The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

by Fred Pearce

But if it is wrong, then keeping out aliens serves no obvious purpose. More than that, it may be counterproductive. Nature’s desperados are proven colonists and exploiters of the ecological mess that humans leave behind them. So surely that makes them nature’s best chance of healing the damage done by chain saws and plows, by pollution and climate change. Far from being nature’s destroyers, aliens may be its reinvigorators, its salvation. They may be a sign that nature is not done. That it can bounce back. If that thinking is right, then simple conservation is shortsighted, and true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders.

Humans are an inescapable part of the landscape. There are no pristine ecosystems and no blueprints for what they might be. Any vision of the pristine past that we choose will require constant tending.