The recent article in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section on invasive species by “reporter” Leon Neyfakh is a polemic in support of a tiny minority of biologists masquerading as journalism. Let’s present a synopsis of this article for those who missed it.
The theme of the article is stated in this paragraph:
The reasons to fight invasive species may be economic, or conservationist, or just practical, but underneath all these efforts is a potent and galvanizing idea: that if we work hard enough to keep foreign species from infiltrating habitats where they might do harm, we can help nature heal from the damage we humans have done to it as a civilization.
Not a bad start. Invasive species cost the US about $34 billion a year in control costs, and previous blogs have shown that invasive species have caused extinctions of native species on islands like Hawaii and New Zealand. However, the author’s agenda begins to appear when he speaks of the “potent and galvanizing idea” that we can heal the damage “we humans have done to it as a civilization.” Invasive species control, he will argue is not good science, but something driven by an anti-humanist ideology. The author then introduces the ideas of Mark Davis who he seems to believe has a “don’t worry, be happy attitude” about introduced species. Not to spoil the story, but the bias of the article’s author is clear from the concluding paragraph:
There is something undeniably comforting, even self-forgiving, about abandoning the idea that human beings are separate from nature - accepting that we are part of an ecosystem, too, and that we belong. If you went with the mainstream ecologists, you’d have no choice but to believe that human beings are the worst invasive species of all. Stand with Davis, Pollan, and the rest of the anti-nativists, on the other hand, and suddenly it’s not a given that we’ve even done anything wrong at all.
Preposterous! How does the author reach this totally illogical conclusion?
He starts with Mark Davis’ article in Science that charges “that the movement to protect ecosystems from non-native species stems from a ‘biological bias’ against arbitrarily defined outsiders.” The author claims that Davis believes invasive species control is an “impossible quest to restore the world to some imaginary, pristine state.” The author tells us that “the arrival of a new plant…can actually help, rather than hurt, an ecosystem,” and “what seems non-native to one generation might be thought of as a local treasure by the next.” He accurately states Davis’ conclusion when he declares we should “assess species based on what they do rather than where they are from.”
He quotes Davis as saying:
“Newcomers are viewed as a threat because the world that you remember is being displaced by this new world. I think that’s a perfectly normal and understandable human reaction, but as scientists we need to be careful that those ideas don’t shape and frame our scientific research.”
Davis has been accused by more mainstream scientists of constructing a straw man argument to build a reputation as a contrarian. Davis assumes an ideological underpinning for his opponents that simple doesn’t exist and discounts the evidence that non-nativeness is one indicator of potential invasiveness. Even Mr. Neyfakh tells us Davis and his critics are so far apart “most ecologists accept that only a fraction of non-native species are harmful,” and Davis and his followers, “when pressed, will admit that unequivocally destructive species like the Asian longhorned beetle should be reined in.” Mr. Neyfakh tells us that the debate between the two sides boils down to “how we justify interventions.” Davis generally ignores research that aims to predict invasiveness and suggests a wait-and-see attitude that would make removal of a truly dangerous species more difficult.
As we noted yesterday of the 140 or so non-native plants at Sheep Pasture slightly less than 30 have been declared invasive. No biologist would start a program to eradicate plantain or chicory or dandelions and yes, indeed the colonists planting of timothy grass probably benefited our environment more than it damaged native grass species. Still because these introductions happened so long ago, it is hard to assess what damage these plants might have done to the local ecosystem. The Native Americans who named plantain “white man’s footprint” may have seen the damage we missed. It’s easier to assess the unintentional damage done by the 19th century introductions of plantsmen like Olmsted. While oriental azaleas can naturalize in the environment, they don’t take off, run away, and push out locals like the equally foreign Japanese Honeysuckle.
The Globe article leaves Mark Davis and turns to an anthropologist who became a naturalized citizen and wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times comparing invasive species control to the anti-immigration movement. The Globe article then asks “how do we decide what in the world is “natural” and what is the result of artificial forces? Why do some species get to stay, while others get pulled out by the roots?” These are bogus questions. The issue is not “natural” versus “unnatural,” it’s damaging versus harmless.
Mr. Neyfakh then gives us a bogus history lesson with this paragraph:
Though botantists first started talking about the idea of nativeness back in the 1830s, for most of history people didn’t worry much about the risks of species moving from one place to another. The 1870s even saw the formation of the American Acclimatization Society, a group of wealthy hobbyists and animal-lovers who wanted to populate North America with species of European animals and plants they thought “useful or interesting.” The chairman of the AAS, Eugene Schieffelin, hatched a scheme to bring every species of bird ever mentioned in a Shakespeare play into America.
