Comments on: Terraforming and Superweeds

By: bmilligan

bmilligan — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:48:52 +0000

I agree. The classification of weeds, although admittedly somewhat relative, serves an important purpose, as they are not all alike in their effects. Some are relatively benign and beneficial. Others are disastrous. Japanese Knotweed, as mentioned in the interview is a memorable example. If you let it run wild in Oregon it will turn a complex riparian ecosystem into a choked monoculture with amazing speed and efficiency. I share a fascination for certain weeds like that (and how can you not be fascinated, and a bit horrified by Kudzu?), and I have been known to spend a lot of time observing urban weed prairies. But I think the interview skips over those distinctions, leaving the reader with an incomplete story, or as I am arguing in the post, one ecological perspective and its subsequent agenda. I think I inhabit both ends of the spectrum - I embrace some new ecologies as inevitable and productive (the interview argument that weed proliferation make sense because the anthropocene is one giant, and continual disturbance regime), but I'm also wary and somewhat conservative because my own ecological model is one that privileges biodiversity and richness of relationships - qualities that take a long time to build, but can quickly be lost. Again, one perspective that I am continually revisiting.

By: namhenderson

namhenderson — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:08:00 +0000

ha you are right I didn’t even look at the comments previously.

I think particularly found interesting the line of commenting that wanted to distinguish between unsightly “weeds” and dangerous invasives which is probably a useful distinction i would imagine. Especially within context of your article.

What say you?

By: bmilligan

bmilligan — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:08:59 +0000

Thanks for the link Nam. Interesting range of comments coming out of that interview.

By: namhenderson

namhenderson — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:50:41 +0000

On a related note did you see this article on Peter Del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum, who is all about respecting the reality of urban weeds as emergent forests of a sort, which make use of micro-ecological niches…

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/23/this_is_not_a_weed/

I added the guy’s book to my amazon wish list.