The Eliminate Sparrows campaign was certainly malicious to sparrows, who had been coexisting with Chinese farmers for millennia. Malice directed at the farmers’ ecosystem neighbors was directly responsible for the campaign’s negative consequences for the human population.
In another sense, though, malice was ambient in the Mao regime; as it is in any regime where disagreement is punished with imprisonment, torture, and death.
I broadly agree on Midgley, for negligence rather than accident. Lead was a known toxin at the time; nobody had reason to believe that introducing massive new amounts of lead vapors to the general public was safe. CFCs are a bit more “accidental”: at the time they were introduced as refrigerants, they were believed to be unusually chemically stable; nobody knew they affected the ozone layer, whose UV-filtering function had only recently been discovered.
Thomas Midgley, Jr (key to the development of both leaded gasoline and CFCs) comes to mind.
Not a person, but the Eliminate Sparrows campaign in China is my go-to example of a policy that was devastating accidentally rather than maliciously.
The Eliminate Sparrows campaign was certainly malicious to sparrows, who had been coexisting with Chinese farmers for millennia. Malice directed at the farmers’ ecosystem neighbors was directly responsible for the campaign’s negative consequences for the human population.
In another sense, though, malice was ambient in the Mao regime; as it is in any regime where disagreement is punished with imprisonment, torture, and death.
I broadly agree on Midgley, for negligence rather than accident. Lead was a known toxin at the time; nobody had reason to believe that introducing massive new amounts of lead vapors to the general public was safe. CFCs are a bit more “accidental”: at the time they were introduced as refrigerants, they were believed to be unusually chemically stable; nobody knew they affected the ozone layer, whose UV-filtering function had only recently been discovered.