Are concepts like “invasive species” actually a little outdated? Can the concept of “alien species” actually support xenophobia and/or racism? Now that we live in a global ecological apocalypse, in “the Anthropocene,” do we need to learn to live with or collaborate with certain non-native and invasive species, to mitigate their harms rather than eliminate them? What even counts as “natural” during the Holocene, anyway? Is the coconut sentient? Who created the Great Plains? Should Aotearoa New Zealand be purple? Even if we work with non-native species, does a newer paradigm of ecological restoration provide a colonialist/imperialist absolution that protects plantation monocultures and European-US academics while destroying and subjugating Indigenous foodsheds and lifeways?
In response to my post about how it’s unfortunate that the rugged fjordlands of Scandinavia and the globally-unique landscapes of remote mountainsides in Aotearoa have come to be associated in photographic representation or public/popular consciousness with fields of purple-colored lupines, a non-native plant which, especially in the case of Aotearoa, was introduced as part of colonial/imperial campaigns to spread European agriculture and which choke-out rare and sensitive native species:
This was in response to some headlines I posted, including:
And, yes, in the case of Iceland, non-native lupine can still harmful. Yes, (1) Iceland has not changed much since Pleistocene glaciation and (2) the lupine does enrich the soil in a way that Iceland’s native plants could not do previously, but think about the relatively tall canopies of lupine on the previously lightly-vegetated “barren” or “rocky” landscapes of Iceland: The lupines choke-out the native lichens and mosses.
So I see that there are several posts on this site from within the last couple of weeks (July 2022), which have been circulating among ecology-themed blogs, and which have received a lot of attention, posts which basically begin by saying something like “the more we think about it … maybe we need to begin accepting/working with invasive species rather than aiming for their total elimination.”
And cool, it’s good that this has apparently now become a popular-ish consideration, though there has been a lot written/discussed about this very issue among environmental historians and cultural historians in decolonial/anticolonial and academic circles for at least two decades now.
And generally, I agree. Like with non-native bullfrogs and their firmly-established new distribution in, say, the Mediterranean California biome, where the bullfrogs’ success is linked to the simultaneous success and state enforcement of non-native monoculture plantation crops in the San Joaquin Valley, meaning that “simple” elimination of the bullfrog wouldn’t really be possible as their is simultaneous ecological degradation from agricultural irrigation, associated soil death/loss, etc. In other parts of the Rocky Mountains, I’ve seen single large non-native bullfrogs roll up on mating balls of native boreal toads, and the bullfrogs obliterate the mating ball, eat one of the toads, and literally directly kill the native toads while also preventing their reproduction. Or like with cane toads in Australia. I was on a rural roadway in Northern Territory one day when many cane toads were emerging from the soil, covering the road, and multiple drivers passing by would swerve to hit as many as possible, before making a u-turn to return and kill more toads. But I asked myself at the time “is the violence helping?” Because how many thousands and thousands of cane toads are able to breed at once in a single ephemeral seasonal pool nearby? Killing 100 toads may save a few native snakes from death by consuming the toads, but will the road rage really stop the toad invasion?
Specifically: (1) Indigenous/cultural autonomy, and (2) the existence of species that still always require highly-specific microhabtiat.
Yea, lupine kills Aotearoa’s life. Maybe Aotearoa’s a uniquely serious example? It’s not just a remote and isolated island archipelago adrift at the extreme limits of the planet’s most expansive ocean. Aotearoa is also home to the globally-rare and unique temperate rainforest biome. And islands host essentially “closed systems” where small or localized ecological damage can quickly cascade to destroy life island-wide. And Aotearoa is also home to an incomparable number of unique endemic species found nowhere else. “Ancient” or “primeval” species like moa (now extinct), kakapo, tuatara, etc.
But Iceland’s status as “little-changed since Pleistocene glaciation” doesn’t mean lupine colonization is not-bad.
