[HN Gopher] Killing sparrows led to famines in China
___________________________________________________________________
Killing sparrows led to famines in China
Author : aashutoshrathi
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-04-12 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historydefined.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historydefined.net)
| alfor wrote:
| Another example of the peril of central planning and total
| authority.
|
| Make me think of the climate change orthodoxy were we focus
| solely on co2 and forget about all the other human problems.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| On the other side of the coin is the anarchy of thought that
| exists around COVID. It's almost like humans societies are a
| complex series of trade offs irreducible to the simplicities of
| total authority or total anarchy.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Not really. Climate change is a multiplier or interwoven with
| lot of those other problems. Plus burning fossil fuels is so
| central to our economies that we haven't even stopped co2
| emissions rising.
|
| If we'd actually focused on co2, rather than the less than
| minimum effort made so far, then maybe there'd be more space
| for the other problems. Instead this one problem looms larger
| and larger.
| alfor wrote:
| Look into the work of Tony Seba: renewable are on an
| exponential growth.
|
| Tesla Master plan 3 highlight the step needed to fully
| transition
|
| Bjorn Longburgh explain in his book and interview what are
| the different priorities and costs associated with the
| different way we can do good in the world.
|
| I am super into renewable, but climate change will not be a
| problem at the current speed of innovation. We should focus
| on making the poor richer so they then can care about the
| environment. We should also tell young people to have kids,
| that there is _not_ too many people on the planet and we
| should be _way_ more careful with the risks of nuclear war.
|
| Not too long ago we were afraid of widespread famine in the
| 2000 and the return of Ice age, and probably many others
| thing.
| ericd wrote:
| Does he have a good answer for the problem of
| overgeneration during the summer months, and
| undergeneration in winter? If you run the numbers on
| battery energy density, cost, and what it takes to run an
| efficient heat pump, it seems clear that renewables alone
| aren't quite a solution yet. I'd love to be wrong, though.
| neovialogistics wrote:
| Someone once commented to me that rather than blaming Mao
| personally, the blame for the negative consequences of The Great
| Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution should be placed on the
| systemic forces that legitimised the absence of domain experts in
| policy making.
|
| It's a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds
| of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and
| attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-
| term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking
| or is it a sign of something useful?
| ipnon wrote:
| "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy."
| emaginniss wrote:
| Don't blame Mao, blame the system Mao built!
| majormajor wrote:
| Well, where did those systemic forces come from? Does it take
| your right back to Mao? (I have no idea, it just seems curious
| that suddenly you'd have these systemic forces cause huge
| problems that didn't exist before...)
|
| "It's systemic" isn't a stopping point for an investigation. If
| you diagnose something as systemic it tells you something about
| how you're gonna have to fight it, but nothing really about
| blame. E.g. if you talk about the effects of systemic racism in
| the US the blame isn't abstract, you can clearly trace back
| many policies, biases, and differences to _active, individual_
| racism over centuries.
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| And whoever publicly even doubted the decision of Mao was labeled
| as right-wing who spread misinformation, or counter-
| revolutionaries who sabotaged the great socialism movement. Maybe
| there is some truth in the question: who's the arbiter of
| information?
| nawgz wrote:
| That sounds like an unfalsifiable claim. Do you have any
| evidence supporting it, or are you "just asking questions"?
|
| Edit: I deserve to have been downvoted, I have misinterpreted
| the context of "right" in the parent post and they have
| educated me with articles in turn
| rdtsc wrote:
| Even asking questions is not a bad way to keep the conversion
| going. Not every sentence has to be proven logically and
| supported by extensive research and references.
| revelio wrote:
| History books? The evidence is abundant, it's weird that this
| is even in dispute. Not sure what the Chinese term was but
| the Soviets used the word "bourgeoisie" or sometimes "kulaks"
| where today we would say right wing/capitalists, and they
| used propaganda (propaganda) for what today we would call
| misinformation. And counter-revolutionaries were just
| counter-revolutionaries, no change there.
|
| The only bit about hintymad's claim that's false is that the
| people who publicly doubted Mao weren't labelled as things.
