Hat Tip to DANEgerus, my favorite blog from Oregon, if only for pointing out that in adored and emulated Portland, the city sends buses to rescue passengers when winter weather shuts down light rail. Hey Mayor Dave, Got Winter? Today he points out the newest environmentalist action cause is INVASIVE SPECIES. The Washington Post proclaims It Sprouts! It Climbs! It Strikes Without Warning!
"Invasive species are the greatest environmental threat of the 21st century, bar none," said Tom Stohlgren, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Institute of Invasive Species Science, who ranks it a greater problem than global climate change.”Science will not ultimately support a theory of significant danger associated with a warming trend on Planet Earth. We live on a marble suspended in cold space and the ability to slow down heat loss into space is the reason life exists on the surface, and exists with greater biomass and biodiversity in the warmest climates. So now the eco-socialists will attempt to gain control over land and money by demonizing a large number plants and animals.
Although the federal government is beginning to respond, several experts said the nation has not focused enough money and attention on the problem. The Geological Survey is spending $12 million, or a little over 1 percent of its budget, on nonnative organisms this fiscal year, and other agencies spend a similar portion of their funds.
"We are not dealing with it adequately," said John M. Randall, who directs the Nature Conservancy's invasive-species initiative.
The core belief of this movement is that there are natural species in an area called ‘native’ species. The introduction of a new species into an area, therefore, makes the species ‘nonnative’. Native is good since nature is good. Nonnative is bad, especially if human activity can be blamed. This belief minimizes the importance of the fact that ecological communities have forever evolved and changed over time. The ‘native’ plants in Wisconsin are those found here when white European settlers arrived. Those plants in turn were invaders several thousand years earlier as the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, and moss and lichens yielded to grass and trees.
The extremist environmental movement is about condemning the effects of human life on this planet in an attempt to obtain power, money and control over human activity. In the purest sense, these advocates don’t really love nature because nature is a constant dynamic struggle between organisms. What they really value is gardening, because they desire human control over the composition of the diversity. Special places should be protected and humans should sometimes be part of the biotic mix on the side of the status quo, but it is financial insanity to fight mother nature everywhere.
