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Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration
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Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration

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Invasive species are everywhere, from forests and prairies to mountaintops and river mouths. Their rampant nature and sheer numbers appear to overtake fragile native species and forever change the ecosystems that they depend on.

Concerns that invasive species represent significant threats to global biodiversity and ecological integrity permeate conversations from schoolrooms to board rooms, and concerned citizens grapple with how to rapidly and efficiently manage their populations. These worries have culminated in an ongoing “war on invasive species,” where the arsenal is stocked with bulldozers, chainsaws, and herbicides put to the task of their immediate eradication. In Hawaii, mangrove trees (Avicennia spp.) are sprayed with glyphosate and left to decompose on the sandy shorelines where they grow, and in Washington, helicopters apply the herbicide Imazapyr to smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) growing in estuaries. The “war on invasive species” is in full swing, but given the scope of such potentially dangerous and ecologically degrading eradication practices, it is necessary to question the very nature of the battle. 

Beyond the War on Invasive Species offers a much-needed alternative perspective on invasive species and the best practices for their management based on a holistic, permaculture-inspired framework. Utilizing the latest research and thinking on the changing nature of ecological systems, Beyond the War on Invasive Species closely examines the factors that are largely missing from the common conceptions of invasive species, including how the colliding effects of climate change, habitat destruction, and changes in land use and management contribute to their proliferation.

There is more to the story of invasive species than is commonly conceived, and Beyond the War on Invasive Species offers ways of understanding their presence and ecosystem effects in order to make more ecologically responsible choices in land restoration and biodiversity conservation that address the root of the invasion phenomenon. The choices we make on a daily basis—the ways we procure food, shelter, water, medicine, and transportation—are the major drivers of contemporary changes in ecosystem structure and function; therefore, deep and long-lasting ecological restoration outcomes will come not just from eliminating invasive species, but through conscientious redesign of these production systems.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 17, 2015
ISBN9781603585644
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration
Author

Tao Orion

Tao Orion is a permaculture designer, teacher, homesteader, and mother living in the southern Willamette Valley of Oregon. She teaches permaculture design at Oregon State University and at Aprovecho, a 40-acre nonprofit sustainable-living educational organization. Tao consults on holistic farm, forest, and restoration planning through Resilience Permaculture Design, LLC. She holds a degree in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from UC Santa Cruz, and her interest in restoration was piqued when studying botany, wildcrafting, and herbalism at the Columbines School of Botanical Studies in Eugene, Oregon. She has a keen interest in integrating the disciplines of organic agriculture, sustainable land-use planning, ethnobotany, and ecosystem restoration in order to create beneficial social, economic, and ecological outcomes. When she is not writing, she is busy keeping up with her toddler and wrangling a diverse array of plants and animals on her 6.5-acre homestead, Viriditas Farm.

