The "Four Pests Campaign" in China, an attempt to boost agricultural output by eradicating sparrows, led to an ecological collapse and a devastating famine due to the birds' crucial role in controlling insect populations.
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What if one animal had all the power
to protect millions of lives?
And what if that animal
was one of the most common
birds in the country?
That sort of thing happens
more than you think.
But sometimes you don't realize that
until they're gone.
China found this out the hard way.
When they went to battle
with the Eurasian sparrow.
And by winning the battles,
they lost the war.
This is China vs Sparrows.
Hi, I'm DDanielle Dufault
and you're watching Animalogic.
Today we're talking about
one of the most devastating cases
where people tried to
ecoengineer ecosystems
for their advantage
and failed
more than failed, really.
They caused an environmental collapse
that killed millions of people.
The year was 1958.
The Chinese government
under Mao Zedong
launched the Great Leap Forward,
a massive campaign
aimed at transforming the country
from an agrarian society
into an industrial superpower.
The idea was to boost steel and food
production beyond
what the West could do.
It was a noble goal,
but it had one gigantic problem.
It included a nationwide sparrow cull.
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If you're wondering how the heck
the death of sparrows
would help them industrialize,
you're not alone.
After all, sparrows
are some of the most common
birds across North America
and Western Europe,
so surely they're not the problem.
The argument was that sparrows,
specifically
the Eurasian tree sparrow,
ate too much grain
and decimated their farms.
These little birds are close
relatives of the house sparrow.
the adorablypudgy bird
you might see
around your neighborhood,
but this tree sparrow
is even tinier than the bird balls
that have taken over
almost every city in the world.
A house sparrow
is around 30g,
or about the weight
of an ounce of water.
The tree sparrow weighs
just 20g,
which means a cup of tea weighs
the same as 12 tree sparrows combined.
You can tell them
apart by a couple of telltale signs.
Tree sparrows
have a black patch in their cheek.
Well, house sparrows have solid
gray cheeks.
A house sparrow
also has a gray cap,
and the tree sparrow
has a chocolate cap.
They can eat a wide
variety of food.
They eat a lot of bugs,
especially when they're breeding
to feed the chicks,
but they also eat
a lot of grain.
Which leads us back
to the main story.
Because of their grain
consumption, the Chinese government
bunched them up with rats,
flies, and mosquitoes as pests
to be eliminated in a campaign
called
the Four Pests Campaign.
You'd think that
they’d give it a catchier name.
So was their argument legit?
Do sparrows really eat
that much?
Let's do the math.
According to the Chinese government,
each sparrow eat approximately
2 kilograms of grain annually,
multiplied by millions of birds.
Officials believed this meant
a loss of thousands of tons of grains.
They could feed many hungry mouths.
To a degree,
this is plausible.
There are billions of sparrows
in China, and their total combined
grain consumption is massive.
But as we mentioned earlier,
their diets are much more varied
than what they thought,
especially in farmland
where there's plenty of bugs
full of juicy proteins,
and a lot of those bugs they eat
are even more voracious
crop eaters than sparrows.
We're talking
locusts, grasshoppers,
caterpillars, and beetles.
A single tree sparrow can eat over
100 insects a day.
When you add up all the grain sparrows
saved by controlling insects,
their grain consumption
is actually a net positive.
Or in other words,
if you have sparrows around,
you produce
more food than if you don't.
Unfortunately,
they didn't know that yet.
China declared war
on sparrows.
This campaign
against sparrows mobilized
nearly the entire population.
Schools, factories,
neighborhoods, and military
units were all enlisted
to fight the misunderstood avian foe.
The effort was
promoted through propaganda posters,
public rallies,
and newspaper stories
portraying the sparrow
as an enemy of the people.
The tactics were widespread
and brutal.
People climbed trees
to destroy sparrow nests,
smashed eggs,
and killed chicks.
Children were assigned
to guard fields,
and competitions were held to see
which groups could kill the most.
Birds.
One of the most famously
cruel strategies
was the noise campaign.
Citizens gathered in open areas,
banging pots,
pans, drums and gongs.
This created a wall of noise
to keep sparrows in flight
by making them too scared to land.
The birds would eventually collapse
from exhaustion
and fall to their deaths.
These noise assaults
lasted hours,
often involving thousands of participants
at a time.
We spoke with Professor Judith Shapiro,
an expert in China's
environmental policies
and one of the leading experts
on China's war on sparrows.
What was fascinating to me about that
campaign was the way,
everybody of a certain
age was involved in it.
When I was writing a book called
Mao's War Against Nature,
I simply, for that
piece of the book,
are simply able to find anybody
who is aged, say, 60 and over,
and ask them
if they participated in that campaign.
And they all had stories and memories
and those stories and memories were,
I would say,
in some ways a bit joyful,
but also a little wistful,
because the little kids
were taken off school
and the factories were closed,
and everybody went out together
and banged on pots and pans
and made great big noises.
