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Harriet Rix's avatar

This is a fascinating article about a fascinating topic. Perhaps clarifying and simplifying some of the specific issues that lead to "introduced" plants/animals having a negative affect on biodiversity would be the way to shift the issue away from blanket negativity and consequent protectionism?

One example: both Red Oak and Hungarian Oak outcompete the English Oak in e.g. Richmond Park, and that this has a negative affect on biodiversity because they only host about 1,000 of the 4,000 species that rely on Pedunculate oak. However, introduction of other oak species (e.g. Quercus brantii from Iraq), particularly as street trees, will almost certainly have a positive effect on biodiversity, because they can grow in drought-affected areas where Pedunculate oak could not. Frame this as an "outcompeting species" and a "resilient species" in everyday discourse and the conversation may become less loaded?

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Mark Fisher's avatar

Disputing biotic nativeness is a convenient way to exculpate human agency in homogenising the biota of the planet. Shouldn’t we be “asking” wild nature what it thinks of this homogenisation? Rhetorical question, but in the absence of being able to do that, the next best thing is to recognise and honour the distinctiveness, endemism and biogeographical distribution due to the intrinsic boundaries to movement ecology that characterises the species of wild nature.

There may be hope that through reversing landscape simplification, by refilling native trophic levels, that biological systems may be self-rectifying – the pine marten and grey squirrel would be one example. In some places, it is a messy, additive chain of non-natives: the trophic ecology of Australia – its small native mammals and endemic vegetation - is destroyed by non-natives (red fox, rabbit) but with the hope that the dingo, a feral dog, can replace the extinct apex predator, the thylacine. It will not work everywhere – some trophic imbalances created by human agency, particularly on islands, can only be solved by removal. Do we not bother?

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