Fish in the Wrong Place
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
Here's the simplest one: They're really, really big. The sights and sounds are indistinguishable from an ocean. The only obvious distinction is that it doesn't smell salty.
And, yeah, the damn carp. Electro fishing is the best way we have to handle them, and it supposedly works very well. Carp like to hang around the surface, while many native species swim much deeper in the water, so the electric fences actually filter for the carp pretty well.
Recreational fishing gets rid of some of them too, but there are several different species that we collectively call "asian carp," and only some of them bite on fishing lures. Eat more carp, I suppose.
I remember an interview with a basketball player while he was in Chicago for a game in which he said something like, "Chicago is so beautiful right here on the ocean"
- Oil Can Boyd on May 27 1986, after a game at Cleveland Stadium, located on the shore of Lake Erie, is postponed due to fog in the 6th inning.
Not to someone who has been swimming in the ocean their whole life. The great lakes are indeed huge, but the waves are nothing like the ocean.
Why was everything always good, peaceful and stable in "indigenous environments" until "the colonizers " show up? I find it hard to believe.
Introducing some external perturbation can destabilize the thing until it eventually settles into a new stable configuration. But if you've built up lots of systems around the old stable configuration this kind of sucks.
(Also, stable configurations can be hard to reach, and "eventually" might be a rather long time.)
Mann attempts to reconstruct what the Americas were like before European contact. More importantly, he makes a case that some American Indians had a higher standard of living than Europeans.
More importantly, everything really was mostly "good, peaceful and stable ... until the colonizers" showed up. The disrupting factor were the pandemics that happened; not that one culture was superior than the other.
The peaceful, noble savage myth.
Native Americans engaged in wars, enslavement, and horrific torture - as did the Europeans.
The League of Five Nations was noted for a stable (and therefore largely peaceful) inter-tribe arrangement, but it was a new and exceptional development, just prior to the coincidental arrival of Europeans.
I'm pointing out that this statement is straight up racist, and disproven by historical record:
> Why was everything always good, peaceful and stable in "indigenous environments" until "the colonizers " show up? I find it hard to believe.
One thing that may help resolve this in your head is that invasive species taking over is the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of the time, when a species is taken out of its native environment and dropped somewhere else, for whatever reason, it dies. Maybe immediately, maybe a few generations get off before the population drops to zero, maybe they do great until they're slugged by winter or the rainy season, most of the time the "home team" will kill the visitor without so much as metaphorically noticing.
However every once in a while the stars align and the new species fits into a slot the home team didn't "realize" existed, or they hammer a weakness that the rest of the ecosystem had just been coevolving around for a long time, and you get the invasive species. It would feel like winning the lottery, except that the invasive species then get to grow exponentially and loom very large in our minds and our experiences. They are, despite that, the rare exceptions and not the rule. The rule is that a species dropped into another full ecosystem with no coevolved slot for them just dies.
"One thing that may help resolve this in your head is that" the echosystem might be destroyed, so an invasive species just takes the place of other species. Like, you know, we kill all the volves and then we are invaded by deers.