Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration

272 Pages·2015·10.4 MB·English

by  Tao Orion

Praise for Beyond the War on Invasive Species
“A gathering body of evidence against the scale of chemical interventions in both agriculture and wild
nature is fueling a battle of geopolitical proportions. In the process of asking the questions about how best
to restore nature, Orion exposes a deep ethical corruption at the heart of both ecological science and the
environmental movement.”
—DAVID HOLMGREN, from the Foreword
“Beyond the War on Invasive Species is a devastating exposé of the military-industrial invasive species
complex and a sorely needed and impeccably researched volume that should become one of many as we
recover from self-destructive attempts to eradicate parts of nature instead of acting with an understanding
of the whole.”
—BEN FALK, author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead and founder of Whole Systems Design
“Beyond the War on Invasive Species is part of a new, much more nuanced conversation about ‘invasive’
species that is taking place in science, agriculture, and land management. It provides an analysis of the new
science that looks for ecosystem function as well as harm from newly arrived species, looks at species
migration in the context of climate change, and broadens our conversation to look at these organisms in the
context of the human ecological footprint. Orion offers land-management guidelines, based in permaculture
design process, that help to chart a new way forward in our new land of novel ecosystems.”
—ERIC TOENSMEIER, author of Paradise Lot and Perennial Vegetables
“An interesting and valuable contribution to the ongoing refutation of invasive species ideology. Detailed
and wide-ranging, Orion extends and deepens several analyses of invasionism, and offers several
interesting new perspectives. She points to holistic systems management as an alternative to the current war
on invasives. Land managers and invasionists would do well to give it a careful read.”
—D.I. THEODOROPOLOUS, author of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience
“Beyond the War on Invasive Species creates an essential pathway for deeper care of the Earth. The holistic
perspective of invasives is shared through deep experience and thoughtfulness and ultimately leads us to a
greater and more aligned role in restoration of our home’s ecosystems in these changing times. This book
offers a critical role in civilization’s evolution and highlights actions that recognize deeper values that
benefit our society as a whole.”
—KATRINA BLAIR, author of The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival
“In her fascinating and highly readable book, Beyond the War on Invasive Species, author Tao Orion points
out the shortcomings of our current approach toward landscape restoration and invasive species. Rather
than seeing these exotic plants and animals simply as invaders that need to be eradicated, she argues, we
should recognize the beneficial role they play in the environment and the many essential services they
could provide to human beings. ‘Embracing rampancy,’ as Orion exuberantly puts it, turns the perceived
problem of invasive species into practical solutions that also allow us to make peace with both the land and
ourselves.”
—LARRY KORN, author of One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka
“Some of our most productive and tasty plants in the permaculture landscape are vilified as invasive weeds
that need controlling. This is a mindset that also promotes a delineation between conservation and
agriculture. My personal response is to cultivate fewer conventional annual vegetables and grow and eat as
many of these weeds as is appropriate, creating an extensive, diverse, and resilient forage system in my
own backyard. It is time to stop putting land management into boxes and create wildlife habitats and food
in stacked systems.
“Tao Orion explains how to take advantage of the vigor of ‘invasive’ edible and useful exotics and
harvest them. This is how to bring ecosystems back into balance. This is adaptive permaculture thinking at
the broadscale level. Chelsea Green has produced yet another pioneering book, demonstrating how
permaculture is way ahead of conventional land-management practices.”
—MADDY HARLAND, editor of Permaculture magazine, cofounder of The Sustainability Centre in the
UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
“This book brings much-needed balance to the overheated debate about so-called invasive species. Tao
Orion’s meticulously researched yet engaging work shows that the true culprits are nearly always human-
caused disturbance and development, and that species shifts are a symptom, not a cause, of this habitat
destruction. Beyond the War on Invasive Species is an important book that offers a path away from
unsuccessful restoration efforts—based on poor science and policy—and toward new, ecologically sound
programs for building and preserving biodiversity.”
—TOBY HEMENWAY, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The
Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience
“Tao Orion has brought together personal experience, careful study, and visionary thinking to turn us
toward becoming useful people of place. Her exploration widens the narrow concept of invasion (so often
repeated but seldom carefully thought through) and elucidates the trouble of shortsightedness. We are not
threatened by aliens, but rather we are turning our backs on the big picture.”
—TOM WARD, author of Greenward, Ho! Herbal Home Remedies and cofounder of Siskiyou
Permaculture