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    Even if you’re not an ecologist or an environmentalist, you’ve likely heard of invasive species: Japanese Knotweed, Kudzu, or Zebra Mussels.How do we define an invasive species? Part of it is that it is “alien,” or “new” to an ecosystem. But by that definition, all of agriculture is composed of alien species.The other component of an invasive is that it thrives in its new home.Why are these bad attributes? Species have been moving around the world for billions of years. Why do we need to be protecting our borders now?As you might have guessed, the concept of invasive was pioneered by herbicide companies like Monsanto—tapping into a nationalist rhetoric to exterminate “others." Current “management” of invasives, statistically speaking, is about herbicide, whether in terrestrial or aquatic ecosystems. It’s very difficult to take any message away from the text aside from an understanding that the paradigm of invasive species is inter-species racism, and is ethically despicable.Why are these species spreading in the first place?“Some of today’s ‘worst’ invasive species were intentionally introduced for ecological benefit. Prior to being classified as invasive, state and federal agencies recommended plants like sea buckthorn, bush honeysuckle, and multiflora rose for their usefulness as habitat or food for wildlife. From 1935 through the 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service distributed eighty-five million kudzu seedlings to stabilize eroding slopes in the Southeast and paid landowners $19.75 per hectare to plant the rapidly growing vine. Scotch broom was sold as an ornamental and planted along roadsides and cut banks through the western Unite States during the 1940s and 1950s.” (Page 15 and 16)Regardless of government intervention contributing to the spread of some of the species we’re now trying to eradicate, in a world with failing natural systems, wouldn’t we enthusiastically greet species that thrive in these changing environments?Maybe part of our challenge is a tendency to see nature as static and unchanging. A beech, birch forest in New England has always been that way hasn’t it? Well, fifteen thousands years ago (a blink of the eye, evolutionarily), this region was covered by glaciers—so all these species that are here today arrived recently.What kind of damage are invasive causing? “According to John Kartesz of the Biota of North America Program, there has never been a plant species in North America, (including Hawaii) that has been driven to extinction by the introduction of another plant species” (page 97).Just as holistic medicine looks at the person as a whole, as opposed to the part of the body experiencing discomfort in isolation, invasives signify a larger shift in an ecosystem. But unlike people, ecosystems don’t have any kind of permanence; a shift in our body’s microbiome can be beneficial or harmful, but the same can’t be said about invasives, as they shift the structure of an ecosystem, transforming it into something else.I haven’t heard anyone calling for the introduction of foreign species, but what can we do with the species that are already here? How can we work with the black locust?Some Native Americans, such as a Southern Sierra Miwok, use the term “wilderness” in a disparaging way. There was no wilderness before the Colonists exterminated the Native Americans. Wilderness describes places that have been literally abandoned, even though we’ve introduced countless challenges to these places. Maybe the larger issue here is that almost no one actively tends lands any longer.In reading the book, I’m reminded of Regenesis Group’s Story of Place process. Invasives call for us to be in deeper relationship with place, as their stories are deeply complex. To understand what invasives are telling us about an ecosystem, we would do well to explore the place’s biological, geological, and social history, as well as tap in to the essence of the place. Maybe invasives are an indicator that we’ve forgotten a place, and call us to re-engage.

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Beyond the War on Invasive Species - Tao Orion

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Praise for Beyond the War on Invasive Species

A gathering body of evidence against the scale of chemical interventions in both agriculture and wild nature is fueling a battle of geopolitical proportions. In the process of asking the questions about how best to restore nature, Orion exposes a deep ethical corruption at the heart of both ecological science and the environmental movement.

—DAVID HOLMGREN, from the Foreword

"Beyond the War on Invasive Species is a devastating exposé of the military-industrial invasive species complex and a sorely needed and impeccably researched volume that should become one of many as we recover from self-destructive attempts to eradicate parts of nature instead of acting with an understanding of the whole."

—BEN FALK, author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead and founder of Whole Systems Design

"Beyond the War on Invasive Species is part of a new, much more nuanced conversation about ‘invasive’ species that is taking place in science, agriculture, and land management. It provides an analysis of the new science that looks for ecosystem function as well as harm from newly arrived species, looks at species migration in the context of climate change, and broadens our conversation to look at these organisms in the context of the human ecological footprint. Orion offers land-management guidelines, based in permaculture design process, that help to chart a new way forward in our new land of novel ecosystems."

—ERIC TOENSMEIER, author of Paradise Lot and Perennial Vegetables

An interesting and valuable contribution to the ongoing refutation of invasive species ideology. Detailed and wide-ranging, Orion extends and deepens several analyses of invasionism, and offers several interesting new perspectives. She points to holistic systems management as an alternative to the current war on invasives. Land managers and invasionists would do well to give it a careful read.

—D.I. THEODOROPOLOUS, author of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience

"Beyond the War on Invasive Species creates an essential pathway for deeper care of the Earth. The holistic perspective of invasives is shared through deep experience and thoughtfulness and ultimately leads us to a greater and more aligned role in restoration of our home’s ecosystems in these changing times. This book offers a critical role in civilization’s evolution and highlights actions that recognize deeper values that benefit our society as a whole."

—KATRINA BLAIR, author of The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival

"In her fascinating and highly readable book, Beyond the War on Invasive Species, author Tao Orion points out the shortcomings of our current approach toward landscape restoration and invasive species. Rather than seeing these exotic plants and animals simply as invaders that need to be eradicated, she argues, we should recognize the beneficial role they play in the environment and the many essential services they could provide to human beings. ‘Embracing rampancy,’ as Orion exuberantly puts it, turns the perceived problem of invasive species into practical solutions that also allow us to make peace with both the land and ourselves."

