Member-only story
ECOLOGY
The Widening Gap between Popular Belief & Science on “Invasive Species”
Don’t believe the hype
This is just a quick reflection I want to share.
As I’ve been mentioning here, my main winter project has been working on a book with Nikki Hill, tentatively entitled, “Don’t Blame the Messenger: A critique of the ‘invasive plant’ narrative.” As part of that effort, I’ve been reading lots of scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals from invasion biology and other fields, and it’s been really eye-opening.
The popular narrative of “invasive plants” is really black and white. These are bad plants. They don’t belong here. They cause harm to native plants. They’re upsetting the balance of nature. They must be eradicated. It’s a scary monster story and a militant call to arms rolled into one.
But the science is far more nuanced. The amount of debate and the lack of consensus within the field is quite striking, actually, and has been growing over time. Invasion biology as a distinct area of study only goes back to the early ’80s and didn’t really take off until the ’90s. Given this short history, it’s possible to get a picture of where it was and where it’s going, and where it’s going is further away from the heroes and villains trope.
As I said, this is just a quick reflection, so I’m not going to provide a bunch of links and citations — that’s what the book is for, after all! — but I want to throw a few things out there that I’ve been reading about lately.
Except for a small number of people in the late ’90s and early 2000s, nobody in the field of invasion biology is saying “native=good and non-native=bad.” That’s just not a thing in the science. The consensus in the field is that only a small number of introduced plants are able to successfully establish themselves in a new setting, and of those only a small number cause “harm.” What constitutes “harm,” though, is a subject of lots of debate, and the most easily demonstrable harm is economic not ecological. Think crop yield decreased by introduced weed, insect or pathogen. Some scientists make the argument that “harm” is not something that scientists should be deciding period, by the way.