| They were just executed.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You're in luck, there's a whole wikipedia page covering the
| named offenses[1] of the cultural revolution. Rightist,
| reactionary, and class-enemy seem to have been common based
| on my reading.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China
| hintymad wrote:
| > Not sure what the Chinese term was but the Soviets used
| the word "bourgeoisie" or sometimes "kulaks"
|
| Yup, Chinese did use "bourgeoisie" too. It's called Xiaozi
| (Xiao Zi ), though the connotation of the word today has
| drastically changed. Before and during the Culture
| Revolution, the word referred to those who didn't have
| complete conviction in the Revolution and were attracted to
| the "corrupted life style" of the western world. However,
| bourgeoisies were educable. If they refused the education,
| whatever that means, they would turn into the right.
| hintymad wrote:
| Oh my god, are you serious? Or I just naively assumed that
| the dark history of China back in the 50s and 60s are well
| known? The Great Leap Forward. The Anti-Right Campaign (BTW,
| "right" in Marxism terms are akin to the left in the western
| world). The Four Cleansing Movement. The Campaign to
| Eliminate the Four Pests... Millions of people died of hunger
| and millions more lost their civil rights for decades! People
| who questioned whether an acre could produce more than 5000KG
| of rice got persecuted.
|
| Just do the Google search on the terms.
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| In addition, do check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhixin,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zhao, and
| https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/politics-
| guilt-092820.... Mind you, the "crimes" these people
| "committed" were deemed serious by the progressives during
| those times. Yeah, so much for the left wanting to censor
| information.
| nawgz wrote:
| Thanks, I did not know it was literally called the "Anti-
| Rightist" campaign and I see I misunderstood the comment
| and implications you originally made. Sorry for that.
| azemetre wrote:
| I mean struggle sessions were a real thing. [1] Suppose it's
| hard to say that any particular person was forced into a
| struggle session for saying that killing sparrows was wrong,
| but they were absolutely a thing and mostly used to quell
| dissent and spread Maoism.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543940.
| hintymad wrote:
| I honestly hope that people didn't downvote the comment because
| of the mention of "right". The "right" in China (or the third
| Internationale in general) is akin to the liberals in the
| western world.
|
| The whole point of the comment is that truth matters and
| freedom of speech matters and government or any entity alone
| can't be the arbiter of information
| dduugg wrote:
| The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty
| Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses.
|
| We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us,
| Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing
| Eye.
|
| Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was
| Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our
| Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe.
|
| A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False
| Dreams Of Endless Riches.
|
| "Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests
| Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In."
|
| And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their
| Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For
| Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And
| Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.
|
| Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our
| Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter.
|
| Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That
| True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We
| Begin To Think For Ourselves.
|
| - Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"
| ycombinete wrote:
| For anyone else wondering why each word in this is capitalised:
|
| _"Despite having no lyrics, the album (by way of its song
| titles) follows the story of the Great Leap Forward in Mao
| Zedong-era China, more specifically recounting the Great
| Sparrow Campaign, a mass killing of sparrows (along with rats,
| flies and mosquitoes) that fed on a portion of the harvest and
| were seen as pests."_ [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Towar...
| [deleted]
| OrbOfConfusion wrote:
| A truly fantastic album, start to finish.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The People's Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows
| from the Soviet Union to stop the ecological disruption.
|
| That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine,
| but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds
| of thousands.
|
| > The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel
| production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot
| in fields.
|
| That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able
| to produce quality steel
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
|
| From the wikipedia article:
|
| > Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings,
| claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass
| creativity, and mass participation in economic development.
|
| At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up.
| But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local
| municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple
| streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single
| landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop
| sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people
| refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error,
| apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform
| their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into
| one large landfill.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I've read about this several times, and I'm not surprised the
| story is popular. Many people see China as a foe, so they like to
| smear it. That's alright, but anyone should be extra cautious
| when a story is just what most people want. Stories tend to
| inflate and bend to please their auditory.
|
| For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000
| sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article
| seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed
| Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book
| "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has
| just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even
| had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion:
| no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only
| showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or
| USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't
| find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub.
|
| Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail
| (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing
| sparrows is the main cause of the famine).
|
| One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and
| insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four
| Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously
| suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning
| in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in
| the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.
| warning26 wrote:
| Ah yes, the "fake news" defense.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| I find it rather strange that people tend to blame the famine on
| communism and central planning
| chaostheory wrote:
| Why?
| nradov wrote:
| Central planning usually causes shortages of _everything_
| including food. Famines are a routine occurrence under
| communism.
|
| https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/
| quacked wrote:
| After reading several autobiographies of people who lived in
| the USSR, I've started to think that material shortages are
| actually the deliberate goal of people who run communist
| countries. More succinctly, without material shortages,
| communist-inspired governments rapidly cease to exist.
