https://sammatey.substack.com/p/review-inheritors-of-the-earth-by
'Since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated by environmental questions;
this newsletter is about the relationship between humanity and its biosphere,
after all. One of the sub-fields of environmental science that never made quite
as much sense to me was “invasive species biology,” the idea that humans’ rapid
introduction of many species to new continents is always — or at least mostly
— a bad thing, with detrimental effects on the local ecosystem. Despite
growing counterevidence, this paradigm is still pretty commonly accepted in the
wildlife conservation field at the moment; a new United Nations report was just
published excoriating invasive species, and the United States government
continues to fund large anti-invasive species programs.
At first, the only real counterweight I had was my own anecdotal experience. On
my way to class as a teenager in Maine, I’d routinely pass Japanese honeysuckle
bushes in flower, with a wide range of native bumblebee species and other
pollinators supping at the feast. Later, as a volunteer research assistant in
the Vatovavy region of Madagascar, I learned that the critically endangered
greater bamboo lemur had grown to rely on the invasive soapbush (
Clidemia
hirta) as a source of “weaning food” berries to help their young transition
from milk to bamboo. I also noted that “invasive” eucalyptus trees from
Australia were prized by the local people as a source of throat-soothing
medicines, and seemed to be doing no harm to the local ecosystem as one of many
tree species in the forest.
The book that really crystallized my thinking on this was
Inheritors of the
Earth: How Nature is Thriving in the Age of Extinction, by Professor Chris D.
Thomas, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the
University of York. It came out in 2017 to a smattering of positive,
surprised-seeming reviews, but in my view didn’t make near as much of an impact
as it should have. This book really deserved to be a
Silent Spring-level
shift in the zeitgeist!
Reading
Inheritors of the Earth gave me a firm evidentiary background for a
controversial new paradigm that has become one of this newsletter's
long-standing talking points: the inadequacy and outdatedness of the idea that
species in a given area are either "native" or "invasive."
The idea of
“invasive species,” or “native species” for that matter, is a human-created
artificial dichotomy which makes no sense when describing the ecological
reality of Earth in the Anthropocene. Today, "native" species around the globe
are moving poleward or up mountains in the face of rising temperatures. And
some "invasive" species are in fact critically endangered in their homeland and
should be protected where they've managed to find new habitat Even if not
actively good,
the vast majority of "invasive" species are, contary to popular
belief, harmless, with the case against them often based less on science than
on reflexive nativism, a weirdly ideological “blood and soil ecology,” and an
unrealistic idea of attaining ecological "purity."
I’ve been thinking and writing about this for years, and this review has arisen
because I’ve finally had the time to put it all together.'
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/goodnews-aids-lgbtq-south-korea-canada-marine-protection/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