What the author doesn’t tell us is that Mr. Schieffelin’s scheme led to the introduction of the starling to America. According to Wikipedia:
Starlings are among the worst nuisance species in North America. The birds travel in enormous flocks; pose danger to air travel; disrupt farms; displace native birds; and roost on city blocks. Corrosive droppings on structures cause hundreds of millions of dollars of yearly damage.
And what’s another introduction from these careless happy days of Mr. Neyfakh? The gypsy moth. I have statistics on how that bug has changed the environment for all animals at Sheep Pasture.
Moving further from science and into ideology, the Globe author than brings in fellow journalist Michael Pollan who likened “natural gardening,” which focuses on growing and eating natives species, as “antihumanist” and “xenophobic.” Mr. Nevfakh even brings up that Pollan’s original writing linked the genesis of natural gardening to the Nazi despite the fact that Pollan has repudiated that statement. Now having studied Native American plant foods before their “invention” of agriculture, I’ll tell you that you’d miss almost all your favorite foods. Even corn, squash, and beans the staples of Wampanoag agriculture were not native to New England. While natural gardening may have the same shaky philosophical basis as veganism, it has nothing at all to do with controlling invasive species. Mr. Nevfakh seems willing to drag in anything to support his unscientific views.
The abstract for Davis’ Science article sums it all up in one sentence: “Conservationists should assess organisms on environmental impact rather than on whether they are natives.” Looking at the Davis critics they push the straw man argument that he has greatly overstated what most biologists believe in order to get attention for his views. The critics also argue that non-nativeness is a good, but not the sole indicator for determining invasiveness, and that Davis’ approach would wait too long to determine if a species was potentially harmful. It’s pretty clear that Davis, for the sake of making his argument has failed to mention the extensive research that helps predict just which species could potentially be invasive.
The do-nothing approach that is the layperson’s takeaway from the Davis article fits nicely into the cost cutting agenda of today’s conservatives, but it clearly will hurt efforts to promote biodiversity. At Sheep Pasture efforts to check invasive species are aimed at balancing a number of interests. As experts from the New England Wildflower Society have told us, we could expend all our energies removing invasives for a decade and turn around and start over again. We control invasives for specific purposes. Japanese knotweed is fought hard because it is contained in only one part of the property so far. Buckthorn impacts one of the few rare species at Sheep Pasture and affects our Rhododendron walk and efforts to restore a riparian buffer along the Queset so it to gets hit hard. Bittersweet is a major problem choking trees near the community garden, but the difficulty in removing it makes it less of a target than other species. Burning bush gets cut back periodically to allow other edge shrubs a chance, and because it is easier to contain. Swallowwort is cut wherever it appears because of its harmful effects on plants and butterflies and its aggressiveness, but honeysuckles and barberries are rarely cut because their potentially bad effects don’t show up often at Sheep Pasture. In fact, those plants are even protected in some areas as legacies of Olmsted’s original plantings. Finally, I have no trouble attacking poison ivy wherever it appears despite being a native. Professor Davis would probably approve of this approach, but so would most other experts as well. Immigrant status is only one factor in determining whether a species will become invasive. That is a scientific fact not a sinister ideological choice.
Let’s end with a test. Let’s say I find Californians total obnoxious-too laid back and too prone to say “dude.” Anything associated with California is totally icky. I shake my head whenever I see a surfboard. So my neighbor, the open minded one, goes to California and brings back a redwood. Is my xenophobic fear of California going to cause me to rush over with a chainsaw and eliminate an invasive? Probably not because I know that redwoods are slow growers, that the climate around here is not to their liking, and that there are bugs that would be only too happy to munch on them. Their alien dude status is only one indicator of potential problems not borne out by all the others. The redwood is as unlikely to become invasive as a domestic carrot. Let the neighbor bring back a cutting of poison oak (I really should have been nicer to him) and I’ll be over with my can of round-up. Why? Not because the poison oak is an alien, but because it is closely related to a native species that already has the characteristics of an invasive. Potentially lacking whatever biological control keeping poison ivy from taking over the world, poison oak could spread like wildfire here. Whether I like Californians or not has nothing to do with the issue. The Globe article tries to turn a hard science issue into a social science one and fails.
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