People Are Dead Due to Invasive Species

People introduce invasive species all over the world

In the middle ages, they brought rats, ridden with fleas, ridden with a bacteria, pestis yersinia. This Black Death killed half of the population in a few select cities. It changed the world, just as our destructive climate changing is taking out the world we once knew.

We still invite the rats all over the world, in our cities, with our garbage, and with our profligate waste of all we take from the world. To tackle invasive species means to change our habits and our land ethic.

Today we have introduced another foe that seems, at least at first glance, less menacing.

What about strands of grass?

It is the nasty grass that kills

We lived in Hawaii almost two decades. Hawaii is world leader in the introduction of invasive species.

Introduced animals like the mosquito, fire ant, rats, pigs, cattle, beetles, and an encyclopedic list of agricultural specimens were brought to Hawaii. As a result, most native forest is gone. Naive birds are extinct. Zoonotic diseases fly in on airplanes, as well as having been shipped here with livestock or plants.

On our farm, we tackled a particularly nasty kind of six to ten foot high non-native grass called Guinea Grass. There are also other non-native grasses. In fact, most of Hawaii is covered with non-native vegetation, and peppered with thousands of non-native animals and insects that live among it.

Because of it’s sharp, serrated edges, insane height, density, and clumping roots, it is very hard to remove. We called it Nasty Grass. It can raise welts, cut through may fabrics, and provide habitat for destructive pigs (another monstrous non-native introduced by people.)

Often, empty lots, or abandoned pineapple, mac nut, or coffee orchards succumb to its spreading madness. After years, we only got all of ours cleared within months of relocating to the west coast.

Grass kills by being fuel. In Lahaina, Maui, former agricultural lands were left to be invaded by Guinea and other non-natives. As the climate is now hotter and drier, the grasses are tinder to raging fires.

All of Hawaii is volcanic. This provides for steep and rolling hills. Places where geography and weather can combine to sweep fire, wind, or rain into funnel-like flares drive it forward.

Add wind. A distant hurricane miles out to sea. And you have an inferno.

Death by a thousands grass cuts to the natural order.

Hawaii is just one place discovered by non-natives

Hawaii is not the only place getting hotter and drier, stormier or wetter, or more invaded by non-native species.

All habitats all over our planet are seeing impacts of our continued use of fossil fuels, our consumption of the native landscape, and the careless agricultural practices that replace carbon sinks and biodiversity richness with monoculture and meddlesome domesticated plants and animals.

In the mean time we are losing precious treasures of splendid species. Not just the magnificent animals, like elephants, tigers, and polar bears. We are losing vast prairies, woodlands, and seascapes. We are losing Joshua trees, giant sequoias, ancient old-growth forests of the north, the Amazon rainforest, and cypress/mangrove coastal buffers.

Loss of any of these will propel more erosion, more fires, more floods, more landslides, and will accelerate tipping points.

One important way to protect our international treasures is through learning your own area and planting as many species as you can that belong there. Refuse to landscape with non-natives that could turn invasive, or that don’t attract the other flora and fauna that are the natural soil and habitat builders of any location.

When you do have an invasive pest or plant, don’t use toxins that could kill other species. For plants, it’s worth your time to dig out the roots. For rats, mice, or non-beneficial insects, investigate solutions that don’t harm other living species, pets or plants.

One more thing is to honor the traditional and sustainable means by which ancient people took care of planet and place. That is, love, admire, be thankful for, and continually inspired by biodiversity that makes all life possible.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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