Puddock Hill Journal #10: Battling Invasives While Helping Natives
The plants in every ecosystem are constantly at war, and it’s a war of attrition. I find it helpful to consider this simple observation when figuring out how best to battle invasive species and promote natives.
Nothing in nature is static. Until about 800 million years ago, for example, Earth contained less than one percent of the oxygen it does today. As photosynthesis proliferated, this balance changed, gradually establishing conditions that allowed for more complex ecosystems that eventually (600 million years later!) produced the evolution of mammals.
In much shorter timeframes, conditions for life in regions both large and small have changed as a result of tectonic activity, climatic variability, fire, the movement of water, and the like. Around the time mammals began to show up, Nevada was at the bottom of the ocean. Thanks to forces similar to those that dried up Nevada, fossilized fish can now be found atop the Himalayan mountains. The Appalachians of North America and the Scottish Highlands of Europe and the Little Atlas Mountains of Morocco were once all part of the same Central Pangean Mountain chain.
The problem we face today is not change itself, but the rate of change and what it means for our existence as humans. For instance, species have migrated great distances in response to past climate change, most of which occurred gradually. In only a handful of cases have events so badly outrun the ability of life to adapt that mass extinctions occurred. The newest, ongoing Holocene mass extinction is only the sixth event of its kind in history.