Invasive. Not Invasive.

What marks an invasive species, really? We all hear the term and those of us who bother to notice can see the effects of an invasive species on a native ecosystem.

Is the definition actually for a species that is currently in place where it does not belong? If so, Homo sapiens is highest on the list, since we likely should only be where we evolved: Africa. But that's not going to change until we go extinct, so back to the real issue.

There is no doubt--to use an example--that pythons are a harmful invasive species in south Florida and in the Everglades National Park. The ecosystem of that part of Earth slowly evolved over millions of years without the presence of a vast, aggressive constrictor snake in its midst. The sudden introduction of such an animal is resulting in the decimation of the native animals that did evolve there and which do belong there. I have no problem labeling pythons in Florida as an invasive species.

Further, there are invasive animals that are present in a foreign ecosystem which are not--apparently--harmful within that environment. When I go kayaking on the Silver River in Florida I generally encounter bands of feral Rhesus monkeys. I won't go in to how they got there (humans brought them, of course), but I often used to wonder if they were harmful to the system in which they found themselves living. I did some reading about it, and learned that apparently they are not considered particularly harmful. General browsers, they don't seem to eat enough of any particular food item in the forests to hinder the lives of the native animals and plants around them.

So. Not all invasive species are harmful.

Some of the worst invasive species are not mammals, reptiles, mollusks, or fish. Many of the most destructive of these things are plants, insects, and pathogens (think of the American chestnut blight). Again, to take Florida as an example, the list of plants that are changing and destroying native ecosystems is off the scales. Quite actually every waterway in Florida is home to any number of invasive plant species. Once established, how do you even begin to remove plants that are fast-growing and endlessly clogging rivers, lakes, ponds, and streams? It's probably an impossible task. The thing is to try to keep it from happening in the first place. But where humans are concerned, the problem seems to be ongoing and never-ending. People are going to acquire and dispose of exotic plants where they should never have been allowed to have them in the first place.

But in the case of plants, what constitutes a harmful invasive species? I actually do have a definition of that which meets popular consensus:

Characterized by:

rapid growth
multiple reproductive methods
wide dispersal and survival
broad environmental tolerance
and resistance to management. (I'll get back to this later.)

And the problems they cause are:

loss of recreation
severe oxygen depletion
stunted fish populations, fish kills
water-flow restrictions, flooding
navigation restrictions
accelerated sedimentation
habitat destruction
loss of biodiversity
reduction in property values.

What strikes me about the list of problems is that they are so centered on the troubles presented to human recreation and human economics. The concern for the local animals and plants is really just something that sits there and is only noticed for its tendency for causing an inconvenience to humans.

Fuck that.

These are problems that beset the web of life in which we all live. Economic concerns are moot. Humans are at the base of the situation, sitting on the web of life that supports everything and methodically plucking out the strands until the whole thing collapses. This constant degradation of Mother Earth is not just going to result in the extinction of some species of big animals, or even of some entire environments that have been present for tens of millions of years. Currently we are in danger of witnessing the total collapse of everything that gives us the air we breathe, the water we need, and the food that sustains us. No more rhinos? No one cares. Hemlock trees extinct? Big deal. Invasive carp eating and out-competing every fish species they encounter? Feh.

We keep plucking out the bits of the web, one string at a time.

Implosion will arrive. And it's not as if we didn't see it coming.

In reference to that list--humans can't manage the Earth. We either live within the limitations of not causing the planet irreparable harm, or we kill it and die with it. You can't manage something with trillions of moving parts. You flow with it, or perish while breaking it.

We have chosen to ignore every warning.

Back in the early 2000s I set about searching out and viewing the big groves of ancient Eastern hemlock forests before they were all extinct from the introduction of an invasive insect species. So that's what I did--I hiked all over the southern Appalachians finding the old trees before they could all succumb. And I saw as many of these places as I could. Those groves? They're all gone, now. All of them. Mankind at its most selfish and pernicious.

This is Why

In something that is strange to me--because I can't understand why it's even posed--people often ask me why I spend so much time going to see wilderness, hiking mountains, camping, backpacking, and kayaking rivers.

