A few words on the occasion of World Environment Day
Professor Dr. Youssef Barzanji / Salahddin University / Erbil / Iraq
June 5th of every year is World Environment Day every year, and we celebrate this day. We have tried and will continue to make everyone environmentally friendly.
Here we want to say a few words about it, which is that the environment is everything around me except me. The environment cannot be limited to water, air, trees, and green spaces. In fact, the environment is all of these and many other things.
Humans, birds, animals, and insects are important components of the environment. They are all complete circles of the environmental chain. If any of these circles encounter problems, the environment will be unbalanced for all other species.
Here I would like to touch upon a historical incident close to our era that took place in China. In the period from 1958 to 1962, during the era of Mao Zedong, China launched a major campaign called the Great Leap, in which four animals were killed because they hindered production in agriculture, and among them were:
First: mosquitoes, because they cause malaria and reduce the number of workers and productivity.
Secondly: flies, because they bother people.
Third: Rats and mice, because they transmitted the plague disease, which was common at that time, which led to a reduction in the number of workers.
Fourth: Sparrow, because scientists estimate that each Sparrow eats 4 kilograms of grains annually. If there were 5 million birds in China, they would eat 20 thousand tons of grains annually.
So they started hunting and killing them all over the country, especially Sparrow. Until the Sparrow disappeared from the country. This led to the increase in the number of insects and worms that birds live on and eat. The insects that birds feed on have increased and appeared as a major disaster. As a result, grain production decreased from 200 million tons in 1958 to 143 million tons in 1960. At the same time, drought reduced production by 30 percent.
China did not have equipment to eliminate these insects, so the step of exterminating Sparrow became one of the main causes of famine in the country, in which about 43 million Chinese died from hunger.
That is why Chinese scientists realized that they had done a bad job of eliminating Sparrow and causing environmental imbalances, so they quickly imported Sparrow from Russia and increased their numbers to restore a healthy environmental balance.
Here we want to write to everyone and say, please, there are no animals and birds in this region and in our country without justification and they have a job, so please do not hunt or kill them, as they were created for the sake of our environment and have specific duties.
reference:
Lynch, Michael. 2008. The People’s Republic of China. London: Hodder Education..
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