Comment by shadowgovt
4 days ago
It is an unfortunate reality of our existence that sometimes Chesterton actually did build that fence for a good reason, a good reason that's still here.
(One of my favorite TED talks was about a failed experiment in introducing traditional Western agriculture to a people in Zambia. It turns out when you concentrate too much food in one place, the hippos come and eat it all and people can't actually out-fight hippos in large numbers. In hindsight, the people running the program should have asked how likely it was that folks in a region that had exposure to other people's agriculture for thousands of years, hadn't ever, you know... tried it. https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...)
You sound like you'd like the book Seeing like a State.
Why didnt they kill the hippos like we killed the buffalo?
Hippos are more dangerous than emus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
My understanding of the emu war is that they werent dangerous so much as quick to multiply. The army couldnt whack the moles fast enough. Hippos dont strike me as animals that can go underground when threatened
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Shoot the hippos to death for even more food. If it doesn't seem to work it's just a matter of having more and bigger guns.
TEDx