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> Invasive species thrive in ecosystems that we create. You don't want spotted lantern flys? You don't want thorny pear trees?

Non-native species get planted in environments we create (eg suburban yards). What makes them invasive is when they spread uncontrollably and displace native flora (dramatically reducing biodiversity in native ecosystems).

> Maybe ask who is defining the term "invasive species" and why they are defining them as such?

Sure, my definition above came from a hobby gardener friend who volunteers for a local environmental nonprofit.

> Anyone thinking about cutting down your pear tree. Read "Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration" [0]

The reviews on that book are delightfully polarized.

I am averse to the rhetoric about invasive species, but do believe that invasives are, in fact, frequently a real problem, not a contrived one. But I think that all the hatred poured on the plants/bugs/etc. is misplaced. IMO, the two most important things we can do are:

1. Create fewer disturbed environments. These plants are typically those that thrive in disturbed environments. As such, they may even be regarded as providing some kind of ecological service. Unfortunately, one of the reasons they out-compete natives is lack of predation. The Amur Honeysuckle I've been systematically removing still have beautiful leaves even in early Autumn, untouched by mold or bug.

2. Prevent the introduction of new species via the commercial nursery vector; hard to achieve any kind of ecological equilibrium when we are constantly disrupting it.

I've kinda had a similar perspective until buckthorn. Buckthorn is essentially eradicating native Big Woods forest, transforming forest that comprises an open understory with high canopies into dense tangles of buckthorn that choke out anything else. It also leads to these boom-bust nitrogen cycles that wreak havoc on the soil.

Many of these forests were just fine until buckthorn arrived. The problem isn't with buckthorn per se, it's in the destruction that it causes on native ecosystems. If the buckthorn was just here or there, an addition to the landscape, it might be fine, but it's not.

A solution to buckthorn overgrowth can't come soon enough because mechanical solutions, while effective, are very laborious.

Maybe there's something that could be imported to keep it in check (I recall reading buckthorn has some kind of highly specialized moth or something that eats it in its native range) but regardless of why, it's a problem.

> I've kinda had a similar perspective until buckthorn. Buckthorn is essentially eradicating native Big Woods forest, transforming forest that comprises an open understory with high canopies into dense tangles of buckthorn that choke out anything else. It also leads to these boom-bust nitrogen cycles that wreak havoc on the soil.

Buckthorn is the devil's plant. IIRC, it's a hedge plant, and literally turns a forest into an impassible hedge.

> Maybe there's something that could be imported to keep it in check (I recall reading buckthorn has some kind of highly specialized moth or something that eats it in its native range) but regardless of why, it's a problem.

IIRC, they're close to approving something like that for garlic mustard (which kind of does the same thing as buckthorn, except on the forest floor, and often gets bad after you deal with buckthorn). They've had to do a lot of testing to make sure it's very specialized and doesn't cause another invasive pest problem.

> A solution to buckthorn overgrowth can't come soon enough because mechanical solutions, while effective, are very laborious.

In Minnesota, they’ve been using goats. It’s still labor intensive, but the labor is performed by goats. Still, there are only so many goats, and there’s a lot of buckthorn.

I love the Big Woods ecosystem, and there’s very little of it left :/

This. My own "invasive is bad" epiphany was with honeysuckle in a SE Michigan park. They had grown so thick that nothing was able to grow in the soil under them - which had turned to dust, like the surface of the moon.

> Invasive species thrive in ecosystems that we create...Anyone thinking about cutting down your pear tree. Read "Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration" [0]

The problem is they also thrive in (i.e. invade) ecosystems that we didn't create, and destroy or disrupt them.

If these species didn't invade wild ecosystems and stayed put in our backyards, then they wouldn't be invasive.

You're acting as if it's not possible to steelman the case against invasive species. This is a bit disingenuous.

Imagine we discover an alien planet with no predators. Should we allow ecological merging, with reasonable expectation of large biodiversity loss?

I'm not an absolutist; there are opposite examples - imagine that in the far future Australia were about to finish its tectonic journey to touch another continent and we expected new connection to result in massive ecological disruptions. Trying to prevent such a thing forever would be questionable.

The point is: you have to dig into reasons and outcomes, and can't resolve this kind of debate by simply saying "foreign bad" or "foreign good".

I 100% agree with you. You absolutely "can't resolve this kind of debate by simply saying "foreign bad" or "foreign good"

Imagine we discover an alien planet with no predators. Should we allow ecological merging, with reasonable expectation of large biodiversity loss. The problem is, the alien planet doesn't have a pesticides industry propped up around saying "foreign bad"

But I have no idea, and am not qualified to answer that hypothetical.

Computer scientists even built a robot to scour Pennsylvania’s forests for the invasive tree-of-heaven, and poison them: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Considerations-in-robo...

(The author was my theory of computation professor at University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Daley (RIP) commuted by Harley-Davidson and in his free time served as chairman of the regional forest stewardship council.)

> Invasive species thrive in ecosystems that we create.

In some cases yes, in other cases they simply out compete local species.

My country had managed to keep snakes out, but no doubt if they ever took hold here they would thrive in the wild, and harm the native bird population like the invasive stoats have. The invasive stoats live in the wild, far from people.

The book referenced actually provides numbers on this. Invasives out competing local species is a rarity according to the studies referenced in the book.

Here is another perspective too: https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22796160/invasive-species-...

Not a glowing endorsement by someone in the field https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2330107179?book_show_a...

"Someone in the field"?

I'm sorry but an anonymous comment on good reads, should not hold the same weight as a book that references academic papers.

In any case it isn't as black and white as "Invasive = Bad" one doesn't need to look far for that evidence.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-potential-conserva...

https://spartina.org/project_documents/revegetation_program/...

I'm not really commenting on the thesis of the book, but pointing out what seemed like a valid criticism of the book overall. After skimming a few articles on the subject [1] it seem like the reviewer is not out of line with scientific consensus on the example he points out.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_yl...

> Invasive species thrive in ecosystems that we create.

Is the idea here that invasive species cannot thrive in non-human-made environments? That is, environments we didn’t create?

Kind of, the idea is that no species would be invasive if we didn't create the ideal place for it to thrive. Invasives mostly thrive in disturbed areas and don't actually displace natives. The book I referenced goes into way more details, but in most cases invasives actually help repair damaged ecosystems. They are often pioneer species in the disturbed areas.

We also imported the first stink bug in the late 90s / early 2000s.

In the case of the spotted lantern fly, it's just the cost of global trade. It was not intentionally introduced like the Bradford pear.

> Invasive species thrive in ecosystems that we create

This is a common misconception

I've referenced articles and books in my other comments, and you're calling it myth. Care to cite something that supports what you claim?

You cite -one- book that maybe says what you want to think and looks more opinion than science. You write also a quote about politics and there is also that old feeling of "we humans are the worst" in the air that can feel justified but never solved anything.

I have a PhD in biology and frankly I'm sick of discussing this issue each time again and again.

Are you solely focused on plants here? Invasive species can also apply to animals. Invasive aquatic species have decimate local animals, and we didn't necessarily create those environments. There's also invasive plants in these aquatic systems as well.

Yes thank you for this clarification. Apologies for my being imprecise. Most of the reading I have done has been related to plants and the use of pesticides to intervene.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149643 https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111... https://naisma.org/naisma-resources/government-relations/the... https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-potential-conserva...

Burmese pythons in Florida is another example of a pristine environment full of predators invaded (and modified) with no effort.