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Fri Apr 16 06:00:02 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten to six. Mostly cloudy in the morning then becoming partly cloudy. Highs in the mid 50s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Oh, I woke up thinking today was Thursday. Surprise Friday! Work ---------------------------------------- - investigate LRO, Yieldstar A bit. - Jamie asks me to order another laptop for Village Squire (maybe a new person by beginning of May) Done. - order printer for HS Done. - send work log to Jamie Twenty-minute walk at lunch. Overcast and cool. Home ---------------------------------------- - grocery delivery 9 AM – 11 AM Done. https://longreads.com/2021/03/23/nation-of-plants-excerpt-stefano-mancuso/ > There is a famous story along these lines told for the first time by the German biologists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. As the story goes, the fortunes of England would seem to depend on cats. By nourishing themselves on mice, cats increase the chances of survival of bumblebees, which, in turn, pollinate shamrocks, which then nourish the beef cows that provide the meat to nourish British sailors, thus permitting the British navy—which, as we all know, is the mainstay of the empire—to develop all of its power. T. H. Huxley, expanding on the joke, added that the true force of the empire was not cats but the perseverant love of English spinsters for cats, which kept the cat population so high.<Paste> > In 1958, Mao was rightly convinced that some of the scourges that had plagued the Chinese for centuries had to be eradicated immediately and in a radical fashion. Keep in mind that when the Communists took power in the autumn of 1949, they found themselves governing a nation gravely distressed by a soaring incidence of infectious diseases: plague, cholera, measles, tuberculosis, polio, and malaria were endemic in most of the country. Cholera epidemics were very frequent, and the infant mortality rate ran as high as 30 percent. > […] the diffusion of carriers that spread disease had to be curtailed: mosquitoes, responsible for malaria; rats, spreaders of plague; and, finally, flies had to be exterminated. These three scourges from which China had to be liberated were soon joined by a fourth: sparrows, which by eating fruit and rice cultivated laboriously in the fields were one of the most terrible enemies of the people. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow ate ten pounds of grain per year. So for every million sparrows killed, food for 60,000 people would be saved. > This information was the basis for the “Four Pests Campaign,” and sparrows were public enemy number one. > I was awakened early in the morning by the sound of a woman screaming. Rushing over to the window, I saw a young woman running back and forth on the roof of a nearby building, frenetically shaking a bamboo pole with a large sheet tied to it. Suddenly, the woman stopped yelling, apparently to catch her breath, but an instant later, down at the end of the street, a drum started beating, and the woman went back to her blood-curdling screams and the mad shaking of her peculiar banner. This went on for several minutes. Then the drums stopped beating and the woman fell silent. I then realized that, on all the upper floors of my hotel, women dressed in white were waving sheets and towels that were meant to prevent sparrows from landing on the building. This was the opening of the Great Sparrow campaign. All day long I heard drums, gunshots, and screams and saw fluttering sheets, but never at any time did I see a single sparrow. I cannot say whether the poor birds had perceived the mortal danger and flown off in advance to safer terrain, or if there had never been any sparrows in that place. But the battle went on without abatement until noon, with the entire staff of the hotel mobilized and participating: porters, front office managers, interpreters, chambermaids and all the rest. > In 1959, Mao, realizing his mistake, replaced the sparrows as a target pest with beetles, but the damage had already been done. The almost total lack in China not only of sparrows (which had to be reintroduced from the USSR) but of practically all other birds led to an immeasurable increase in the insect population. The number of locusts began to increase exponentially, and immense swarms of insects making their way through the fields of China destroyed most of the crops. From 1959 to 1961, a series of ill-starred events partially related to natural disasters and partly caused by the mistaken reforms of the Great Leap Forward (the idea to exterminate the sparrows being one of the worst), led to three years of famine so harsh that it caused the deaths of an estimated 20 to 40 million people. Servings: grains 3/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 3/2, meat 3/3, nuts 0/0.5 Breakfast: egg with corn chips and tomatoes Lunch: banana, two hot dogs, coffee, cucumber Dinner:

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