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The 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 ht
by sien 3y ago
The 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.