What this horticulturist said to me did surprise me, though, in that she suggested that horticulturists are so concerned about the pest pressures on native tree species that they are not certain that there is a long-term future for native trees. Whether that’s somewhat hyperbolic or not, I can’t tell you, and I’m not about to run out and start planting Ailanthus whips in beech groves “to prepare the planet for the future”, but, as I said above, I’m really haunted by this idea, because, if its true, then one part of a strategy for diversity and complexity might necessarily be figuring out how to nudge invasives away from monoculture and towards ecological productivity. Though, even if that’s not hyperbole — if native forests are doomed — that’s no reason not to do what we can to buttress them.

Of course, you might take another thing that she said to me (about an increasing interest in planting North American natives on the part of horticulturists elsewhere), and stretching this in an even more implausible direction, wonder if our native forests won’t end up in, say, Europe, while we end up with Sino-Japanese forests. There’s probably no way that happens without being a complete ecological catastrophe, but that’s what we all think we’re headed for anyways, right?

They have a specific mandate to mantain and enlarge the genome, which is critical especially for agricultural production (creating hybrids that combat diseases or pests or draught). it’s an everyday practical extention of the doomsday vault up in Norway.

there was recently an article in wired about how this system is being used to combat ugandan wheat rust which could potentially threaten the entire world supply potentially. also, npr “on point with tom ashbrook” recently interviewed a lady who gave a great rundown of the workings of it and argued that it is woefully underfunded and unloved for the critical function it provides.

i would agree with f.a.d’s last sentence wholeheartedly. if you frame the argument in terms of native v. non-native then you end up in a philosophical/semantic debate. but if it’s about maintaining or even enriching biodiversity (and eo wilson would say that is critical) then i think the argument is a lot clearer and the question becomes what strategies and tactics to implement.

as an aside, i dig ailanthus. also, mammoth is sounding a lot more bldgblog-esque after that glacier/island/storm week…

I think its helpful in the native vs. non-native debate to approach it in terms of systemic relationships or ecology–aspects we often can’t physically see, rather than focusing on isolated species. Once aggressive invasives come to dominate an environment, the relational structure of the system typically breaks down, reducing overall complexity and resiliency, and has already been mentioned, often produces monocultures. An Ailanthus forest in North America may look like a forest, but from an ecology point of view its really not because it will not contain the same richness and functional processes.
I can appreciate the logic of a world of weed ecology (humans being the weed par excellence) based on a palette of species perfectly adapted to our ‘disturbance’ mode or operating (which may be turn out to be relatively short and terminal from a broader time frame), but what we lose in this is immense and largely unknowable like climate change – which will further complicate the idea of nativity as biomes have begun to drift around the surface of the globe.
I would argue that the continuation and maintenance of diverse,complex ecologies (rather than aesthetics) is worth fighting for.

But those at the ICA do have a similar attitude: defensive, and burdened with an unstated assumption that nature is more or less static on the long term. That is clearly not true. Whither the mastodon?

But then we have to consider whether humans are causing the ecological shift. After all, that depends on whether you interpret humans to be part of the ecology or somehow separate. Looking back and forth between the XIIIe (or even the VIIIe) and an emergent slum in Madras, I think that’s an open question.

I was thinking if you expanded the timeframe, perhaps in terms of geologic time, “native” species wouldn’t exist, but all are in a continuous migration transported by the earth’s processes.