The sparrows were not able to roost,
and then they would fall and die,
or the little kids were given, like
the equivalent of a penny
for every dead sparrow
that they brought in.
And you could see trucks
driving away full of sparrows.
So generally there was
this feeling of almost like a holiday,
to get rid of the sparrows.
But then occasionally
you met somebody saying, I don't know.
There's actually a famous little video clip
of the woman that she says,
I don't know what the sparrow did
to make Chairman Mao so pissed off,
she says, and she seems a little sad.
This happened all over the country,
and the results were catastrophic.
According to official estimates,
up to 1 billion
sparrows were killed
during the campaign.
In some regions,
the species was pushed
to the brink of extinction,
and in just a few months,
local sparrow populations
collapsed across China.
At the time,
the extermination was celebrated
as a major victory.
Piles of dead
sparrows were displayed
in public squares,
and individuals were rewarded
for their participation.
It was an ecological tragedy
that would soon turn
into a human tragedy.
Farmers quickly
found out about the super important
role sparrows played
in farmland ecosystems
without one of their
main predators around,
the crop eating insect populations,
especially locusts, exploded.
Then they went to town on the farms
and devastated them.
Locust swarms in particular,
grew to devastating sizes,
stripping entire fields
of rice, wheat, and millet
within hours.
Birds of prey
that fed on sparrows declined too.
It was a full on
environmental collapse.
The timing couldn't have been worse.
This happened at a time
when other failed government
policies had led to food shortages.
Ecological and political factors
combined
to create the Great Chinese Famine,
one of the greatest man
made disasters in history.
Tens of millions of people
died.
Some studies show that in areas
where sparrows were abundant
before the campaign
suffered the steepest declines
in food production.
Rice production
went down by 3% and wheat yields
shrunk by 1.5%.
This might not seem like a lot,
but since there were already massive
food production issues,
it certainly worsened the famine.
But these kinds of grand
events rarely have just one cause.
Ecosystems, as well as human politics,
are very complex.
To make the connection
between the sparrow killing campaign
and 50 million unnecessary deaths,
I think that's,
an oversimplification
is that they were still sending
large amounts of grain
to their friends
in Africa and the third world.
You know, global
communist, solidarity.
I think that kind of structural policy
is a huge factor.
Natural disasters also play
some kind of role.
By 1960, the government
quietly removed sparrows
from the four pests list,
replacing them with bedbugs
as a new target.
And having learned
about the great importance of sparrows,
China even imported
sparrows from the Soviet Union
to help restore
ecological balance and control
insect populations.
The famine was not only a famine,
a human famine,
it was also an ecosystem collapse
because once
there was no food,
people were desperately
eating anything.
So the people that I knew very,
very well remembered
that they used
to pull bark off the trees
to try to get some nutrition there.
We should really think
about this famine
as not only a human catastrophe,
but also an ecosystem catastrophe.
The war on sparrows
wasn't the only time
ideological policies
without consideration
for the environment has led
to human catastrophe.
In the Soviet Union,
the virgin lands campaign
tried to expand
agricultural production
by plowing vast areas
of grassland in Kazakhstan,
Siberia and the Volga region.
It seemed like a good idea at first,
but the project soon backfired.
The destruction of native vegetation
exposed the soil to wind erosion.
This led to enormous dust storms
similar to those
in the American Dust Bowl.
The fertility of the soil
declined and harvests collapsed,
leaving the USSR
with chronic grain shortages.
Today, farmers
in Asia and North America
are attacking pikas and prairie dogs,
respectively.
Prairie dogs are accused
of eating the cows grass
and building burrows
that might injure the cows.
Their numbers are shrinking,
and this negatively affects
populations of burrowing owls
and ferrets
that depend on their burrows.
In parts of China,
the charming inspiration
for Pikachu is unfairly
considered a modern pest.
There's this wonderful little rodent
in the highlands of Tibet,
in the Himalayas called a pika.
It's a completely adorable.
The Chinese are still pouring
rodenticide into all of their burrows,
because they think
that the cattle will break their legs
if they step in the burrows.
But actually,
the scientists who study
these guys have shown that the burrows
create a sponge like sort of effect
on the grasslands,
and it's actually really beneficial
for a water retention,
which is very much needed,
because that's where the headwaters
of the major rivers of China,
India, Nepal all lie.
So this is another example.
You know,
we haven't learned our lessons,
on these things.
So please don't mess
with the soil and protect the species
that keep our ecosystem in balance.
And don't buy into
oversimplified narratives
where a single species is
labeled as an enemy.
Complex problems
rarely have single species,
villains, or quick fixes.
They demand long
term solutions.
China's war on sparrows
lives on as a cautionary tale.
Bold action without science
and foresight risks sowing
the seeds of its own failure.
So what should we talk about next?
Please let me know in the comments
and don't forget to subscribe
for new episodes every week.
Thanks for watching.
See ya and take care.
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