People like to see themselves as masters of nature. It makes them feel better about their precarious position as the passengers of a flying space rock. Sometimes, though, they let their hubris grow out of control until the natural order reasserts itself. Here are a few reminders that we’re a part of nature, not the owners of it.

All of Australia

Australia was first colonized by British settlers in 1788. This was a time when Europeans looked at other species (and their own) as useful tools to enhance their quality of life. In their desolate new desert homes, they would need deer and foxes to hunt. They would bring dogs and horses to assist them. They would bring rodents by accident and cats to deal with them.

Though settlers saw their pets as separate from the environment, the animals disagreed and quickly populated local habitats. Even domestic species like ox and pigs found their way into the wild and became feral.

Non-native species are undesirable in most places, but Australia, an island continent with unique fauna, is especially vulnerable to invaders. As it happened, cats and foxes were incredibly good at killing relatively slow, blundering marsupials, and they quickly wiped out other natives.

Australian colonizers also brought insects, diseases, and a pandora’s box of other ecological ills. Among the most reviled of all was the cane toad.

The cane toad, a big, ugly, toxic amphibian was introduced to wipe out a beetle that liked to eat cane plantations. Instead, it bred out of control, spread across the country, and poisoned people and their pets.

Macquarie Island

There’s a small island south of New Zealand called Macquarie. It isn’t particularly special, but starting in 1810, it became the center of one of history’s best-known wildlife debacles.

Recognizing the island for its indigenous seals and penguins, European hunters landed their ships on its shores. This introduced rats, who gleefully leaped offboard when they sensed impending opportunity and freedom. Then, of course, they bred out of control.

To curtail the island’s new rat population, the Europeans decided to introduce cats. Cats, they understood, were natural enemies of rats. The logic went as follows: the cats would eat the rats, congratulate themselves on a job well done, and go back to lounging about in the sun. Sadly, this is not what happened.

As with other places around Oceania, Macquarie Island’s birds were unaccustomed to being hunted. The introduced felines hunted and killed thousands of hapless seabirds with ruthless efficiency, resulting in the extinction of the Macquarie Island parakeet and the Macquarie Island rail.

Still ignorant of what they had done, settlers also introduced rabbits so they could hunt them at their leisure. These soon became food for feral cats, increasing the feline population to an even more worrisome level. Predictably, the rabbits also bred out of control and overgrazed tenuously maintained grasses, causing erosion.

Over approximately the next century and a half, a cascade of further ill-conceived introductions decimated the native species of Macquarie and exhausted local wildlife officials. Only recently, in the 21st century, the island has at last become free of its invasives.

The Salton Sea

Southern California has always been dry. It has also been one of the United States’ most desirable regions to live in. In the early 20th century, Nevada and California farmers needed to start a major irrigation project to sustain new migrants. They devised a creative solution — they would dig a few canals to allow water from the Colorado River to drain into a lower basin.

At first, this decision seemed like a brilliant move. It irrigated dry land and boosted agricultural productivity. In time, however, the banks of the river canals began to erode, causing millions of additional gallons of water to overflow into surrounding areas. This was a disaster for engineers, who had to choose between drying hundreds of square miles of farmland and subjecting them to flooding.

Instead, they chose a third option — they directed the water to fill a drainage area. Unfortunately, this overfilled a dry lakebed, called the Salton Sea. As you might expect, the Salton Sea was filled with salt. It was so salty, in fact, that all of the local fish died. Only human-imported, salt-tolerant species could survive.

For a while, everyone rejoiced. The “sea” was now inhabited by fish and birds, who created their own ecological balance. Celebrities like Frank Sinatra started to visit or buy up beachside property.

The Salton Sea, though, was never destined to be a stable environment. It gradually shrank, increasing its salinity. Soon, agricultural runoff polluted its already-inhospitable waters. by the 1980s, most imported species had died. By the 1990s, the sea had become a toxic wasteland complete with blowing clouds of toxic dust.

The Hoover Dam

The Hoover Dam is just one dam, but it exemplifies the foolery of trying to control one of nature’s most powerful forces. To start, over 100 workers died just trying to build it. While this might have been considered acceptable in the 1930s, it wouldn’t fly today.

The Hoover Dam sits in a stretch of desert with many vulnerable territories beneath and above it. In different places, the dam dried or overflowed wildlife habitats. While the people who built it didn’t particularly care about this downside, it would come back to bite them.

You can’t simply stop a river from flowing and expect the fish you intend to eat to figure out the rest. The Hoover Dam, as with many other similar projects, devastated aquatic species.

While people like to view their monuments and construction as permanent, they’re anything but. Dam projects generate electricity, but not infinitely. As sediments build up near turbines, dams lose their efficiency and eventually stop working. Was less than 100 years of electricity worth those 100 lives?

Chernobyl

Nuclear energy is among the most terrifying and destructive forces in the universe. Humans, therefore, have decided that it’s the perfect thing to power their amenities.

The Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster was a perfect intersection of design flaws and human error. While a simple act of negligence caused the reactor’s power to dip dangerously low, flaws in the station’s control mechanisms allowed things to spiral out of control.

Those in Chernobyl and neighboring Pripyat who didn’t die in the initial meltdown explosion were the unluckiest of the disaster’s victims. Radioactivity can have terrifying effects on the human body. Though it causes cancer in cases of mild exposure, extreme exposure causes indescribable pain as the body transforms into a blackened husk.

Because the damage radioactivity does to cells happens at the subcellular level, painkillers have a minimal effect on acute radiation victims. Most patients die after two horrible weeks.

After everything, the Soviet Union admitted that a whopping 30 people died in the Disaster. This, of course, neglected all those who suffered in the coming days, weeks, and years. According to the World Health Organization, over 4,000 deaths can be attributed to radioactivity in Pripyat.

Why Do We Keep Doing It?

The Greeks invented the word hubris, but we continue to prove its relevance to the human species. We trust in our technologies, models, simulations, and estimates. Often, this is a mistake. As they say, all models are wrong. Some are useful. Even that last part, though, might be debated.

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Five Times When Controlling Nature Went Terribly Wrong