Abstract
Globalization has undeniably impacted the Earth’s ecosystems, but it has also influenced how we think about natural systems. Three fourths of the world’s forests are now altered by human activity, which challenges our concepts of native ecosystems. The dichotomies of pristine vs. disturbed as well as our view of native and non-native species, have blurred; allowing us to acknowledge new paradigms about how humans and nature interact. We now understand that the use of militaristic language to define the perceived role of a plant species is holding us back from the fact that novel systems (new combinations of all species) can often provide valuable ecosystem services (i.e., water, carbon, nutrients, cultural, and recreation) for creatures (including humans). In reality, ecosystems exist in a gradient from native to intensely managed – and “non-nativeness” is not always a sign of a species having negative effects. In fact, there are many contemporary examples of non-native species providing critical habitat for endangered species or preventing erosion in human-disturbed watersheds. For example, of the 8,000–10,000 non-native species introduced to Hawai‘i, less than 10% of these are self-sustaining and 90 of those pose a danger to native biota and are considered invasive. In this paper, we explore the native/non-native binary, the impacts of globalization and the political language of invasion through the lens of conservation biology and sociology with a tropical island perspective. This lens gives us the opportunity to offer a place-based approach toward the use of empirical observation of novel species interactions that may help in evaluating management strategies that support biodiversity and ecosystem services. Finally, we offer a first attempt at conceptualizing a site-specific approach to develop “metrics of belonging” within an ecosystem.
Highlights
Decades of restricting humans from natural areas has sometimes led to failed attempts, socially and economically, to protect and restore our planet’s biodiversity
The conservation and protection of nature without humans was our collective response to honoring the forces of nature – and within that effort was a paradigm that native species are inherently good, and non-native species must be removed to protect the integrity of a system
If we acknowledge that not all non-native species are harmful or especially impactful in ecosystems – can we reevaluate our attitudes toward native and non-native species and place more importance and emphasis on harmful invasions rather than the mere distinction between native and non-native? In other words, the native/non-native binary assumes that native is “good” and non-native is “bad” and has the effect of uncritically assigning the moral status of species based on a one dimensional logic of origins
Summary
Decades of restricting humans from natural areas has sometimes led to failed attempts, socially and economically, to protect and restore our planet’s biodiversity. The use of militaristic language in ecology and conservation biology literature was recently quantified, and word counts of militaristic language were greater in articles on invasive species than other topics and were greater in basic science journals than in applied science journals (Janovsky and Larson, 2019) These word choices may have been said unwittingly (i.e., alerting toward newly found problems), to some they overly express a nativist language of militarism, inciting greater protections of nation-state borders through the preservation of ecosystems to resist biological invaders (see Figure 1). Weed risk assessments and barrier zones are effective but not foolproof tools to reduce the likelihood of future invasion (Coutts et al, 2018)
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