Copyright © 2015 by Tao Orion.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in
writing from the publisher.
“Work Song” copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of
Counterpoint.
Project Manager: Alexander Bullett
Developmental Editor: Brianne Goodspeed
Copy Editor: Deborah Heimann
Proofreader: Brianne Bardusch
Indexer: Peggy Holloway
Designer: Melissa Jacobson
Printed in the United States of America.
First printing June, 2015.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 16 17 18
Our Commitment to Green Publishing
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align
our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business
enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using
vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper
that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the
Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers,
and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Beyond the
War on Invasive Species was printed on paper supplied by McNaughton & Gunn that contains 100%
postconsumer recycled fiber.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orion, Tao, 1980–
Beyond the war on invasive species : a permaculture approach to ecosystem restoration / Tao Orion.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60358-563-7 (pbk.) —ISBN 978-1-60358-564-4 (ebook)
1. Permaculture. 2. Restoration ecology. 3. Introduced organisms—Control. 4. Endemic animals—
Conservation. 5. Endemic plants—Conservation. I. Title. II. Title: Permaculture approach to ecosystem
restoration.
S494.5.P47O75 2015
631.5'8—dc23
2015006881
Chelsea Green Publishing
85 North Main Street, Suite 120
White River Junction, VT 05001
[phone]
www.chelseagreen.com
For Sylvan, and the world we give to you.
“We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process
heal our own—indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity,
beauty, and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our
sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared
our evolutionary process.”
—WANGARI MAATHAI
“My friend, all theory is gray, and the Golden tree of life is green.”
—GOETHE
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Against All Ethics
2. Getting to the Root of Invasive Species
3. Thinking Like an Ecosystem
4. A Matter of Time
5. Problems into Solutions
6. Everyone Gardens
7. Restoring Restoration
8. Putting Permaculture to Work in Restoration
Acknowledgments
APPENDIX A. Species Identification List
APPENDIX B. Organisms that Moved around the World Prior to the
Modern Colonial Era
APPENDIX C. Recommended Resources for Holistic Restoration and
Invasive Species Management Alternatives
Notes
About the Author
Foreword
In the 1970s when Bill Mollison and I began working on the concept of
permaculture, we recognized local and global biodiversity as a treasure trove of
biological wealth that could be combined to create designed ecologies for
sustaining humanity beyond the fossil-fuel era. In Australia, the paucity of
cultivated indigenous plants and valued native animals was the context in which
we highlighted the potential of native plants and animals as integral to
permaculture.
As permaculture mushroomed in the context of the 1970s’ energy crises
and back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, one of the most surprising critiques of the
concept was from a small network of botanists and environmental activists
promoting the idea that no plants capable of spreading should be grown,
anywhere! (At the same time, these activists accepted that agriculture would
continue to feed us with foreign species maintained with industrial inputs.) The
serious suggestion that permaculture was potentially one of the greatest threats
to global biodiversity because of its focus on using a larger, rather than a
smaller, range of species to support humanity, seemed remarkably similar to
disputes between various schools of Marxism in the 1960s.
Over the following three decades, this ideology of demonizing spreading
species as a threat to biodiversity (on a scale rivaling climate change) took over
the mainstream of environmental activism and the biological sciences, especially
in the English-speaking world. Scientific research papers rebranding spreading
species as “invasives” (or in Australia, “environmental weeds”) burgeoned,
filling peer-review journals. The correct botanical (and emotionally neutral) term
“naturalization” was abandoned because it recognized the validity of the process
by which species become native to a new place.
This new science of “invasion ecology” informed the education of a cadre
of natural-resource-management professionals, supported by taxpayer funds.
These resources mobilized armies of volunteers in a “war on weeds.” But labor
and even machine-intensive methods of weed control were soon sidelined in
favor of herbicides that environmentalists and ecologists accepted as a necessary
evil in the vain hope of winning the war against an endless array of newly
naturalizing species. For the chemical corporations, this new and rapidly
expanding market began to rival the use of herbicides by farmers, with almost
unlimited growth potential, so long as the taxpayer remained convinced that the
war on weeds constituted looking after the environment. In Australia, the
visionary grassroots Landcare movement, started by farmers in the early 1980s,
was reduced to being the vehicle for implementing this war on weeds.
The criticism of permaculture by the environmental orthodoxy was not due
to the scale of any real impacts of permaculture, but more because of the
perceived audacity of using ecological arguments to justify the use of a wider
range of species not indigenous to a site or even a bioregion. Permaculture
practitioners were mostly doing little more than attempting to maintain the
lineage of agricultural and horticultural research into promising species, as
governments beguiled by economic rationalism abandoned their responsibilities
to invest in economic botanical research. Most permaculture teachers and
designers accepted the findings of invasion ecology at face value and sought to
minimize risks of unintended naturalization.
For me, this pragmatic accommodation drove permaculture away from the
principle of working with rather than against nature. My own interest in
abandoned gardens and arboreta and rewilded farms and urban places as sources
of permaculture inspiration was intensified through working with planner and
resource ecologist Haikai Tane in New Zealand in 1979 and 1984. We coined
the term “ecosynthesis” to describe the relatively rapid restoration of ecosystem
function that we saw in the recombinant mixtures of native and foreign species
that colonized abandoned landscapes. We also recognized how this process was
generating new resources that could support human populations beyond the
fossil-fuel era. Further, we recognized that these novel ecosystems were the best
models for the design of intensively managed human settlements. Beyond this,
Tane branded the war against naturalizing species as nativism, an ideology that
sought to separate nature into good and bad species according to some fixed
historical reference.
As Orion makes clear in this excellent review of the application of
invasion ecology to the practice of ecological restoration, much of the
dysfunction can be traced back to the triumph of reductionism over a more
holistic systems approach in the biological sciences. It is a great irony that