|
| If the People are not presently experiencing a material
| shortage, then they do not rely on authority figures to go
| about the daily business of feeding and policing themselves.
| Without regular contact between the People and the central
| authority personnel, it becomes impossible for the central
| authority personnel to supervise and grant/revoke permissions
| for them. Supervision and permission were the two components
| absolutely required for the government of the USSR to
| continue to exist--supervision allows for the early
| identification of threats to the government structure, and
| "permission" systems create excuses for the government to
| deploy the violent martial caste against threats to their
| supremacy.
|
| (It is self-evident that people don't like living inside
| systems where they're constantly monitored and supervised;
| millions of people around the world work very hard to leave
| supervision-heavy countries for less-supervised ones. Also,
| children everywhere chafe against school, and prisoners chafe
| against prison.)
|
| So I don't believe a truly centrally-planned, communist
| government will ever generate a useful material surplus
| (food, medicine, tools, etc.). If it did, the People who
| enjoyed the results of the surplus would immediately stop
| participating in the centrally planned processes mandated
| upon them by the planning committees.
|
| Conversely, the first thing any centrally-planned government
| will do is organize itself in such a way that all important
| goods become scarce, so that it can guarantee regular contact
| points with citizens and set up a robust system of permission
| granting and revocation.
| more_corn wrote:
| This was 100% a problem caused by central planning and failure
| to consider second order effects.
|
| But at the core the problem was blindly following the
| suggestion of a leader who is not making evidence based
| decisions. This will always end in tragedy.
|
| I regret to report that such leaders can and do emerge under
| every economic system.
|
| Maybe free markets are less susceptible to them because the
| leaders have less power over people's lives in free markets.
|
| Perhaps the takeaway should Be to limit the power our leaders
| have over us because the world is complex and a central plan
| will never encompass the realities of every individual.
| Fernicia wrote:
| What is strange about that?
| zabzonk wrote:
| who else would you blame it on? communist, centralised states
| are reknown for causing these kinds of problems - look at the
| ussr in the 1920s and 30s.
| fdye wrote:
| So I think its fair to say the USSR, China, Cuba, North Kora
| were a form of communism that had the following
| characteristics. 1. Authoritarian 2. Central planning
| (perhaps the same thing) 3. Slow to change These are all
| valid criticisms based on what we know from history, etc. I
| think there is a bit of nuance here though based on a glance
| of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines and some
| basic history. 1. China did experience some horrible famines,
| particularly the '59-'61. However, they had experienced
| these, ~20years+/- 10 years, since at least the 1800s,
| perhaps 1700. That is well into royal rule prior to the
| revolution. Particularly the 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 (Four
| famines, ~45Mil dead). Just saying, objectively, not sure the
| average peasant was more or less likely to experience a
| famine under the royal rule or communism. 2. Russia and the
| surrounding neighbors that were consumed by the USSR, seem to
| have a similar story. The Tsar's in particular were not very
| good at economics, logistics, or resource management. 3. Post
| WWII cold war meant virtually every communist country was
| isolated and sort of by definition a centralized state. They
| were locked out of the emerging reserve currency (Dollar).
| They could not freely go to market with their goods. As well
| as they were all sort of frenemies of each other (see
| relationship between Korea, China, and USSR for examples).
|
| Look I'm no great lover of communism, I sat through the same
| U.S. history classes in the 80's-90's, saw the wall fall on
| TV, etc. That said I think the one thing no one acknowledges
| is that people don't start revolutions and try out radical
| types of government because their lives are going just swell!
| Shit maybe its to much Civ as a kid, but I think its
| important to be honest about the pluses and minuses of
| government and the specifics of the people, region, and time
| period that these changes occur.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > people don't start revolutions and try out radical types
| of government because their lives are going just swell!
|
| of course they don't, and i deeply sympathise. but what
| they always seem to end up with like genocidal maniacs like
| mao and stalin. both communists. and of course, in the
| west, we had hitler. but after 1945 i would say human life
| has improved in the west - more than i can say for china
| (despite industrialisation) and the "former" ussr.
|
| i should say i am someone of broadly left-wing leanings.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| It wasn't just the communists that were not thinking about
| the consequences, making moronic choices and ruining
| ecosystems.
