Another Failed Landscape – When Ideology Trumps User Needs

The question I pose is, if the new species are winning and the old ones are dying out, when did we become God to decide which stays and which goes? And how do we know we’re right?

*Head slap

Good article….

someone needed to say it.

Whatdid you like about it, specifically?

    While I can understand his perspective about the edge of a desert and use of native plants, however he didn’t think this all the way through.  In the north east, this just wouldn’t fly to me.

    I believe in Darwin. I think in the main he got it right. We all compete. Plants compete for air, sunlight and space. Animals compete for food, breeding grounds, for mates. The stronger and more adaptive survive, the weaker die out, ultimately vanish, and become extinct.

Yes, this may be how it works when spaced out over eons, however ecosystems aren’t adaptable to rapid and sudden changes in their environment, and that leads to the collapse of the whole system.  This guy is advocating using Darwin as a reason to throw your hands up and do nothing, and continue making vast and sweeping alterations to ecosystems that have existed for millions of years so we don’t need to feel guilty about introducing invasives, fragmenting ecosystems and eliminating the territory of apex predators so that all that is left are rodents and cockroaches.

That article is so stupid, it must come from someone educated in the american public school systems..

Just as humanity has developed political systems based on something we call ‘human rights’, a concept that did not exist 500 years ago, we similarly have used our brains and come to an understanding of something called ‘ecology’ or the interdependence of all species on the earth. This concept also did not exist 500 years ago -it is called ‘progress’, when we have increased our comprehension of the world, no?

The animals and plants of the world are  hanging on by slivers, from the onslaught of human population explosion and resource exploitation.

It is because we have the brains to understand the concept of ecology, that some  species continue to be able to survive. Those small spaces of native plants, that this person wants to be irrigated sweetgums, just like Brooklyn (except that it is Malibu) are providing for many lives other than  hers, and those lives are equally as important  – I think Ben Franklin said humanity could not survive four months without bees.

Malibu has  no natural source of water, unlike Brooklyn. These natural areas serve to show us how we could live, by respecting the earth, and respecting water use. This is something  we need to take extremely seriously – the non-irrigated landscape. Georgia (Atlanta) already has it’s water wars. The Colorado, that supplies most of California, doesn’t even make it to the Pacific without being tapped out for human use. If  you can’t see the value of a non-irrigated natural landscape, for wildlife and as an appropriate level of water-use for our exploding population,   I recommend you not cross the street today, you may get hit by a bus.

That’s a good point Jon.  I recall sitting in on a lecture a few years back where the point was made that spartina was an invasive species in the United States but not in Europe.

In Europe it is kept under control by a certain insect, one that doesn’t exist in this country.  Without its natural predator it has quite an impact environmentally and economically.

He makes it more a utilitarian arguement that the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.

..at least give them something they will use….

what a waste!

Tracie, didn’t you go to U. of Penn?

last time I looked it was a public school….

you are so funny sometimes…