Salute to an activist turned observer

Webmaster of "Conservation Sense & Nonsense"

As regular readers will know, Nikki Hill and I are co-authoring a book tentatively entitled, “Don’t Blame the Messenger: A critique of the ‘invasive plant’ narrative.” This project is an expansion of a zine we produced on the same topic in January 2019.

While researching for the zine, Nikki stumbled across a blog called “Million Trees” where we found all sorts of incredibly useful information on the topics we were curious about. Sometime after, we both became acquainted with the webmaster through Facebook, and started email correspondence. Sometime after that, she renamed the website “Conservation Sense and Nonsense.”

In her own words:

Conservation Sense and Nonsense began in 2010 as the Million Trees blog to defend urban forests in the San Francisco Bay Area that were being destroyed because they are predominantly non-native. In renaming the Million Trees blog to Conservation Sense and Nonsense, we shift the focus away from specific projects toward the science that informed our opposition to those projects.

Many ecological studies have been published in the past 20 years, but most are not readily available to the public and scientists are often talking to one another, not to the general public. We hope to help you navigate the scientific jargon so that scientific information is more accessible to you. If this information enables you to evaluate proposed “restoration” projects to decide if you can or cannot support them, so much the better.

Since 2010, we have learned more about the ideology of invasion biology that spawned the native plant movement and the “restoration” industry that attempts to eradicate non-native plants and trees, usually using herbicides. We have read scores of books and studies that find little scientific evidence in support of the hypotheses of invasion biology. We have studied the dangers of pesticides and the growing body of evidence of the damage they do to the environment and all life.

Deforestation and Climate Change are two other topics that feature prominently on Conservation Sense and Nonsense.

She has definitely succeeded in her goal of making scientific information more accessible to a non-academic audience, in part by translating jargon into more regular language. She also rigorously cites all her work, and I’ve found this super helpful for my own research, because I can follow those citations, and then go down deeper rabbit holes from there.

Late last November, she announced that after 25 years of environmental work she would be transitioning “from activist to observer.” However, “Conservation Sense and Nonsense” will remain online, and she will occasionally be publishing work by other people (including me, who she featured on Feb. 1), as she has always done.

Some of my favorite articles on the site are found under these tags:

• Herbicides/Pesticides. My investigation into “invasive plants” began when I became aware that herbicides are the first go-to for eradication, and as someone who opposes the use of toxic chemicals, I wanted to know if it was warranted. (Spoiler alert: no.)

• Doug Tallamy. Tallamy is well-known for talking about relationships between native insects and native plants, but his claims are overstated and not always so well-substantiated.

• Eucalyptus trees. A popular narrative about these trees exaggerates the fire danger associated with them, but it’s really just a smokescreen (pun intended) for demonizing an introduced species that has become important to California ecology, especially the Monarch butterfly.

So this brief post is a salute to her and her work, and a recommendation that you visit the site and go down some rabbit holes yourself. It’s truly a valuable resource that’s packed with great information and is a pleasure to read.

I especially recommend Conservation Sense and Nonsense to people who are scientifically-minded and who peddle an anti-invasive view. She’s offering a different perspective, and it’s firmly based in science, and she shows her receipts. Her points can’t simply be dismissed out-of-hand. You’ll either need to offer a well-substantiated and current counter-argument, or adjust your own stance in the face of new information. Science doesn’t stand in place, and it’s not where it was in the ‘90s, or even the 2000’s.