|
| See also: Frogs and Rabbits in Australia, Deer in Haida
| Gwaii, Mongooses in Hawaii, the list goes on and on...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off
| sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete
| research on what role sparrows played
| ashwagary wrote:
| >So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off
| sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete
| research on what role sparrows played
|
| We can try this framing in another 100 yr drought scenario
| and see what gets blamed.
|
| "So the ideas of capitalism is what caused the Dust Bowl or
| was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on
| what role grass/trees played when creating vast plots of
| dry overplowed land"
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Sounds to me like it was information
| SonicScrub wrote:
| The power and control wielded by centrally planned
| economies allows for wide-scale top-down dictation which
| vastly exceeds that of the democratic-capitalistic states.
| Thus enabling destruction on this scale. It's not about
| specifics of ideology, it's about how much authority is
| concentrated in the hands of the central planners. If
| central planning only works in a world where perfect
| knowledge of the state of the economy is possible, then
| central planning can never work.
|
| Fun side note: I really love The Culture sci-fi series by
| Iain M. Banks, for it's depiction of a truely utopian,
| classless, centrally planned Galactic Empire. As it turns
| out, this is the ideal form of human social organization
| provided that the central planning is done almost
| exclusively by post-singularity benevolent AI ( who are
| essentially gods). This is about the only scenario where
| central planning seems viable.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, authoritarian communist states in practice have a
| very hard time course correcting from courses their
| leaders decided on.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Just want to expand on this comment, because it can be
| easily handwaved away with a "our version will be
| democratic". The level of power afforded to central
| planners is a stabilizing force away from distributed
| power, and towards tyrannical governments. Every
| government's primary objective is to retain power for
| themselves, else how would they achieve their goals?
| Every other objective must be subservient to this,
| because no other objective can be achieved without it.
| This is true be it a state is democratic, monarchic,
| communist, or whatever. Give a governing power 100%
| control of a national economy, and they will use it to
| entrench their own power. If they fail to do so, they
| will lose power to those who will. Benevolence cannot be
| relied upon as a long term stabilizing force.
| zabzonk wrote:
| culture minds are not always so benevolent (though they
| may tend to be towards culture human citizens) - this is
| one of the major threads of the series
| zabzonk wrote:
| one nitwit in a town somewhere decides to kill sparrows -
| stupid, but not too bad
|
| one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill
| them all off across a vast country he rules by terror -
| stupid, and a disaster
| at_a_remove wrote:
| The ideas of communism are that of the command economy,
| total centralization. Someone at the TOP decides all of
| this stuff. This means that if someone at the top (who is
| not to be questioned, see Mao's other wacky hijinx) makes
| any kind of error, well, you don't hear about it until it
| is unavoidably terrible. No early feedback, everyone is
| afraid to give it to you.
|
| In a more decentralized setup, it is bottom-up, and
| suddenly "hey this isn't working" gets propagated. Also, a
| peer is more willing to call you on your bullshit, but if
| you're a dictator, you just get yes-men.
|
| Essentially, the setup was such that anyone less than a
| perfectly informed leader who never made mistakes would
| wreak havoc.
| revelio wrote:
| Killing off sparrows is only one example of
| crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular
| occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order):
|
| - The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad
| campaigns to convince people to start smoking.
|
| - The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting
| (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to
| plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants
| tried to flee they were then banned from leaving.
|
| - In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is
| living in.
|
| - Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who
| mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his
| military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into
| such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying
| now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be
| so weak again.
|
| - The single-minded obsession with steel production.
|
| - In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair
| cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a
| haircut that's not on the list will be punished.
| Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled
| against the families of the criminals.
|
| It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because
| the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning
| markets, central planning) and can therefore only be
| implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks
| sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate
| feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because
| the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| It's communism (or more specifically, Marxism). This sort
| of outcome was predicted by Benjamin Tucker as an
| inevitable consequence of Marxist socialism in 1888, essay:
| "state socialism and anarchism", long before any
| implementation of Marxism came to being
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| This is why I was concerned when I heard Google, of all
| companies, released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out. I'm
| curious what happened with this effort. It's not exactly a vote
| of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The Gates' have a pretty spectacular track record, what do you
| mean?
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Like buying up farmland an using GMOs.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I was more referring to their work with malaria. I suppose
| it's up for debate how much good they have done, but the
| scales weigh petty clearly from where I sit.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy
| trying to do this is Bill Gates
|
| yeah, a super-villain trying to wipe out malaria - what is his
| cunning plan?