—LARRY KORN, author of One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka

"Some of our most productive and tasty plants in the permaculture landscape are vilified as invasive weeds that need controlling. This is a mindset that also promotes a delineation between conservation and agriculture. My personal response is to cultivate fewer conventional annual vegetables and grow and eat as many of these weeds as is appropriate, creating an extensive, diverse, and resilient forage system in my own backyard. It is time to stop putting land management into boxes and create wildlife habitats and food in stacked systems.

Tao Orion explains how to take advantage of the vigor of ‘invasive’ edible and useful exotics and harvest them. This is how to bring ecosystems back into balance. This is adaptive permaculture thinking at the broad-scale level. Chelsea Green has produced yet another pioneering book, demonstrating how permaculture is way ahead of conventional land-management practices.

—MADDY HARLAND, editor of Permaculture magazine, cofounder of The Sustainability Centre in the UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

"This book brings much-needed balance to the overheated debate about so-called invasive species. Tao Orion’s meticulously researched yet engaging work shows that the true culprits are nearly always human-caused disturbance and development, and that species shifts are a symptom, not a cause, of this habitat destruction. Beyond the War on Invasive Species is an important book that offers a path away from unsuccessful restoration efforts—based on poor science and policy—and toward new, ecologically sound programs for building and preserving biodiversity."

—TOBY HEMENWAY, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience

Tao Orion has brought together personal experience, careful study, and visionary thinking to turn us toward becoming useful people of place. Her exploration widens the narrow concept of invasion (so often repeated but seldom carefully thought through) and elucidates the trouble of shortsightedness. We are not threatened by aliens, but rather we are turning our backs on the big picture.

—TOM WARD, author of Greenward, Ho! Herbal Home Remedies and cofounder of Siskiyou Permaculture

Copyright © 2015 by Tao Orion.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Work Song copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

Project Manager: Alexander Bullett

Developmental Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Copy Editor: Deborah Heimann

Proofreader: Brianne Bardusch

Indexer: Peggy Holloway

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing June, 2015.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 16 17 18

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Beyond the War on Invasive Species was printed on paper supplied by McNaughton & Gunn that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orion, Tao, 1980–

Beyond the war on invasive species : a permaculture approach to ecosystem restoration / Tao Orion.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60358-563-7 (pbk.) —ISBN 978-1-60358-564-4 (ebook)

1. Permaculture. 2. Restoration ecology. 3. Introduced organisms—Control. 4. Endemic animals—Conservation. 5. Endemic plants—Conservation. I. Title. II. Title: Permaculture approach to ecosystem restoration.

S494.5.P47O75 2015

631.5'8—dc23

2015006881

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

For Sylvan, and the world we give to you.

We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own—indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

—WANGARI MAATHAI

My friend, all theory is gray, and the Golden tree of life is green.

—GOETHE

Contents

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Against All Ethics

2. Getting to the Root of Invasive Species

3. Thinking Like an Ecosystem

4. A Matter of Time

5. Problems into Solutions

6. Everyone Gardens

7. Restoring Restoration

8. Putting Permaculture to Work in Restoration

Acknowledgments

APPENDIX A. Species Identification List

APPENDIX B. Organisms that Moved around the World Prior to the Modern Colonial Era

APPENDIX C. Recommended Resources for Holistic Restoration and Invasive Species Management Alternatives

Notes

About the Author

Foreword

In the 1970s when Bill Mollison and I began working on the concept of permaculture, we recognized local and global biodiversity as a treasure trove of biological wealth that could be combined to create designed ecologies for sustaining humanity beyond the fossil-fuel era. In Australia, the paucity of cultivated indigenous plants and valued native animals was the context in which we highlighted the potential of native plants and animals as integral to permaculture.

As permaculture mushroomed in the context of the 1970s’ energy crises and back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, one of the most surprising critiques of the concept was from a small network of botanists and environmental activists promoting the idea that no plants capable of spreading should be grown, anywhere! (At the same time, these activists accepted that agriculture would continue to feed us with foreign species maintained with industrial inputs.) The serious suggestion that permaculture was potentially one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity because of its focus on using a larger, rather than a smaller, range of species to support humanity, seemed remarkably similar to disputes between various schools of Marxism in the 1960s.

Over the following three decades, this ideology of demonizing spreading species as a threat to biodiversity (on a scale rivaling climate change) took over the mainstream of environmental activism and the biological sciences, especially in the English-speaking world. Scientific research papers rebranding spreading species as invasives (or in Australia, environmental weeds) burgeoned, filling peer-review journals. The correct botanical (and emotionally neutral) term naturalization was abandoned because it recognized the validity of the process by which species become native to a new place.

