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Worth noting a “weed” is just any plant-based life form the man doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Commoners are told a distinction between native and invasive
by jakear 3y ago
Worth noting a “weed” is just any plant-based life form the man doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Commoners are told a distinction between native and invasive life, but this is a facade. It is not uncommon for native species, such as the Western Juniper, to be classified as “weeds” and subject to expensive removal efforts, despite being a fully natural part of the environment.
- ethanbond 3y agoThere are definitely some species that are actually not native to an area and are brought by human activity alone. Granted humans (and all our creations) are also natural, but the challenge is that we’re good at creating extreme change over very short timeframes.
- jakear 3y agoAll true, but who is to say that the impacts of human-accelerated stochastic gradient descent are necessarily evil?
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y agoIsn’t this just an argument of nihilism? If it doesn’t matter because native/weed is an artificial distinction, or because it is by definition insignificant on a geologic timescale, then why get upset at people trying to change or reverse “the gradient” in any way?
- jakear 3y agoI’m not upset at anyone, though people seem upset at me for pointing out the futility. I suppose the resources could be better spent doing something else, though I couldn’t tell you what that’d be.
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y agoAll I’ll say is that while I am not a biologist or an ecologist, I do know several who work on conservation projects and efforts to counteract invasive species. This story shares so many similarities with other cases of an introduced species radically changing the regions ecology and that in and of itself is incredibly alarming to them. Yes, at the end of the day the Earth doesn’t care and life will go on. But trying to maintain some semblance of a minimally invaded ecosystem is valuable to these folks and I greatly respect their efforts.
- rcoveson 3y agoHow to better spend resources than commenting multiple times per hour in defense of the idea that nobody here can prove that an effort to cull an invasive weed will have an impact on the ecosystem in a million years? You could go lie down and listen to music or something (though I warn you, I can't prove that it will have any effect on a geological timescale).
- goatlover 3y agoYes, but so what? We speed up evolution and force more adaptation. It's not good or bad. It just is.
- llamaimperative 3y agoWell it very likely could be bad for us which I care about for a while. And it’s actually anti-Darwinian to even refer to “speeding up evolution.” There is no destination here. Things do not necessarily get better, more interesting, more beautiful, and so on. They just change, and they are already changing in ways that don’t seem desirable. Of course “desirability” itself is subjective as well, in theory. In practice I suspect almost every human would prefer a world that is more biodiverse over one that is less biodiverse, all things being equal. Still a human value, but of course those are all we have when we need to make decisions.
- jakear 3y agoPlease provide a reference for the claim that the introduction of this plant to the area will result in less biodiversity across geo-biological timescales. Without that you’re just spitballing.
- UncleEntity 3y agohttps://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/29/560292442/bats-and-tequila-a-once-boo-tiful-relationship-cursed-by-growing-demands#:~:text=You%20can't%20have%20tequila,bats%20over%20thousands%20of%20years https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/29/560292442/ba.... The plants that the bats rely on in Arizona is already on the protected species list and, coincidentally, in the area discussed in TFA.
- jakear 3y agoOne species in one small study does not biodiversity across geo-biological timescales make.
- BoiledCabbage 3y ago
- seattle_spring 3y agoWhy is that worth noting here? This specific plant is invasive, damaging, and non-native. Quibbling on the definition of a "weed" seems completely non-sequitur.
- jakear 3y agoWhat makes you say it’s damaging? Some arbitrary moral framework whereby “native” species are better than “invasive” ones, most likely. I’m of the opinion that human-accelerated SGD (aka “Evolution”) is a natural phenomenon just like any other.
- emodendroket 3y agoI guess many people would prefer not to live in a world with a dozen species crowding out all of nature's diversity, beyond specific issues caused by this one plant.
- Lutger 3y agoTrue, but as a society we certainly don't act like we care at all about biodiversity. The thing is though, this is not likely what will happen. It will temporarily crowd out existing vegetation, which will create the conditions for new species to arise. By bringing more carbon into the soil, it will increasing fertility and with that, new forms of life can take place and in turn crowd out the pioneering 'weed', increasing rather than diminishing biodiversity. Certainly some species will be lost. This is called succession. But others will take their place. I'm not sure if Arizona will have the climatic conditions to move far beyond a desert, but that is what is happening and what we would be preventing.
- emodendroket 3y agoThat process takes a very long time, much longer than it takes for things that exist today to go extinct
- kbelder 3y ago
- sien 3y agoThe book 'The New Wild : Why Invasive Species Will be Nature's Salvation' is really interesting about this : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22716462 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22716462 To quote a bit of my own review of the book "The New Wild (2016) by Fred Pearce is a fascinating different perspective on introduced species and their role in ecosystems. Fred Pearce is an environmental writer who writes for New Scientist. Pearce puts forward the idea that landscapes that are truly untouched by man are very rare and possibly don’t even exist. He puts forward many, many examples of species that are regarded as native that have been brought in. He also points out that naturally with a changing climate species have been moving forever. The book recounts how a new volcanic island was rapidly colonised by species from elsewhere. He also writes about Ascension Island in the South Atlantic that had hardly any vegetation but that visitors turned into a rich ecosystem. But it is far from an untouched one." Species have been moving around a lot, dynamically, for a long time. The idea that some species are 'invasive' and others are native is just picking a snapshot in time.
- onlypositive 3y ago> that some species are 'invasive' and others are native is just picking a snapshot in time. What's your point? Invasive plants are still invasive. It's not always a problem but if they're getting labelled invasive it's usually because they're having a negative impact on the existing ecosystem or would if left unchecked. Negative is relative to our human needs of the status quo I guess but again I don't really see that as an issue what other frame of reference would we be discussing?
- jakear 3y ago> Invasive plants are still invasive. Name a plant that wasn’t at some point “invasive”. You can’t. We call plants invasive when we see their spread, and native otherwise. But whether a human observed a particular organism spreading matters precisely not at all.
- onlypositive 3y agoYes, we call plants invasive when we see them spreading uncontrollably, that's the word we have decided to use to describe this occurrence. Native plants is a term used to describe plants that were present before humans got involved. It's a human centric way to view the world but I guess it's better than us trying to dick around making everything human agnostic considering we're all human and share a bunch of human context with each other.
- seqizz 3y agoProbably this is also because of evolution, that we'd like to keep things as it is, otherwise we'll be in risky waters. Of course today's "natural weed"s were themselves invasive at some point in the history.
- Lutger 3y agoIndeed. When it is something we do not like and consider 'foreign', we call it invasive. When the same thing is considered native, even if its only here for a couple of hundred years, we call it a pioneer species. Truth is, plants move around the world all the time even without the help of humans, and are relatively quick to adapt. Invasive species exploit a niche in the ecosystem that hasn't been filled yet, and are extremely useful in building up the system. Eventually the system will find a new balance, except when humans keep disturbing it. Sometimes I think that 'invasive weeds threaten native plants' is the ecological equivalent of 'foreigners taking our jobs'. Preservation turning into botanical racism.
- jpgvm 3y agoWhen life gives you junipers, make gin.