Collateral Damage (full version, parts 1-3)

The high costs of "control"

Roadside Bindweed in Arizona [photo by author]

I originally planned to release this for paid subscribers in three parts. But I put the first one out in early May, and got too busy with farmwork and life to post following parts soon enough after that it would make sense, so here's all three together, including the first part already posted. Lol. This is an unfinished chapter, but complete enough to present for the ideas. (The biggest omission to correct is that Atrazine is not discussed. That will be added in a later draft.)

Collateral Damage

Thirty years ago the greatest threats to nature were chainsaws, bulldozers, and poisons. Now the greatest threats are wild plants and animals. And what do we use to fight them? Chainsaws, bulldozers, and poisons. Who does this serve?

—David Theodoropoulos, 2003ⁱ

In the following pages we detail some of the ecological damage that is routinely caused by efforts to eradicate, control or manage “invasive” plants. We do so in order to stress that the topic of “invasive” plant management is not merely academic. The demonization that follows from the label, and the policies that follow from the demonization, can have serious ecological consequences, and we want the reader to have these consequences in mind from the beginning.

Control methods can be classified into three broad categories: mechanical, biological and chemical. All the different means within these categories have their own rates of efficacy and their own drawbacks from the perspective of reducing or eliminating the “invasives.” As practiced, very few methods are effective at removing their targets without killing non-targets, and only then at very small scales. As the size of a project grows, so does the likelihood of unintended consequences and collateral damage from any method.