Native or Not

I am worried about today's native plant frenzy. Nature centers and environmental groups organize outings among their devotees to rip up and pull out non-native plants and substitute them with "native" plants.

Two summers ago, our neighbors tore out a clutch of sweet honeysuckle that had been gracing that yard - and the air of summer evenings - since I was a child. Several naturalist folks I know have told me that honeysuckle is an "invasive" around here. Which means, it really ought to go. Though I am not sure that is the reason my neighbors ripped it out, or because it looks a bit messy.

But I do know that we seem to have this modern conceit that native always means best, and non-native always means invasive and destructive.

Indeed, some non-natives are dangerous and destructive, threatening to overtake and destroy whole ecosystems. And certainly they should be removed. But not all non-natives are bad. I once had a conversation with a landscape architect about how one even defines what plants are native and what are not; how long a plant must be established in an area and how integral a part of the sustainable ecosystem for it to be considered native?

The answer is not so clear. Nature is not static but constantly evolving. So whether it changes through spores that float through the air over thousands of miles or seeds that hitch a ride on a carcass floating in the water or in the clefts of wood pallets that come in freighters, local nature often finds itself serving as hosts to well-travelled nature. That is the way the world grows. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes that is destructive.

In the first chapter of a book called, Nature and Ideology by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Stephen Jay Gould warns us against the hegemony of nativist thinking. Native, he argues bravely, does not always mean best.

Despite the popularly misunderstood lessons of evolution, he argues, "Organisms do not necessarily, or even generally, inhabit the geographic area best suited to their attributes... 'Natives' are only the plants that happened to arrive first and be able to flourish... while their capacity for flourishing only indicates a status as 'better than' others available, not as optimal or globally 'best suited'..."

And, I would argue, "first" itself is a relative term.

I write this not because I have any truck with some favored invasive, or non-native. (Although I do still lament the loss of that honeysuckle.) And certainly not because I am looking forward to the tussle I anticipate from dear friends who no doubt radically disagree with me.

I write to remind us that we constantly need to be on guard against any orthodoxy. Even orthodoxies in our attitudes toward nature.

Every decade, it seems, we discover, at some remove from its inception, that a once-celebrated, universally-adopted idea really harbored seeds of destruction (think DDT and thalidomide). This should warn us against our greatest yearnings to find the magic bullet; the grand solution. It should warn us against our tendency to declare Hallelujah at a new promise and embrace it as the latest orthodoxy.

Whether we are chasing the latest fad promoting Vitamin D or clear-cutting land to make room for suburbia, sprawling malls and cull-de-sacs, we may one day wake up and find the truth different than we had imagined.

Even as we reach for progress and improvement, we need to remember that today's new ideas that come to debunk older ideas may themselves fall out of favor - not because they are no longer fashionable but because they are indeed wrong.

Progress entails lots of promise, loads of failure and a few grand successes.

We should not be afraid to embrace and try new ideas, but neither should we too passionately elevate them to the level of orthodoxy.