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.
No borders for bugs! 😂🐛🐜🪲
Just as nature intended
It’s about damned time.
That whole “invasive species” thing has always frustrated me.
“Oh no - the invasive species is out-competing the native species!”
Yeah - that’s one of the ways by which evolution has always worked. Some species that fills some niche finds itself forced to compete with some “invasive species,” and it either adapts or dies out, and either way, nature ends up with a species that better fills that niche.
I can just see conservationists getting ahold of time machines and going back to the moment when the first sea creatures crawled up onto the land and going, “Oh no! An invasive species!” and kicking them back into the water.
“Invasive species” is a technical ecology term used to describe plants and animals that face no predation in a given environment and have a negative effect on the other species native to that environment. Like many other scientific terms, it was misused by people without the technical understanding.
The crux of your argument is species drift compared to forced mass introduction, but there’s a huge difference between them. It’s similar to the difference in outcomes that can occur when somebody surfaces after deep diving. Go slow enough, and the systems have an opportunity to acclimate to the changes and respond. Go quickly enough, and things break and start impacting systems around them in a cascade. That’s the thing that gets missed every time I see this sentiment.
I can just see conservationists getting ahold of time machines and going back to the moment when the first sea creatures crawled up onto the land and going, “Oh no! An invasive species!” and kicking them back into the water.
I can get behind that tbh.
(Honestly I felt the same even as I was writing it, but I went with it anyway.)