This new science of invasion ecology informed the education of a cadre of natural-resource-management professionals, supported by taxpayer funds. These resources mobilized armies of volunteers in a war on weeds. But labor and even machine-intensive methods of weed control were soon sidelined in favor of herbicides that environmentalists and ecologists accepted as a necessary evil in the vain hope of winning the war against an endless array of newly naturalizing species. For the chemical corporations, this new and rapidly expanding market began to rival the use of herbicides by farmers, with almost unlimited growth potential, so long as the taxpayer remained convinced that the war on weeds constituted looking after the environment. In Australia, the visionary grassroots Landcare movement, started by farmers in the early 1980s, was reduced to being the vehicle for implementing this war on weeds.

The criticism of permaculture by the environmental orthodoxy was not due to the scale of any real impacts of permaculture, but more because of the perceived audacity of using ecological arguments to justify the use of a wider range of species not indigenous to a site or even a bioregion. Permaculture practitioners were mostly doing little more than attempting to maintain the lineage of agricultural and horticultural research into promising species, as governments beguiled by economic rationalism abandoned their responsibilities to invest in economic botanical research. Most permaculture teachers and designers accepted the findings of invasion ecology at face value and sought to minimize risks of unintended naturalization. 

For me, this pragmatic accommodation drove permaculture away from the principle of working with rather than against nature. My own interest in abandoned gardens and arboreta and rewilded farms and urban places as sources of permaculture inspiration was intensified through working with planner and resource ecologist Haikai Tane in New Zealand in 1979 and 1984. We coined the term ecosynthesis to describe the relatively rapid restoration of ecosystem function that we saw in the recombinant mixtures of native and foreign species that colonized abandoned landscapes. We also recognized how this process was generating new resources that could support human populations beyond the fossil-fuel era. Further, we recognized that these novel ecosystems were the best models for the design of intensively managed human settlements. Beyond this, Tane branded the war against naturalizing species as nativism, an ideology that sought to separate nature into good and bad species according to some fixed historical reference.

As Orion makes clear in this excellent review of the application of invasion ecology to the practice of ecological restoration, much of the dysfunction can be traced back to the triumph of reductionism over a more holistic systems approach in the biological sciences. It is a great irony that ecology, the scientific discipline that was founded on holistic understanding, was overwhelmed by reductionism in the 1980s. This coincided with the flow of cheap oil from the Alaskan North Slope and the North Sea, the dismissal of the inconvenient truth of The Limits to Growth, the rise of economic rationalism, and the demonizing of the counterculture, all aspects of the Thatcherite-Reaganite revolution that spread from the Anglo American countries in the 1980s.

My experience in articulating ecological arguments that naturalization of species could maintain and rebuild ecosystem services seemed like reputational suicide among environmentalists and ecologists. Pointing out that our views were in line with the UN biodiversity convention (1992) didn’t help (even though it recognizes the validity of conserving biodiversity wherever species are wild). Even the more modest case, that major efforts at removal of established species would do more harm than good, was dismissed.

It was not until the turn of the millennium with the aid of the Internet that I became aware of the growing number of ecologists who were questioning this orthodoxy. In the book Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience (2003), independent Californian naturalist David Theodoropoulos went further, claiming that the spread of species in a rapidly changing world would do more to conserve biodiversity than the massive efforts to reverse naturalizations and protect species in collapsing niches. Since then, a growing body of peer-reviewed research in the field of what is now called novel ecosystems research is providing the evidence toward a tipping point that may reform the field of invasion ecology. I believe abandoning emotionally loaded and unscientific terms such as invasive and weed will be a symbolic and necessary step in the process. Those driving the restoration industry (primarily in affluent countries) are mostly yet to recognize the shift in the science, or the leakage of disillusioned restoration professionals who have responded to the bizarre contradictions in the practice of restoration ecology by adopting more holistic responses to ecological disturbance and species naturalizations, such as permaculture. In this way, the industry is progressively losing its most motivated and ethical practitioners.