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out"
|
| Spoiler alert. We lose fish. All fresh water fish. Not as bad
| as fucking with bees. But a close second.
| goda90 wrote:
| Generally those efforts are targeted at disease carrying
| mosquitoes. There are other species of mosquitoes in the same
| regions and there aren't any animals that only eat one kind of
| mosquito.
| Brybry wrote:
| To add to this, the disease carrying mosquito species like
| aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus are invasive species in
| the Americas.
|
| These mosquitoes do some pollination but given that they're
| invasive it probably wouldn't be a big deal to wipe them out.
|
| Also, invasiveness is true of a lot of pests in North
| America: the American cockroach isn't American, it's from
| Africa. Brown rats, red/fire ants, and wild pigs are also
| imported/invasive.
| hidroto wrote:
| a complication to eradicating a invasive species is when
| that species has replaced a native species ecological
| niche. getting rid of it at that point may cause more
| problems then it solves.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Luckily or unluckily depending on your perspective, there
| is no lack of other species of mosquitoes.
| jabits wrote:
| Not when you're talking about wild pigs...
| pvaldes wrote:
| History runs in circles. Everybody wants to be an hero, so they
| will refuse to see the danger or to understand that ecosystems
| don't grant a second try if you change something and regret it
| later.
|
| Mao died in 1976. Sparrows still remain extinct in most of
| China.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I wonder if any sparrow species unique to China went extinct ?
|
| I did a search but no real info, the searches I found only talked
| about native vs imported. Not species that only exist in China.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I didn't realize sparrows ate insects too. The rule of thumb on
| the farm was "swallows good, sparrows bad". Swallows ate insects
| and sparrows ate grain. Maybe China could have replaced sparrows
| with swallows but that would probably have led to a different
| kind of disaster since importing species has a horrible track
| record.
| yareally wrote:
| Swallows will only eat flying insects and catch them in the
| air. The common house sparrow typically forges on the ground.
| The intersection of the insects both species eat is probably
| close to zero
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| This article has the causality inverted.
|
| The sparrows were just a sideshow to distract from the famines
| cause.
|
| Most famines were caused by the culture of face and the nature of
| the party. The party dictated a plan, and as failing the plan and
| making the great leader loose face, ment the local governments
| loosing face would get them Maos wrath, all the members of the
| party reported success when it came to harvests.
|
| So Mao collected the surplus and sold it to the soviet union, who
| he with his inferiority complex wanted to impress. After that,
| starvation raged, and he knew. They all know, but feign to not
| know, to keep face. Instead, superficial measures are taken.
|
| Like hunting scapegoats, spreading crude conspiracy theories
| inside the country, or hunting harmless sparrows. Busy work to
| detract from the actual cause. And nothing was learned from this,
| cultural change was avoided and now its time to go full circle.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| How does the targetting of the sparrow species for annihilation
| in China compare to the post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in
| the Americas's? Xi does have the ecological health of the
| environment on his policy priority list which is a change from
| previous leadership driven by slavery to economic devop. There
| are documentaries on little birds by the sea. They have their
| place.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > Xi does have the ecological health of the environment on his
| policy priority list
|
| And as a consequence of this policy, how many new coal power
| plants has china opened?
|
| https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-
| two-....
| 8note wrote:
| I think that's the wrong question.
|
| How many fewer coal plants were opened than would have been
| opened without that policy?
| scythe wrote:
| Practically no other event in human history comes close to the
| ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early
| colonial period in the Americas. But because of that, it should
| not be used as a yardstick for anything else. "It's not the
| worst thing ever" is a poor defense of anything.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Practically no other event in human history comes close to
| the ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early
| colonial period in the Americas.
|
| This is a really optimistic point of view
| andrewflnr wrote:
| On a similar note, there's a danger of comparing "the early
| colonial period in the Americas", a 300-400 year period
| containing many distinguishable catastrophes, to anything not
| of equal scale. It's kind of like comparing an apple and a
| whole apple tree.
| scythe wrote:
| A fair complaint, but I didn't put the comparison; the
| poster I responded to did.
| justrealist wrote:
| > post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in the Americas's
|
| It's an open question how much of the Americas were actually
| heavily forested before western disease killed 95% of the
| population.
|
| A lot of what Europeans saw when they explored was basically
| post-apocalyptic wilderness which had sprung up in the 100-200
| years since the vast majority of the population was killed.
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