Are Invasive Species Really Bad.
The Invasive Species War
Boston Sunday Globe
Sunday July 31st, 2011
The European water chestnut is considered an invasive species, one of the 1,500 or so plants and animals across the united States that have ended up settling in places where they don’t belong because of human activity. It’s a dubious distinction – one that most of us associate with evil carp overpowering local fish populations in the Mississippi River Basin, stubborn zebra mussels clogging pipes and killing birds in the Great lakes, and the Asian long horned beetle wiping out trees here in Massachusetts. Controlling the spread of such creatures has been a priority among ecologists and conservationists since roughly the 1980s.
The reasons to fight invasive species may be economic, or conservationist, or just practical, but underneath all these efforts is a potent ad galvanizing idea: that if we work hard enough to keep foreign species from infiltrating habitats where they might do harm, we can help nature heal from the damage we humans have done to it as a civilization.
In the past several months, however, that idea has come under blistering attack.