I’ve addressed this specific question before here, in response to the ask/question: “… i’m working for someone who is part of the ecological landscape alliance and we’ve been having big talks about the concept of “invasive” species vs “native” plants and how the concept is rooted in xenophobia, and also talking about how maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad?? …” This post addresses concepts like assisted migration, invasion biology, and creolization; arguments like how post-glaciation global Holocene change is potentially entirely anthropogenic; Crosby’s “neo-Europe”; and how concepts from authors like Tsing and Haraway have been influential in the disc horse, though potentially dangerously supporting white, European-US academics’ hand-wringing self-absolution.
And I’ve also elaborated, here, more on those same concepts and why we ought not be so quick to dispel with notions of alien, invasive, native species, using Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippopotamus in Colombia as a case study to discuss “justified” killing of invasive species, naturalization, anthropogenic change in the Holocene, potential problems with so-called “re-wilding” restoration projects, as well as the case study of the coconut’s assisted migration. This one contains a longer response to your specific argument/question/proposition.
For an example of how the language of “alien” and “invasive” used in ecology and science communication can support eugenics, racism, xenophobia (in this case, plants and insect pests as threats to industrial plantation monocultures in Hawaii, California, etc. being used to support narratives of Asian invasion/subversion of US interests):
Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka, 2022)
For an example of how the Anthropocene and global ecological apocalypse might require “working with invasive species” and, specifically, learning to avoid exalting notions of “purity” and instead valuing “damaged landscapes” and “impure species” without enacting undue mass killings against introduced species, try this good tale of the preservation of the “junk-bird”:
Hugo Reinert. “Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild.” Cultural Studies Review. 2019.
For a similar example of how the mass killing of non-native or introduced species can be bad, try some of Anna Boswell’s essays. Her writing on stoats is especially well-known/respected, as she criticizes how silly/violent it is for the colonial New Zealand state to have introduced stoats in order to perform mass killings against introduced mammal species, before the state then turned to demonizing the stoat itself:
Anna Boswell. “Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State.” Animal Studies Journal. 2017.
For an example of how we may as well learn to live with some invasive species, since, at this point, there is not a single “untouched” landscape in any remote corner of the planet that has escaped the ecological effects of industrial extraction and its supply chains, creating a web or network of “planetary urbanization”, and therefore notions of alien, invasive, wilderness, etc., all must be interrogated and questioned:
Lindsay Bremner. “The Urban Hyperobject.” Geoarchitecture. 24 August 2015.
Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. “Radical urban political-ecological imaginaries.” Derive. May 2014.
I also made a compilation post of the juiciest excerpts from here, which you might like.
For an example of how local/Indigenous people can simultaneously acknowledge the harms/danger and violent/imperialist origin of an introduced species while still trying to respect the introduced creature (in this case, these Indigenous Marind communities recognize that non-native African oil palm destroys their food forests and supports devastating Indonesian colonialism and capitalist plantation industry, but also have a nuanced respect for the tree):
In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Sophie Chao, 2022)
For an example of how not only a non-native plant can come to be perceived as locally useful and functionally naturalized to the point that it becomes central to regional cultural identity, but also how a non-native plant can support marginalized communities and their pursuit of autonomy. Therefore, alien/invasive/native denominations are complicated. (in this case, ex-slave quilombola and other Afro-diasporic communities of Brazil guarding Blackness from imperial/state recuperation through relationship with non-native dende, African oil palm):
Palm Oil Diaspora (Case Watkins, 2021)
These final considerations – human foodsheds, Indigenous lifeways, cultural autonomy – ought to be discussed right there alongside the “purely scientific/ecological” considerations.
