Environmental Education (Student Edition)
P. A. Chacko, SJ.
Mao Ze-dong was the founder of the People’s Republic of China. He was also the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. He was born in 1893 and died in 1976.
He led his country’s Communist Revolution. He was the son of a rich farmer. As a political leader, he led a peasant movement.
He encouraged food production to solve food scarcity.
He proposed that, in order to improve cultivation, pests in fields had to be destroyed. Sparrow was one such big menace. Sparrows ate up too much grain, he said.
As part of the Health and Hygiene Campaign, he identified three more pests, namely mosquitoes, rodents and flies.
A law was passed to kill such pests.He led an army of villagers and peasants to destroy these pests. People destroyed the nests of sparrows and killed or drove them away by beating drums. Soon there were no sparrows left. Mao looked happy. People expected good crops.
When the harvest time came there was not much grain to collect. The reason was that locusts had destroyed the harvest. Soon famine followed. That was the great famine of 1959 to 1961. As per the Chinese Government’s official records, 45 million people died of starvation. But, according to other sources, it could have been much more.
Why did people die of starvation? The main reason was that, when the sparrows were there, they used to eat up the locusts. Since the sparrows had disappered, the locusts had a good feast. Their invasion had created a havoc.
Then Mao realized his mistake. In order to repair the mistake, the Chinese government imported 250,000 sparrows from Russia.
Sparrows, like other birds, are one of the agents to keep ecological balance in nature. Birds eat up pests that harm plants, trees, vegetation, etc. Their droppings are good manure. They clean our surroundings by eating up dead creatures. They entertain us with music. They add beauty to nature with their colourful body and feathers.
If we are friendly with them, they become our friends. They can even learn to speak our language.
People who do not understand the great usefulness of birds kill them. Some village children go about with slings to kill birds.
Those who kill birds are enemies of nature and environment.
Remember birds are our friends and benefactors.