If I became governor of Hell I would reserve a special room for Eugene Schieffelin and his minions in the North American Acclimatization Society, the idiots who thought it would be nice for all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works to be represented in America. In the 1890’s he released around 60 starlings into Central Park. Because of one single line in Henry IV, an estimated 200 million of the aggressive little bastards currently occupy North America, wreaking havoc on native bird populations.
Why such antipathy for these morons? Why not put in Etienne Trouvelot (who introduced Gypsy Moths) or whoever shipped the wood that contained the fungus that annihilated the American Chestnut? Because Schiefflin and his cronies went out of their way to perpetrate their crime, and for a silly reason.
Humans have been bringing pests from one land to another since they first commenced to roam, and many native species and a few ecosystems have paid the price. Many are completely unintentional, from fire ants to zebra mussels. Some seemed like a good idea at the time, like kudzu or cogon grass. But Schieffelin’s crowd were whimsically Anglophilic.
Dreamers are fine. But sometimes their dreams can become nightmares.
Towards the Moon or To the Sun 