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 (802) 295-6300 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