6 Ways We Ruined The Earth (While Trying To Save It)

The small Pacific island nation of Kiribati (population ~100,000) has a simple economy with two main industries: fishing and coconuts. The problem was that there were too many fishermen (or at least, too many good fishermen), so the government came up with a brilliant plan. In order to reduce overfishing, they would subsidize the coconut pickers. That way, the people would have an incentive to make more money, and the fish population would have a chance to recover.

While the government patted itself on the back for their flawless plan and passed around cigars, a grad student named Sheila Walsh thought to ask, "Hey, did your plan actually work?" Spoiler alert: It didn't.

Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Walsh came back and told them that fishing was up 33 percent, and that the reef's ecosystem was in dire straits as a result. It turns out that the people weren't exactly interested in having enough money to buy whatever leisure items you might possibly need on a gorgeous Pacific island. What they were interested in was having enough spare time to enjoy leisure activities out on their oceanic paradise ... like fishing.

By subsidizing coconuts, the government had accidentally gone with the option that took up less time. Folks could now earn more money in a shorter amount of time, and now all they wanted to do was fish -- which could incidentally be used as a further source of income. Damn you, prosperity, leisure, and industriousness! Damn you to hell!

In any case, the EPA often just lets out an enormous sigh and does the cleanup themselves, which gives businesses even less incentive to do it. Last year, in Silverton, Colorado, workers were attempting to add a water tap to a tailing pond near a local mine, which is a sort of holding tank for all the sludge and waste that a mine generates. By adding that tap, it would be easy to control the drainage in a safe manner and keep it away from things like drinking water resources. The residents of Silverton were able to see this tap in action as the nearby Animas River turned from an ugly blue to a beautiful and healthy opaque orange.

KOB-TV

It turns out that adding the tap damaged the retaining wall on the pond and turned their nice, controlled drainage into an unstoppable flood of toxic chemicals. The initial break released over three million gallons of wastewater, and was still pumping out around 750,000 gallons per day a week later, which is you'll note is about 750,000 gallons per day more than it had been spewing before. A nearby dam released extra water to try to dilute the mess, but even now, residents are reporting that the Animas still has the charming hue of runaway diarrhea.

Ha, no. A clusterfuck of California heat and stagnant water coupled with chemical over-treatment rendered a whole hell of a lot of water undrinkable. The treatment plan had arrived at its chemical numbers based on the assumption that the people of Poway would use more water, and instead the mayor had to order half of a million gallons of water to be dumped away, never to be used by anyone at all. This is what happens when we underestimate folks' willingness to avoid showering.

In one incident in New Zealand, the Conservation Department had contracted a group of hunters to take out some garbage birds which were competing for food with an endangered bird species called the Takahe (of which there are 300 left in the wild). Despite being carefully instructed on how to go about their hunt, they accidentally shot four of the Takahe. Y'know, the ones the Conservation Department was hoping would not get killed.

But that was a situation in which folks were apparently supposed to be doing some killing. Then there's the case of the British environmentalist who was out camping and noticed a bunch of yummy-looking crayfish that resembled the American Signal Crayfish, an invasive species that's been wreaking havoc on the native endangered crayfish. Filled with righteous hunger, the guy ate a few dozen of the crustaceans ... until a passerby informed him that he'd been chowing down on the exact same endangered crayfish he'd been trying to save.

BBC

Okay, so that's some birds and some lobster knockoffs. What about animals everyone cares about? Well, in 2012, a conservation group in South Africa made preparations to dye the horn of an endangered black rhino. This dye doesn't hurt the animal, but renders the horn totally worthless to poachers. That said, it's a bit dangerous to attempt to mess with the horn of a very awake rhino, so it needed to be tranquilized first.

However, despite what movies may have shown you, tranquilizing a large animal is a delicate process which requires precise math. Otherwise, you're probably going to kill the animal. In the case of our black rhino, he went into convulsions and died after being shot. Even worse, the group had invited various members of the media out to see how the procedure was done, so the whole fiasco was thoroughly documented.

Siphiwe Sibeko/Retuers

Macqaurie Island is a small piece of land owned by Australia that's about halfway to Antarctica, and those are pretty much the only pleasant things we can say about it. Back in the day, it was a popular destination for seal hunters, who inadvertently let a whole bunch of rats off of their ships and onto the island. Taking their plans straight out of Tom & Jerry, these seal hunters thought it'd be a great idea to let some cats loose on the island. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to inform the cats of what their job was.

Geoff Copson/Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service

Around the same time as the introduction of the cats, fur trappers also brought rabbits to the island to serve as a food source for potential shipwreck survivors. As a result, the cats now had the luxury of rabbit instead of rat for dinner. Meanwhile, the rabbits continued to breed like, well, rabbits, and the cat population exploded accordingly.

Thinking that by reducing the number of rabbits, the cat population would decrease, Australia decided to introduce an actual plague: myxomatosis, a virulent disease which kills most rabbits within two weeks of contracting it. After they released their bunny WMD on the island, the rabbit population fell from 130,000 to 20,000 in less than 10 years. All this did was cause the cats to look at rabbit as more of a delicacy, and they turned their focus to the island's flightless birds instead, wiping out two native species all on their own.

C. Potter/Australian Department of the Environment

Finally, Australia simply decided to shoot all the cats, and succeeded. Unfortunately, this caused the rabbit population to spike right back up, and away went the island's plants again. This time, it got so bad that the lack of vegetation caused a landslide, which in turn wiped out an entire colony of penguins just for good measure. With a government-endorsed "Fuck this," Australia decided to stop screwing around and killed the rabbits using poisoned bait. By 2014, the island was finally declared rabbit-free, and Australia was boasting of "the most successful pest eradication program ever."

Chris writes for his website and tweets.