Wild Food Foragers vs Ecologists

[urbpan]

Over the past month I've become slowly aware of a separation between two communities that should be closely aligned. It's similar to the division between cat-lovers and ecologists, but with its own distinctions

Comments

[asakiyume]

I don't like invasive plants that become monocultures (like phragmites and purple loosestrife, etc.), but I do find myself wondering, do they really become monocultures?

(At which point feel free to say, Yes. Yes actually they do. And I'll believe you and back off, but let me explain why I wonder/doubt)

I was under the impression that Rosa multiflora was like that--and maybe it is? And yet it seems like a lot of birds like it well enough.... I guess that doesn't solve the problem of diversity of plants, and even if the birds are liking it, I understand that there are animals etc. that were dependent on whatever it's displaced that are hurting.

--In any case, I think it fine to want to preserve the biodiversity of an area the way it was before an invasive came/comes along. I think it's fine to *not* just simply roll over and accept invasives. But at the same time--and here I'm speaking not as a forager, but just as a, I don't know... Gaia oriented person? Whatever--things *do* change, and things *do* move around. "Yeah, but never in the past the way they do now thanks to container ships [etc.]" --and true. But that *is* the reality now. And on the one hand, we can fight it, but on the other hand, with invasives that are pretty well established, I think we have to acknowledge that while we might be able to eradicate them from, say, a nature preserve, we're not going to get them out of the entire ecosystem, so we might as well brace ourselves and look at what the ecosystem is like now that they're here. I'm thinking of things like, precisely, phragmites and knotweed and oriental bittersweet and so on.

.... Okay. I talked a lot. Sorry/thank you for listening.

[urbpan]

I agree completely. On some level, the fight against Oriental bittersweet (for example) is already lost. But I feel like: if we have stewardship of a given parcel of land, we have a responsibility to take care of it, and taking care of it means removing invasives. That's relatively easy to do in a back yard (we have successfully removed all the ailanthus and barberry, and continually and possibly perpetually are removing the garlic mustard, knotweed, swallow-wort, and o bittersweet) but much more difficult and labor intensive on a larger scale.

At Drumlin farm, they chose a few species (knotweed, swallow-wort, and house sparrows (!)) and a few locations, and did a good job of drastically reducing if not eliminating the species from the 250+ acres.

I've argued for (on this blog) leaving ailanthus be in urban areas, since it's one of the few trees that will grow. I'd probably not do the same today, but I also wouldn't argue to remove ailanthus trees from an urban lot unless there was a good plan in place to replace them with something. (sumac? honeylocust?)