Invaders are taking over our land!

In a piece titled “Nature Has No ‘Balance’ for Us to Keep,” Matt Ridley touches on one of my pet peeves — the irrational human penchant for waging war against the “unnatural”:

In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine wilderness is to manage it intensively. Left unmanaged, a natural habitat will become dominated by certain species, often invasive aliens introduced by human beings. “A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem,” she writes. “The ecosystems that look the most pristine are perhaps the least likely to be truly wild.”

In the Netherlands, for example, cattle are being used to re-create a simulacrum of a Pleistocene woodland, because their aurochs ancestors would have been vital in keeping forest patchy. To keep African national parks from deforestation, elephant control is sometimes needed. To let aspen, willow and beaver return to Yellowstone, it was necessary to reintroduce the wolf, which reduced elk numbers. To preserve Mojave Desert tortoises, it is essential to control native ravens, whose numbers have been boosted by distant landfill sites.

Here in Ann Arbor, I have lost count of the number of fires “controlled burns” I have seen. These are deliberately set by legal arsonists empowered by university degrees which serve as credentials to treat “the environment” as their own personal fiefdom. They have put themselves and their fellow environmentalists and ecologists in charge of all nature, and regard the taxpayers who are forced to pay their salaries the way the Sheriff of Nottingham would regard poachers. Not only do they burn fields and forests, they poison streams (to kill the “unnatural” invaders, natch), and the pliant citizenry (probably because they are too busy working for a living, and lack credentials) rarely say a word in protest. Only occasionally are their antics deemed worthy of reporting, as in the case of the plan to shoot barred owls because their range is said to be expanding. When M. Simon wrote a post about this (“Killing Off The Successful – A Story To Make You Owl“), I got “unnaturally” carried away and left a comment:

It is worse than you think. The Barred Owl and the Spotted Owl can interbreed! And the Barred Owl is expanding its range WESTWARD!

I suspect an unacknowledged psychological subtext here. The Barred Owl is a surrogate for white expansionism and Manifest Destiny, while the Spotted Owl is the Indian. By shooting the Barred Owl, the government is symbolically atoning for the past…

M. Simon is a bad influence on me. However, I think these nutcase environmentalists need ridicule. Badly. I see it as possibly the first step towards refusing to pay them any more tax dollars.

Money is what this is all about, and I am surprised more people can’t get past the purported concern over “invasive species” and see it for what it is. Since when has nature respected man-made borders? What difference does it make whether a seed was brought by a human from Country A to Country B, or floated over in the water, was blown by the wind, or expelled from a bird’s digestive tract? If a plant sprouts in the ground or an animal survives and extends its range, that may be cause for concern if the owner of the land does not want it there. Weeds can always be pulled, and unwanted animals trapped or shot depending on the needs of landowners, but this obsession with What Was Living Here At The Time Of Columbus (which is what environmentalists use as the dividing line) and calling for massive extermination and replanting is just batshit crazy (especially from the standpoint of ordinary humans who will be forced to pay for it).

From the environmentalists’ standpoint, however, it makes perfect sense in its very enormity and utter impossibility. They have come up with a gargantuan task of proportions so monumental that they truly are Sisyphean. As anyone who has ever had a lawn or a garden knows, getting rid of weeds is a constant annoyance, and takes up lots of time. So imagine millions of acres, covered with plants that were not there at the time of Columbus. Imagine the job of its “restoration” to “original” status.

By the way, when we consider what is “original” and “pristine,” we are to forget about earlier environmental destruction caused by the invasions of so-called “native” Americans. That does not count. Only invasions related to post-Columbus Europeans can truly be described as “invasive.” That’s because the descendants of these invaders are supposed to feel guilty, and pay the environmentalists huge sums of money to set fire to the land, to plant “original” seeds, to poison streams and repopulate them with “original” fish, and then of course start all over every few years after the invading plants and animals creep back in.

I cannot think of a better make-work scheme to provide full employment for environmentalists. Not just existing environmentalists, either. The endlessness of the task of combating invaders will demand armies of environmental foot soldiers. And endless money, paid by people whose land will have to be grabbed to those who have grabbed it.

Sounds almost Darwinian.

I wonder what he would say.