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The concept of native plants is both highly important and deeply problematic. It is much more convoluted than how it is explained in the article. Once you start
by Lutger 3y ago
The concept of native plants is both highly important and deeply problematic. It is much more convoluted than how it is explained in the article. Once you start digging into it, you find out there isn't actually a sound definition and it is rather arbitrary, maybe emotional even.
Some species who are introduced are, at first, considered exotic and often cause problems at the time of introduction. The successful ones are often called invasive (mostly pioneers in their native habitat). After a while, when attempts at eradication have become futile, we start to tolerate and merely try to control them a bit. This can take a long time. Then, something magical happens and suddenly we begin to consider them native plants. When, due to changing habitats, their numbers dwindle we sometimes start to care for them or even protect them. This happened with the sparrow in the Netherlands for example, which was a real pest when first introduced.
The most commonly cited benefit for native plants (and wildlife) is their co-evolution with other species. This makes them very beneficial to the ecosystem as sometimes hundreds of species rely on them as a source of food. It turns out that this process of co-evolution is happening a lot faster than people generally assume, and a vast array of plants that were brought from and to Europe some 200 to 400 years ago are now completely adapted. Ironically, they sometimes harbor even more relations with wildlife than the plants that have occurred in the same habitat before them, but are still considered non-native and even invasive.
I'd like to think of the concept of 'native' as (at its best) an indirect indicator for 'co-evolved' or 'adapted' species, signifying its harmonious place in the ecosystem. A good yet often flawed rule of thumb in the absence of actual knowledge. However, I can't help but think when people use the word that it is also something very cultural, something people just take for granted because someone once drew a line in the sand (time of the settlers) and after that line every newly introduced species is considered non-native. It is interesting to look more closely at this cultural construct of nativity, as it can hide a palette of more substantial values behind a thin facade of ecological benefits. Something like what people mean when they use the word tradition.
- totetsu 3y agoThis was a big rearrangement i had to make in my thinking when I first moved overseas from an island with highly isolated evolution, where "native plant" was very easy to understand.
- red_trumpet 3y ago> This happened with the sparrow in the Netherlands for example, which was a real pest when first introduced. Do you have a reference for this? When and how were sparrows introduced to the Netherlands? According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrow): > One of about 25 species in the genus Passer, the house sparrow is native to most of Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, and a large part of
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThis is the place I've come to, too. Nature is a boiling tumult of constant change and shoving my categories into it seems increasingly presumptuous. I live on 6 acres of what feels like barely contained chaos. This summer in particular the wet and heat have conspired to cover every surface with a froth of green. In the woods I have at the back it would be hard to say what's native and what's invasive; the fantasy that one could classify anything as either seems to me to come from the mindset that really wants to see the world of flora and fauna as a self-balancing system with some sort of natural equilibrium. It just isn't it's constantly changing. I do 'encourage' things that are native and that I find interesting, but not clear my interventions accomplish much. But what I know is what's here is alive so much more than the cultivated fields and yards around me. And that's my excuse for avoiding my yard chores. Because of climate change this area around the north side of Lake Ontario has become a kind of moving target of what's "really" native; every year it seems like more "southerly" plants become established here. Plants whose "normal" home is US appalachia ... sassafras, tulip trees, pawpaws, vitis aestivalis, all plants that only seemed before to only thrive down in the valley closer to the lake ... they're establishing themselves up here above the escarpment. Are they native because they're from the same continent? Where does the boundary lie? They weren't here before.... For the first 10 years japanese beetles decimated my vineyard every summer; this year is the first year I've noticed the birds have decided that they're an acceptable snack and they're not causing me nearly so many problems. I've heard they've been a bit of a 100 year wave slowly making its way north across the midwest and northeast, causing crazy disruption and then settling down to a periodic annoyance. The vines I grow in my vineyard are hybrids with native north american species; and yet those same native vines growing along the fencelines and edge of the woods don't have problems with the beetles at all. The shelter of the woods probably housing birds and other insects and fungus that make quick work of the beetles. In the end, we're all just "Becoming Native to this Place" whichever that place might be https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/becoming-native-to-this-place/ https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/becoming-native-to-t...