So...this is why:

The Earth as we have known it, as it was when She gave birth to us, is dying. We are rapidly killing off the ecosystems from which we came, and on which all life on Earth depends. Humans despoil everything they covet. Forests are felled. Rivers are dammed and diverted. Mountains are carved down, valleys filled in, aquifers poisoned. The animals who are our companions are slaughtered and eaten, or killed and stripped of their skins, or merely murdered for sport. There are people who would shoot dead the last rhinoceros just so they can consume its horn; or kill the final tiger to eat its bones.

For most of my life--for I am a reader--I have known that at some point humans would finish devouring the Earth. After all, we gnaw away at the very crust of the planet and grind mountains into toxic heaps to get at what makes a tiny few of us wealthy. But now, in my old age, I realize that I am watching the extinction of entire ecosystems before my own mortal coil is wound down. I may actually live to see the last tigers go, and witness the final days of the last elephant.

This is why I go into the wilderness. I want to see these places now, while they still--even if only vaguely--resemble the state they were in before we crushed them beneath our heels.

A few years ago I set out to witness the virgin groves of giant hemlock trees in our southern forests. Because I knew that an invasive pest was consuming them and that our government would not do anything to stop it. So much more politically expedient to buy billion-dollar weapons than to preserve forests. And I was right. Those forests are all dead, now. Those hemlocks are ghostly trunks of bleaching wood, no longer green, no more to shelter animals who once lived among their branches.

The only thing that gives me any reason to feel positive about what we are doing is that I know that we are also not immune to extinction. Only those with the utmost hubris deny it (although they are many). But as we feast on our own home to make a dollar we will discover that we are going to go down with the ship into which we fired so many holes.

And when we are gone, the things we leave in our wake will evolve. They will spread out and radiate and refill those ecological niches that we left bare. Evolution will do its job. Given time, a rat can become a tiger. Given tens of thousands of years, a pigeon can become an eagle. Common guppies will turn into sharks. Deer, or something like deer will one day roam the places we had spoiled.

As for us...we'll be gone forever. We had our chance and we wrecked it. No trips to Mars. No colonies in space. No brotherhood of all.

But there will be peace.

Once mountains in West Virginia. Now a toxic wasteland.

Nature Heals

In the absence of Mankind wrecking the Earth, Mother Nature can move in and quickly hide the wounds. A classic example of the boom and bust of human greed and the reclamation by Her Graciousness is illustrated in the brief history of one horrible place called Volcano, West Virginia.

The town was founded on the abundant oil fields that once lay beneath the crust here. An enterprising capitalist bought up the land and began to drill for oil. Rail lines came in and soon the place was thriving. Of course the land was raped in the way that only the oil industry can commit such a crime. The town burned down not once, but twice. The first time it burned the community recovered, but the last time was it. There just wasn't enough oil remaining under the soil for any effort to be made to preserve and rebuild, and so Volcano was left to die. Which it quickly did.

Many people wring their hands over the destruction that Mankind has wrought on the natural world. And this worry is for good reason. But most of these people think that when we're done, and when we're gone, there will be no way for Nature to repair the damage.

But when we're done, and when we've killed ourselves off (which we assuredly will do), then the forests will move quickly in. Vegetation and rot and rust and rain and gravity and wind will soon scrub away all sign that we were even here.

If you don't believe me, walk the woods where once a thriving town and booming oil industry stood in a spot called Volcano, West Virginia.

Hotel, Volcano, WV.

Power Station, Volcano WV.

Interior of the power station.

Town Hall, Volcano

Residences and oil derricks.

Homes, including that of one physician.

Part of the old downtown Volcano.

This was once a thriving city. Unless you look for the hidden details, you can't tell that there were once rail stations, oil wells, opera houses, grocery stores, general stores, doctor's offices, banks, barber shops, schools, churches, mansions, and thriving neighborhoods on this land reclaimed now by the forests.

Here and there, you can see foundations and even the remains of rock-walled rooms.

To see what's left of this house, the mansion where the town's richest man once lived, see the photo below.

Here is just about all that remains of the mansion where the oil tycoon who founded the town once made his home. Later, it was sold to some suckers who were told they could make it into a hotel and turn a profit. That's hard to do when the railroad pulls out (taking even the rails with them) and 99%of the population vanishes into the hills. Later, hobos used it to take shelter, eventually burning it down (seemingly the fate of all buildings).

It Will Happen Here

Carole took this one of me and Andy at Mammoth Hot Springs. Not too many years ago energy companies wanted to tap the thermal aquifer beneath Yellowstone National Park to run steam turbines to create electricity. This would effectively have destroyed most, if not all, of the thermal features in the park.

