New research published today in the journal Science has concluded that eradicating animals on the basis that they are not native in order to protect plant species can be a flawed practice costing millions of dollars, and resulting in the slaughter of millions of healthy wild animals.
Isn’t this along the same lines as arguments against reducing carbon emissions (the climate naturally changes anyway, and species should be allowed to adapt on their own) or against reducing pollution (shit happen, deal with it)?
Spend a bit of time witnessing the impact invasive species can have. A formerly vibrant piece of nature goes quiet, monotonous, and ecologically deprived. Sure it still looks green, but it’s comparatively dead.
I have witnessed it plenty, I’m an ecologist. I was simply saying it could be argued. Also in case-by-case situations not as a blanket statement for everything.
But you also need to look at it from outside of our little human perspectives and from an evolutionary time scale.
In 90% of cases almost everything affected would suffer negatively in the short term, but 100000 years from now things would adapt and nothing we do would have made much of a difference.
Also humans are part of nature. If a species arrived on an island 500 years before we discovered it, and caused mass devastation to local fauna and flora that we didn’t witness, we would simply classify it as native to the island because it was there when we found it. Had we gotten there 501 years earlier we would have classified it as invasive and probably our fault somehow. Whether something arrives in the hold of a ship or stuck in the talons of a bird it still gets there naturally, we can’t just separate ourselves from nature because we think we’re special.