The casting of ‘invasives’ as ecological villains has long been backed by scientific and political consensus. Yet as species increasingly move into unfamiliar regions, a favouritism towards natives is growing harder to defend. The traditional approach of trying to stop invasions and eradicate successful invaders isn’t just costly and often ineffective. It may be entirely the wrong approach, if we’re concerned about the environment. While some invasive species are truly harmful and need to be fought, others are a healthy ecological response – they’re part of how the biosphere is adapting to humanity’s environmental impact.
To be clear (and not having read the article because I know the argument already): the problem with anthropogenic species invasions is they reduce biodiversity in the short to medium term. Yes, sure, “life finds a way”, and on the 100m-year horizon everything will have recovered (perhaps on a different trajectory). But not in a timespan relevant to us. And a biosphere with less diversity is going to make things less pleasant and much harder for us, possibly quite badly and quite soon.
The article presumably recommends a more targeted and effective approach to conserving biodiversity. Fair enough if so, but words like “prejudice”, “nativist” and “dogma” are not encouraging me (personally) to give it a full hearing.
I did read the article, and I generally agree with you—but I’d add that the most important thing is global biodiversity (or even, the ability to increase global biodiversity on an evolutionary timescale going forward).
An invasive species might have a negligible effect on the biodiversity of the local ecosystem (or even a positive effect, if it’s replacing the functionality of a previously-lost species), but if you add the same species to every similar biome in the world, then each of those locations loses the opportunity to diversify in a different way.
Please read the article, it is Aeon, I have rarely read an Aeon article that didn’t make me think differently in an interesting way even if I didn’t agree with the thrust of it.
The point isn’t to deny the damage invasive species can set off in an ecosystem, the point is to recognize how easy it is to see conservation as a war against invasive species, which is not only bad science it also leads into reductive patterns of thinking that fail to understand that even as an invasive species is intruding upon an ecosystem it is becoming part of that ecosystem in some way. Once the invasive species has intruded, the solution can never be as simple as “delete the new stuff and go back to the old version!”, that is how software works not ecosystems. We must grapple with the new reality and begin to understand how our empathy must extend to these creatures invading the ecosystems we love even as we seak to mitigate the processes of damage they can accelerate.
Obviously, it is complicated right? This article doesn’t pretend it isn’t, so I definitely recommend giving it a read! Aeon articles are kind of my gold standard for brainfood lately, they rarely miss.