The momentum of the “return to the natives” movement has gotten out of hand.
In England, according to “Illustrated Gardens,” vacationing families return from vacation to find huge plants, such as rhododendra, dug up and transported, with a note in place that explains “This is not native and must go! “.
In the United States the activities are less drastic but “armies of volunteers” show up to “remove” some of our favorite trees, shrubs and some of our favorite birds. Who gives them this right?
A bird hierarchy, created by bird agencies and organizations, such as Audubon and AOU, decides which birds are good and which are bad. The “hot birds” are birds of prey, like owls, hawks, hawks, that eat the young of other birds. This contradicts the effort to save songbirds and shorebirds, on which millions of dollars have been spent in recent years. Are we saving them to be a raptor’s lunch? This man-made hierarchy is not based on good science, or any. Such decision making is unsettling.
A recent example is mute swans. Fossils of the ancestors of this bird have been found in four states and more recent specimens have been found from the pre-colonization of Canada. Dr. Robert Alison, who works for USF & W and the Canadian Wildlife Service, formed [email protected], requesting emails of support.
While we all go to work, we live our lives, important environmental decisions are made based on,
That? Grant money? Perpetuation of important programs? There are serious problems out there.
Loss of birds, trees, and the most recent horror story, fish, to the point of extinction are all very possible. The science you use to answer or solve big problems is rubbish, because you can’t
put the blame where it belongs and thus a non-native “white list” is drawn up and blamed.
In Alan Burdick’s book “Out of Eden”, he sums up by saying that scientists have traded
real science for hysteria and suggests that there is a lack of ethics in this, something
S. Dillon Ripley, who ran the Smithsonian, suggested years ago.
We are the invader. We are the non-natives. We are the destroyer and the user to the point of
extinction. Something other than “elimination programs” should be used not only to live with the environment around us, but to nurture it. Targeting non-harmful living beings, flora or fauna, to eliminate them based on junk science, misleads us as human beings.
Even the zebra mussel, which did a great job cleaning up one of the terribly polluted Great Lakes, has a place in the wild and must be fed and used for this purpose, not extinct.
Good science is possible. Good science can bring subsidies. Good science can ensure a better solution for all living beings and in this, we have dominance, as benefactors.
Stay alert!