Abstract
‘Place’ is a contested concept in conservation and restoration. In this chapter we will focus on invasion biology to examine some of the topics related to this controversial concept. The recent emergence of this discipline has gone hand-in-hand with heated debates on the so-called exotic species issue. Apparently, these debates have ended in stalemate, with only two extreme positions: nativism and cosmopolitanism. To break up this dichotomy and to give the debate a new impulse, we will explore the different metaphors that can be found within the scientific discipline of invasion biology in some detail.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Its impenetrable stands displace virtually all other vegetation, and its dense root mat oozes substances poisonous to other plants. Its airborne secretions are poisonous to humans and cause severe respiratory and skin irritation. Conservationists have tried to burn it out, but it is fire-adapted and spreads by burning. Its inner bark is a wet, insulating sponge, while its outer bark is dry, and its leaves are laced with a flammable oil. Although it sucks up water four times as fast as the native sawgrass, it burns with explosive force. Several days after a devastating fire, the tree sprouts new growth and rains millions of seeds onto burnt land. They germinate in only three days, and seedlings may reach six feet in their first year’ (Shrader-Frechette, 2001, p. 508).
- 2.
Margolis points out that the burden of bioinvasion falls unevenly across the world. ‘The human toll is often devastating to the poorest nations, where a failed crop can start a famine. Implacable exotic pests like the cassava mealybug, gray leaf spot and witchweed claim up to half the harvests in the poorest countries.’
- 3.
The plan failed. Some of the pike probably survived in tributary streams above the lake. The voracious invaders were rediscovered in 1999 and now again threaten California’s multimillion-dollar Chinook salmon and steelhead fisheries. Late in the summer of 2007, ten years after the first effort, government biologists will deploy lethal doses of fish poison once more. Only this time, most residents of Portola have accepted the plan (Bland, 2006).
- 4.
Daniel Simberloff (2003) believes that critics such as Sagoff have introduced a red herring and tend to ignore the ecological and economic impacts of bioinvasion.
- 5.
Light mentions cleanups as the most obvious cases of benevolent restoration. Cleanups include the bio-activation of existing micro-organisms in soils to allow the land to essentially clean itself up, and cleaning out exotic plants that were introduced at some time into a site, allowing the native plants to reestablish themselves.
- 6.
Davis contrasts the two paths as Platonic and Aristotelian approaches, respectively.
- 7.
When he first coined the word ‘cybernetics’ in 1945, Norbert Wiener defined it as ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’. Wiener brought together two fields of research. On the one hand, he elaborated on the engineering-oriented research into the ‘servomechanical’ nature of control and communication in machines, using the ideas of information flow, noise, feedback and stability. On the other hand, he built on what physiologists like Walter Canon had developed under the headings of ‘homeostasis’: a variety of mechanisms in the organism to maintain fixed levels of blood sugar, blood proteins, fat, calcium as well as an adequate supply of oxygen, a constant body temperature and so on.
- 8.
Their book The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) is one of the most frequently cited books in ecology and popular biology.
- 9.
The concept is mentioned more than once in The SER International Primer on Ecological Restoration (SER Science & Policy Working Group, 2004) (available from: http:/http://www.ser.org).
- 10.
MacArthur’s ‘dissertation work, a study of community structure and niche partitioning among different species of warbler, also yielded a paper for Ecology, which appeared in 1958 and became recognized as a minor classic’ (Quammen, 1996, p. 410).
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Keulartz, J., van der Weele, C. (2009). Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Reframing in Invasion Biology. In: Drenthen, M., Keulartz, F., Proctor, J. (eds) New Visions of Nature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_18
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