Until I get a chance to go back west and visit Yellowstone and other National Parks in those amazing places, I'll be poring over the photos we took and reliving those memories. For years I have realized that our remaining wild lands are existing on the verge of destruction. It's only a matter of time--and I'm convinced short time--until they're all either outright destroyed or ruined beyond only the application of peace and time to restore.

And, of course, restored only in the absence of Mankind.

Looking at our parks and wilderness areas, reduced to relatively small patches of territory around the Earth, I can see now that saving it all is an impossibility and that the final destruction of our remaining ecosystems and the living things who dwell within them is a lost cause. For these artificial boundaries that we set up to indicate a park or national forest or protected wilderness are ephemeral and easily destroyed through the same legislative acts that created these tenuous boundaries.

To see what can and will happen one has only to look to recent history in places like Rwanda and the Sudan. There, National Park boundaries were ignored and overrun by desperate people displaced by poverty and warfare. In short order they became wastelands where animals were nothing but food for the raving hoards of weapon-carrying humans and the forests were felled for fuel and housing, the waters fouled. So much for parks.

Think it can't happen here? It can, and will. Already I read of timber poachers who creep into National Parks to surreptitiously fell old growth trees in the absence of rangers. We can't afford rangers, you see, and there are more than enough desperate assholes in the USA willing to rape their own parks to cut down ancient hardwoods to sell for enough money to buy a big screen TV. Bears are shot for body parts to sell to rich Asians who believe in old superstitions that instruct them that consuming such things will increase their potency and likelihood of conceiving a male heir.

Even in Yellowstone, which showed me the power of Nature, the park is constantly under threat. Land owners and gun rights madders are whipped into a frenzy of insanity over the existence of wolves and bison which they see as threats. These idiots don't understand that they're being used by energy and real estate interests to weaken laws and regulations that protect these creatures. Without those protections rich men can become even richer mining the earth and mowing down the forests and building atop the places that now serve as home for the creatures that are just in the way of their profits.

Our parks are doomed. Our forests will be cut. Our rivers will be fouled. Our fellow creatures will be exterminated. All of this will be done for money.

And the only thing one can really do for it is to see it all before it's gone. So if you want to witness an unspoiled mountain vista free of urban sprawl, then I suggest you get yourself to such a place and hike into it with all due speed. If you want to see a free-roaming herd of bison living as they once did before Man arrived on the scene, then I think you should rush out to one of the few parks left that afford you this chance and lay your eyes upon it. If you hunger to walk through virgin forests of old growth trees then you'd best hurry up and do so, because between timber companies and invasive pests and climate change and mysterious diseases I fear we're going to see the end of such places in quick order.

Mother Nature does fine art with super-heated water and mineral deposition.

If these hot springs were ever tapped, they would be destroyed.

The ever-changing pools at the top of Mammoth Hot Springs.

Hot springs and mountain vistas.

One of the amazing roaring features we witnessed on our Yellowstone trip.

This huge buffalo was using a dust wallow on a steep slope above the valley.

It was the beginning of the rut and this bull was staking out this cow and warning everyone away. Later that same day, I watched a group of motor bikers pull up beside an enormous bull bison sitting in a wallow beside the road, walk up to him, surround the animal, as one of the idiots reached out to touch the almost one-ton buffalo. Humans can, and will, destroy everything that they can get their mitts on.

Telephoto shot of part of one of the enormous herds we watched in Hayden Valley.

A bit of the hundreds-strong herd in Hayden Valley. Once upon a time, the west was all like this for thousands and thousands of miles. We've destroyed 98% of it, but that apparently is not enough. That remaining 2% must, apparently, also go away.

View of 10,300-foot Mount Washburn, which I had climbed a day earlier. It has one building on it, and would, some would argue, be better off if it could be covered in subdivisions and gas stations. I am reminded of Highlands NC and the hideous sprawl of houses wrecking the slopes every time I look at an unspoiled mountain.

Take a Trip!

If there are parks and wilderness areas that you want to see before it's too late, I'd suggest you do so.

The clock is ticking down and mass extinctions and irreversible environmental damage is in full swing. We're not talking about centuries. Oblivion for many species and many environments are now measured in months and years.

I plan to take at least two trips next year to see some places that I fear will not be around much longer in anything resembling their natural state.

We've really messed things up.