https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22796160/invasive-species-climate-change-range-shiftingt’s time to stop demonizing “invasive” species
Climate change is forcing some animals to move. Don’t call them “invasives.”
I too had been criticizing the uniquely Western concept of "invasive species" earlier:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-sustainable-evil/msg7287/#msg7287Continuing:
Ecologists expect climate change to create mass alterations in the habitats of these “range-shifting” or “climate-tracking” species, as they’re sometimes called, which will reshuffle ecosystems in ways that are hard to predict. The migrations are critical to species’ ability to survive hotter temperatures.
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“Invasive species” is a concept so ingrained in American consciousness that it’s taken on a life of its own, coloring the way we judge the health of ecosystems and neatly dividing life on Earth into native and invasive.
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For decades, invasion has been a defining paradigm in environmental policy, determining what gets done with limited conservation budgets. Species deemed invasive have often been killed in gruesome ways. Even though invasion biologists readily point out that many non-native species never become problematic, the invasion concept almost by definition makes scientists skeptical of species moving around.
Examples of those gruesome ways are available in this topic.
Detractors said that merely linking climate-tracking species with invaders taints them by association. Range-shifters ought to be seen “not as invasive species to keep out, but rather as the refugees of climate change that need our assistance,”
This. See also:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/climate-refugees/No one here ever said climate refugees are limited to humans only.
So, most importantly. which civilization was it which came up with the stupid concept of "invasive species"?
The origins of “invasive” species
“Invasive species” might feel like a firmly established scientific category, but invasion biology, which studies the impacts of non-native species, is a relatively young field.
British ecologist Charles Elton drew attention to non-native species in his 1958 book The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants, arguing that there is a place, or niche, for every species on the planet where they’ve evolved to survive. Those that move, he believed, should be removed.
Yep, the same one as usual.
Common starlings, for example, a species of bird native to Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, have become wildly successful as an introduced species in North America. They’re blamed for hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural damage annually in the US, often eating grains in cattle feedlots, says Natalie Hofmeister, a PhD candidate in ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “That’s like a treasure for the starlings,” she says. The USDA Wildlife Services poisoned 790,000 of the birds in fiscal year 2020.
How about ending the breeding of cows for human consumption instead? Then there would have been no problem in the first place!
The invasion model has a nativist bias
Some conceptions of invasive species’ harms are questionable.
For example, invasives can be considered a threat not only by killing or outcompeting native species but also by mating with them. To protect the “genetic integrity” of species, conservationists often go to extraordinary lengths to prevent animals from hybridizing
Sounds familiar.....
Historically, the term has erroneously expanded to the idea of, “‘If you’re not from here, then you are most likely going to be invasive,’” Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, said on a June 2021 episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science-mysteries podcast. Conservation policies have been crafted around the idea that if something is not from “here” — however we define that — “then it is likely to become invasive, and therefore we should repel it even before it causes any actual damage,” as Shah says, which is part of the nativist bent that pervades ecological management.
This sounds familiar too.....
What’s more, the very notion of “invasion” draws on a war metaphor, and media narratives about non-native species are remarkably similar to those describing enemy armies or immigrants. For example, a recent news story in the Guardian about armadillos “besieging” North Carolina described them as “pests” and “freakish.” It also gawked at the animal’s “booming reproduction rate,” an allegation that, not coincidentally, is leveled against human migrants.
I knew it! How many times have we heard rightists calling immigrants "invaders"?
Many scholars have explored how anxieties about humans and nonhumans crossing borders, or going places where they don’t “belong,” map onto one another. “The fear of immigration is never isolated to humans,” writes science studies scholar Banu Subramaniam in The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology. “It includes nonhuman migrants in the form of unwanted germs, insects, plants, and animals.”
It is the same mentality.
One important set of interests isn’t considered in invasive species management at all: those of the “invasives” themselves. Arian Wallach, an ecologist at the University of Technology Sydney who is well known for her criticism of invasion biology, calls invasive species “nothing less and nothing more than a curse word” used to demonize species and exclude them from moral consideration. She first began to question invasion biology after she moved for her PhD to Australia, which has some of the most militant invasive species management programs in the world, aimed at protecting the country’s own unique species.
“I started seeing conservationists blowing up animals with bombs, shooting them from helicopters, poisoning them, spreading diseases through them,” she says. Australia has shot feral goats, camels, deer, pigs, and other animals from the sky (a method also used in the US), and the country kills many small mammals with 1080, a poison that is widely regarded as causing an extremely painful death. Invasion biology, Wallach believes, is “a bad idea that’s had its run.”
Western civilization as a whole is a bad idea that's had its run. However it does not accept this. Therefore we have to kill it.
Her work serves as a proof of concept for “compassionate conservation,” a movement that opposes the mass killing of some animals in an attempt to save others. A core tenet of this framework is to value animals as individuals with their own moral value, rather than just a member of a species.
This is what I have been advocating from the beginning.
In a 2019 study, Wallach and a team of researchers pointed out that non-native species are excluded from world conservation goals. This creates situations where, for example, a species like the hog deer, a small deer native to South Asia, is endangered in its home range but hunted and treated as feral in Australia.
This is the kind of nonsense you end up with when you trust Western civilization to provide the answers.
In Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Chile and Argentina, a particularly dramatic novel ecosystem is taking shape. In 1946, beavers were introduced there in a futile attempt to create a fur industry. Instead, the animals proliferated and munched down the region’s Nothofagus — southern beech — forests, creating dams and ponds. “They are these miraculous world builders,” says Ogden, who wrote an essay imagining the beavers not as invaders, but as a diaspora. (Beavers have also been a boon for ducks and other marine species.) The invasive species paradigm, Ogden adds, is devoid of nuance, history, and politics; she prefers a concept that gives expression to the moral complexity of the beavers’ presence in South America, as well as the fact that they had no choice in being moved there.
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the idea of a diaspora opens up a way of thinking about what we owe the beavers, as opposed to how to expel them.
See also:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/msg9907/#msg9907After 75 years in South America, don’t the animals have a claim to living there? What right do we have to exterminate them?
We should exterminate Western colonialist bloodlines instead. If anything in the world supremely deserves the descriptor "invasive", it is Western civilization!