Video: The Sparrows of Mao (1958)

The Great Leap Forward

We are deluged with climate accords and objectives. The world is malleable, the environment too. No matter how serious in intent, many of the resulting measures evoke disbelief and astonishment on my part. Disbelief and astonishment are also the feelings that came over me when I read that in 1958, at the time of the Great Leap Forward, Mao decided to eradicate the sparrow in China. The aim was to combat famine; the birds were eating the grain intended for the starving population. The measure was part of the Four Pests Campaign, which also targeted rats, flies and mosquitoes. Film has survived of large numbers of Chinese people running across the fields together, shouting, banging metal pots and pans to force the sparrows to stay in the air until they literally fall down dead. Their little corpses were collected and handed in. Ultimately more than two billion birds were killed. The result was catastrophic; the country was hit by a huge increase in other damaging pests, including locusts, so the harvest was even worse than before.

Bulbs

That image of the battle of Maoists against sparrows came to mind many years later, when hundreds of millions of citizens worldwide swapped the polluting incandescent bulbs in their lights for low-energy equivalents. The world was saved!