self-explanatory after all. 

Four Pests

Rats spread the plague. Flies spread disease. Mosquitoes spread malaria. Sparrows ate grain and fruit meant to feed people. After the People's Revolution the new Chinese government really tried to do something about things like disease and famine. China had long and tragic experience with both. Now they were going to try to live up to the promises that they had made during the revolution and improve things for the people. 

Four Pests Campaign

With the sparrows they had children out killing them with slingshots and they set up noisemakers to discourage the sparrows from being able to stop anywhere to rest or build nests. The sparrows, denied any rest, would fall dead from the sky. When the nests were found, they were destroyed. It's estimated that the Chinese killed a billion sparrows in this four year period. The government gave awards for the piles upon piles of dead sparrows, flies and rat's tails collected by citizens. There was, however an unfortunate result of all this killing. It turned out that the sparrows ate a lot more than just grain and fruit. They also ate insects that ate the crops. Instead of having a bumper crop after killing the sparrows, it started a famine in which 20-45 million people died because locusts multiplied without the sparrows to eat them. For scale, 20-45 million people would have constituted an eighth to a quarter of the US population at the time. In their zeal they had created exactly the situation they had been trying to prevent. 

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Rabbits were first introduced to Australia in the 18th century. They were raised as domestic food animals much like pigs or chickens. This was during a period in which we didn't really understand ecosystems and the consequences of introducing a non-native species. This is something Australia was soon to learn. The Australian continent had no natural predators or competitors that could keep up with the rate at which rabbits bred. The climate was so mild that they could breed year round.

Rabbits In Australia

The current infestation which resulted from such ideal conditions for rabbits was devastating. There were so many of them, and they all had to eat. They ate the native plants sometimes to extinction. When they'd eaten everything leafy from the ground, they started on the tree bark and the scrub. They'd strip everything edible and leave nothing to hold the ground together. This led to erosion wherever they had been. And all because Thomas Austin released 24 rabbits in 1859 so he could hunt them for sport. Within ten years of this two million rabbits could be killed a year without having any noticeable effect on the population. Not so surprising given that the whole problem started with just 24 rabbits. 

In order to deal with the problem, Australia shot rabbits. They poisoned them. They built rabbit-proof fences to fence off water sources and keep rabbits out of land for cattle, because not only did rabbits eat everything in sight but they dig burrows and cattle have an unfortunate tendency to step in the holes and break their legs. What finally seemed to work was the development of biological measures against rabbits. They found diseases specific to rabbits and introduced them. First they introduced rabbit scab and then a form of pasteurella and finally myxomatosis which reduced the population from 600 million rabbits to 100 million. The problem still isn't completely solved. Australia is still working on it. They've had some other problems with introduced species which have led to a stringent policy forbidding the import of biological material, animals, insects, etc. to Australia. 

Why There Are No Rats In Hawaii - Or Birds

Around the 1870's, sugar plantations were big business. There was just one problem. Rats. Rats liked sugar cane and caused a lot of damage in the fields. The owners decided that mongooses were the solution to this problem. For a while they reported that the mongooses were working splendidly and that there was less rat damage to the canefields.

Small Asian Mongoose - Chung Bill Bill

Unfortunately it just wasn't true. For one thing, rats are nocturnal while mongooses are not. Instead of killing rats, mongooses went for easier prey. They ate birds and they ate birds' eggs and they ate turtle eggs. Once they're loose they're nearly impossible to catch. They breed prolifically and they carry diseases like leptospirosis and e.coli. Hawaii lost a lot of native bird species and saw a decline in turtle populations thanks to someone's bright idea to use them for rat control. 

Muskrats

By Linda Tanner - Fat, Fat Water Rat

At the beginning of the 20th century people were into wearing fur. It's fallen out of fashion now, but in those days it was a status symbol. They loved mink and fox and beaver...and muskrat. In 1905 the first introductions to Europe were started in an effort to farm muskrat for their fur. In both intentional releases into the wild and escapes from fur farms, the muskrat made its bid for freedom. Unfortunately they're much like little beavers and they are adept at adjusting the habitat to suit them but not us. They create wetlands and chew up little trees to build their nests on the water. They were introduced in 1927 to the UK, but they figured out what the muskrats were up to and eradicated them by 1939. In Belgium and the Netherlands they are vigilant in keeping them under control because they like to dig holes in the dike system. 

If you've been paying attention you might notice that all but the first example of unintended ecological consequences have been the result of wanting a luxury. Sport hunting. Sugar. Fur. In hindsight they weren't very good reasons to fuck up the ecosystem. Schopenhauer once suggested that it was our human intelligence that made us most miserable. These are examples illustrating that. We're too smart for our own good. We're so smart that we outsmart ourselves trying to show off how clever we are. He may have had a point after all. Not to diminish the value of intelligence, but if you think about the most intelligent people you know of, how many of them are any happier or more successful in life as a result of their intelligence? Does it help us, or does it just as often screw things up worse because we meddle in things we don't really understand? Does it make us overconfident? Is this how Dunning-Kruger plays out in the more intelligent? All of these are questions that go through my mind. Perhaps we value the wrong things and shoot ourselves in the foot while we're at it. If we're so intelligent, how is it that we've managed to fuck up the planet we live on as badly as we have?