I see the importance of Orion’s book as threefold. The book traces the story of how well-intentioned concerns about biodiversity loss and ecological change were captured and corrupted by corporations selling chemical solutions to the perceived problem of invasive species. Using measured language and open questions, Orion allows the ordinary reader to judge this process. A gathering body of evidence against the scale of chemical interventions in both agriculture and wild nature is fueling a battle of geopolitical proportions. In the process of asking the questions about how best to restore nature, Orion exposes a deep ethical corruption at the heart of both ecological science and the environmental movement.

Perhaps more fundamentally, the author’s personal experience as a dedicated and innovative restoration practitioner, speaking directly to both her peers and the general public in a reflective tone, provides a great model that can help all of us move farther along that long, winding road of learning how to work with nature rather than against her.

Finally, as the baby boomers who rode the first wave of modern environmentalism fade from the scene, I find it significant that it is a young woman who provides the hope that environmentalism, having lost its way through a futile and destructive war against nature, can return to the path we collectively lost.

DAVID HOLMGREN

Work Song: A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in the noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting. Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

—WENDELL BERRY

Introduction

Several years ago, I found myself on the front lines of an unexpected war. It was 2010, and I’d been hired as a botanist for the Lane County Department of Public Works in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where I live and farm with my family. My job was to identify plants, collect seeds, and strategize innovative ways to manage an emerging wetland restoration site located on county land. The site had been farmed for more than fifty years, most recently for ryegrass seed production, which the Willamette Valley is famous for. The county had purchased the 64-acre site as part of a mitigation plan—mitigating the effects of expanding an adjacent landfill onto intact wetland. The goal of the project was to convert the site back to a wetland—similar to what it might have looked like before agriculture, ranching, logging, and mining altered the ecological character of the region. At the time, I thought this was a valuable endeavor. Returning a small portion of the valley dominated by grass seed farms to wetland habitat seemed like a noble, if inadequate, attempt to integrate more habitat and ecological function into a landscape where it had largely been lost.

Before taking this job, I thought of restoration as an important undertaking, but I didn’t understand what restoration meant in a modern context. I knew it implied a process of improving habitat and biodiversity, but I was unfamiliar with how organizations developed projects to achieve these goals. I didn’t realize that there’s a subtext to restoration, as commonly practiced, of native species as good and invasive species as bad and that this dichotomy is the principle that underpins many of the decisions and strategies driving restoration projects around the country. The Society for Ecological Restoration defines restoration as the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. My assumption was that restoration would align with this sentiment not only in theory, but in practice.

Needless to say, my training is not in the field of ecological restoration per se. It’s in farming, agroecology, permaculture design, and ethnobotany. Before I started the job, I was familiar with invasive species as a land manager, organic farmer, and permaculture designer, but not as someone trained in restoration ecology—and I didn’t realize how different these fields would be. But I knew, for example, how frustrating the spiny vegetation of Canada thistle can be when it encroaches in a bed of peppers, and I have found myself confounded by the persistence of field bindweed. I know how rapidly the long thorny canes of Himalayan blackberry creep across unmanaged pasture, and I have received my share of scratches in attempts to cut them back.

But I never considered invasive species to be threatening or loathsome. I thought of their proliferation mostly as a management issue—the result of either too much, as in the case of Canada thistle spreading on overgrazed pastures, or too little, as with blackberries that grow on field margins and other underutilized spaces—usually in highly modified ecosystems. I credit permaculture and organic farming with teaching me that the proliferation of invasive species represents an opportunity to understand ecological dynamics at a deep level and to manage land based on that understanding.

Specifically, organic farming taught me how to manage these plants using organic methods: mowing, cultivating, burning, and mulching. Permaculture taught me that every organism is intrinsically connected to the ecosystem of which it is part and that addressing the ecological conditions that promote a species’ proliferation, whether you wish to discourage or encourage its survival, will enhance the ecosystem overall. I knew that invasive Scotch broom is a hardy, drought-tolerant, nitrogen-fixing plant that grows where soil has been disturbed. Blackberries and Canada thistle also find their homes on land where conditions are less than ideal for native or other desirable vegetation.

Admittedly, I came to restoration with a bias, or at least a sense that every organism in an ecosystem is an indication of complex underlying ecological dynamics, whether it is considered native to an area or not. So when I learned that the use of herbicide is common in the field of ecological restoration as a way to manage invasive species, I was—quite frankly—appalled. When I accepted the position with the Lane County Department of Public Works, the restoration project was already two years into a five-year plan. The first three years involved annual broadcast spraying of Roundup—known as nuking in restoration lingo—across the site. According to the management plan, this regular herbicide application creates a moonscape—another common term in the restoration lexicon—that supposedly makes it easier for native plants to survive when they’re later sown and planted. After this nuking, invasive species are spot-sprayed as they crop up.

