Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Dancing with Wolves (in Cohousing)-off topic

[Howard Landman (howard]

Liz wrote:
>> if it was a starling, you'd be doing bluebirds a favor by killing
>> it. It is a non-native species to North America, believe it or not!

Robert wrote:
> Killing creatures because they are not convenient just does not sound
> right to me.

There are two value-sets in conflict here.  (1) Don't mess with Mother
Nature and don't kill.  (2) Value biodiversity and try to prevent or undo
the damage caused by human activity.

In normal biology, species making the leap from (say) Europe to North
America occur infrequently.  But since humans learned how to build
globe-spanning highways, railroads, ships, and airplanes, the pace
of this has been vastly accelerated.  Some tidbits:

- Tumbleweed (Siberian Thistle) was introduced into North America in
  the late 1800s.  It rapidly spread through the entire Great Plains.
  Nothing can eat it, so it reduced the food available for wildlife,
  and also caused (and still causes) major problems for farmers and
  livestock producers.  (Those mid-20th-century cowboy movies full
  of tumbleweeds are anachronistic fantasies.)

- Snails are not native to California.  They were introduced by
  a French gastronome who liked escargot, and promptly escaped
  from his backyard.  Thus all California snails are edible (you
  need to feed them cornmeal for a day or so to purge possible
  plant toxins from their digestive tract) and in fact choice,
  if you like that sort of thing.  But they've been so successful
  that they've pushed other, native, gastropods out of their
  niches.

There are literally tens of thousands of cases like this.  The
net result is a homogenization of the biosphere with a severe
reduction in its overall complexity, diversity, and ability to
adapt.  Of course, the biosphere has often been radically simplified
in the past, and has come back.  But often the collapse-and-regrowth
has eliminated dominant megazoa, such as dinosaurs or humans, so that
we have some reason to be concerned for our own species, as well as
many others.

This concern has led many to believe that good stewardship of the
planet must include active efforts to preserve biodiversity, and
one important piece of that is favoring local native plants and
animals over imported ones.  (There are other pieces, such as the
identification and propagation of useful rare strains; one good
organization working in this area is Native Seeds/Search of Tucson AZ.
(www.nativeseeds.org))

Several people in River Rock pushed our landscaping in the direction
of more native plants.  This doesn't mean there are no foreign
flowers or fruit trees, bt just that we made a conscious effort to
include native plants where appropriate.  This also tied in with
the idea of xeriscaping (landscaping with plants that don't need
much water).

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins CO
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