So I’ll repost something I said in the Colombia feral hippo post:
Also regarding degrees of “naturalness” and the Pleistocene […]. So a question that scholars, theorists, ecologists, etc., ask regarding “re-wilding” is: To which moment in history are we trying to turn the clock back to? In the US, for example, are these re-wildling actors trying to rehabilitate landscapes to their conditions before the 19th-century intensification of Indigenous genocide and settlement of “the West”? Or, a return to before English colonies and the deforestation of New England? A return to 1492? Outside of the Americas, as re-wilding campaigns in Europe try to return lynx and European bison, are we returning to a time before Roman state-building and imperial expansion? Or even earlier, a return to landscapes before agriculture in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, to the Pleistocene? […] What is a “natural” environment during the Holocene/Anthropocene, during the past 12,000 years, anyway? The myth of “wilderness” dismisses millennia of Indigenous influence on ecosystems. Even before sedentary agriculture, urban settlement, and state-building in Indus, Yangtze, and Tigris-Euphrates valleys, we know that there were urban constructions along the western coast of the Indian subcontinent (now submerged beneath the sea), and at Gobekli Tepe before the end of the Pleistocene. […] Or, at the very least, these humans helped instigate transition from woodland to grassland inadvertently by harvesting herds of mammals/megafauna. […]
And then, dialogues of historical/social analysis and ecology meet, with controversial concepts of “hybridization”, etc. Some ecologists, especially in recent (2000 until present) disk horse argue that, with so many non-native species (especially plants and invertebrates) now so widespread globally, should we begin to accept that conditions have simply changed so much that people ought to work with non-native species to forge a “new” understanding of what counts as “natural”? (You’ll see this issue discussed in places like Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and other settler-colonial places. But careful: Does this disk horse function as a roundabout way of sneakily implying that humans, too, can “become-natural” to anywhere? So that, if a European colonial power inhabits a “new” place, they also can frame themselves as natural? Would this be a “settler absolution” that works to literally “naturalize” imperial occupation?) And these scholars also ask: How long does a creature have to have lived in a place, in a landscape, before it has been present long enough to be considered “natural”? When you see a European dairy cow grazing on non-native pasture in Aotearoa on land that was temperate rainforest, home to strange endemic flightless birds only decades ago, it is “unnatural”. But maybe when you see a coconut in western Polynesia, it might seem natural. However, the coconut species “swam” there, floating over the seas. It migrated. But has the coconut been around in Polynesia long enough to be considered natural to those islands? Is this also how the yam/sweet potato found its way from Southeast Asia, across the Pacific, to Latin America? Does the fact that coconut migrated on its own, (possibly?) without apparent deliberate human introduction, make a metaphysical/semiotic difference, does it mean that the coconut is more natural because it found its own way rather than through direct human introduction? But even if humans did “unnaturally” introduce a species to a new region, do we consider that species “natural” or “native” species after enough time has passed? What to make of the human-induced spread of apples and other fruits from the Tien Shan slopes, or the human cultivation of tomato in the Andes? If humans propagated an apple variant 8,000 years ago, has enough time passed that the apple variant has become “natural”? Are the Asiatic steppes actually “natural” grasslands if humans, during the Pleistocene, burned woodlands and helped create those grasslands?
And specifically about your proposition that lupines in Iceland pose relatively less danger to ecosystems, so is it really that bad? Here’s an excerpt from the first post I’ve linked at the top:
At the end of the day: Sure, kudzu or English pasture grasses or coconuts or European earthworms or domesticated cattle might be generalist species which can successfully inhabit landscapes across the planet. So whether humans introduce them via agriculture, or whether they “naturally” expand by some accident or by drifting across ocean currents, they might exist in this strange ontological space between “native” and “alien” which confounds human conceptions of what “belongs”? And this is worth considering! This is good to think about! But there are still, and always have been, those “small” landscapes, those isolated pockets, those relicts and remnants in shaded stream corridors, where small populations of endemic species teeter on the verge, with highly-specialized adaptations to highly-specific microhabitats. You’re not going to “assist the migration” of or “accidentally introduce” a cave-obligate salamander from a limestone cavern or a temperate rainforest-dwelling land-slug to a desert biome. But, again, I still think it is good to stop and ask ourselves whether categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in ecology make sense, are outdated, or if they reinforce racism/xenophobia. And, again, I haven’t read enough – I haven’t grappled with these questions enough – to have an opinion which I’m comfortable sharing definitively, so I don’t want to discourage this disk horse too much.
Hope some of this is interesting.
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