this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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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, forced collectivization (basically, and perhaps ironically, farmers not owning the means of production), 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.
Sounds similar to what we did in Australia.