From California to South Africa, New York to New Zealand, invasive species seem to be everywhere, their populations expanding and threatening ecological integrity around the world. A 1998 Princeton University study found that invasive species are the second greatest threat to global biological diversity.¹ In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the world’s oldest and largest global environmental organization, warned that invasive species wreak havoc on economies and ecosystems.² Organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and the National Audubon Society consider invasive species to be serious impediments to healthy wildlife habitat and the survival of endangered species.³ And government agencies, including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, blame invasive species for losses and permanent damage to the health of natural plant communities.⁴

Species invasions are also costly. According to The Nature Conservancy, worldwide spending on invasive species totals $1.4 trillion every year, equal to 5 percent of the global economy.⁵ The United States alone spends $137 billion annually to contend with them.⁶ The National Invasive Species Council holds invasive species accountable for unemployment, damaged goods and equipment, power failures, environmental degradation, increased rates and severity of natural disasters, disease epidemics, and even lost lives.

Given the apparent threats posed by invasive species, it makes sense that their eradication has become a central organizing principle of the practice of restoration. After all, if they are perceived as degrading ecosystems, then the practice of restoration as assisting in the repair of degraded ecosystems should focus on their elimination. I know that people who work in restoration care deeply about the loss of habitats, loss of ecological function, and declining biodiversity that are readily apparent in seemingly every ecosystem on Earth. Invasive species in many cases are part of this trend, and while I agree that invasive species are less ideal than the diverse and robust native flora and fauna they appear to dominate and replace, invasive species themselves aren’t the actual problem; they are merely a symptom. I remove invasive species on my own property and in my own design work, but always in the context of creating something greater, more robust, diverse, and resilient than what was there before, and I have never considered using herbicides to manage them. As individuals, we have to take responsibility for the land. We have to draw the line.

Herbicides are favored as a restoration tool because they represent a relatively cheap, readily available, and supposedly benign method of killing certain plants and favoring others. Herbicides can be applied in small, targeted amounts, ridding the site of unwanted species with relatively little disturbance (at least visually) compared to seemingly more destructive eradication tools like bulldozers and tractor-mounted mowers. Planes, helicopters, and people with backpack-mounted spray tanks can apply herbicide in remote locations that are not easily accessed by other eradication equipment. Herbicide application can be selective, as it is easily applied to certain plants and not others on a small scale. Working with a weed whacker or machete does not allow for the same careful treatment. In some cases, such as the Lane County project I worked on and others I visited, herbicides are used on a larger scale in the hopes that the site can start with a clean slate, leaving the desired native vegetation more or less free from the competition expected from rampantly growing invasive species.

I understand the need for cheap and straightforward vegetation management strategies, especially on a large scale. I’ve spent many a sweaty hour at the helm of a well-sharpened hoe. But the idea that herbicides are considered a necessary part of restoring an ecosystem didn’t sit right with me. If organic farmers can grow nonnative plants like broccoli, potatoes, and turnips without the use of chemical pesticides, why should native plants need them, I wondered? I assumed that native plants and animals are supposedly more suited to local conditions than nonnative ones, so it seemed to me that they should be easier to establish and maintain than those crops commonly grown in a farm setting.

As I considered how to curb the rampant growth of invasive species without chemical intervention on the site I worked, I turned to organic farming for possible solutions. At the first organic farm I worked on, we’d used backpack-mounted propane torches for spot-burning the carrot beds. Carrots take a couple of weeks to germinate, and many weeds emerge sooner, impeding their growth. With a few well-timed passes of the torch, I could drastically reduce the number of weeds competing with the carrots, making successive weeding more efficient.

I reasoned that a similar approach could be taken at this wetland restoration site—eliminate the early germinating and rapidly spreading invasive plants, and make room for more slowly emerging desirable native species. Although backpack burning is standard in organic farming, it had not been used as a restoration tool in the Willamette Valley. Still, my supervisors were willing to let me try it.

We found that spot burning worked successfully to eliminate populations of rattail fescue and worked reasonably well on false dandelion and the pennyroyal that grew along the pond margins. We sowed seeds

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