Second day of the new cooler herbicide free bush regeneration season. Getting into the rhythm with a keen eye as we progress through earlier slashed, pulled and layered mulch sites. Emerging red cedars, white cedars, pencil cedars, bangalow palms, tamarinds, rosewoods, eucalypts, all strong as they reach through the mulched and decaying lantana from last winters slash. Interesting too, the Giant devil’s Fig, patches of up to 10 in what was full lantana cover last year which was slashed. Easily removed with the hoe or mattock. No drones with herbicides will have a reason to come here, that is if we let the government play the devil with our ecology.
In Fred Pearce’s introduction to THE NEW WILD, he writes and I quote, “rogue rats, predatory jellyfish, suffocating super weeds, snakehead fish wriggling across the land——–alien species are taking over. Nature’s vagabonds, ruffians and carpetbaggers are headed for an ecosystem near you. These biological adventurers are travelling the world in even greater numbers, hitchhiking in our hand luggage, hidden in cargo holds, stuck to the bottom of ships and migrating in greater numbers to keep up with climate change. Our modern, human dominated world of globalized trade and messed up eco systems is giving foot loose species many more chances to cruise the planet and set up home in distant lands. Some run riot, destroying local species, trashing habitat and spreading disease.
We all like a simple story with good guys and bad guys. And alien’s always make the easiest enemy.
Conservationists have for half a century been battling to hold back the aliens. They call them the second biggest threat to nature, after habitat loss. That concern is laudable. They want to protect native species and the ecosystems they inhabit. But do we fear these ecological outsiders too much? Is our fear usually little more than green xenophobia? Most of us are appalled when foreigners are treated as somehow intrinsically dangerous. Yet the orthodoxy in conservation is to demonize foreign species in just that way”.
