Invasive species are an enemy people taking care of land love to hate. Chopping down a thick woody stem with a chainsaw fulfills a satisfying itch. I have never called “Timber” when watching one topple over, but I understand the urge. One volunteer Dad and son I worked with called invasive removal time their “fun destruction”. There must be something innately evolutionarily satisfying about this destruction- similar to the way we humans are drawn to fire and water. Perhaps it served a good purpose, to enjoy taking aggressive plants and trees, knocking them back to make space for others.
Whatever the reason, many conservation practitioners love to spout about their hatred of invasive species. They will discuss for hours on end the various methods of killing them- mechanical, chemical, hand pulling- and how effective each are for which species. They will also go on about the terrible qualities of those maligned species- whose sin is to grow too well, in a place they were brought by people because of their ability to grow well there.
There are some debates though, about what exactly constitutes an invasive species. Some people use the word to describe any species that spreads aggressively, be it native or non. Others save the despised ‘invasive’ term only for non-native prolific species. For example, many species of grapevine are native to the US and provide many ecosystem services. However, grape is often called invasive and sometimes aggressively controlled, because it can pull down trees in young forests, slowing forest progression.
Native vs non-native is determined by drawing a line through time- for the Americas this is typically when Europeans began their wholesale invasion of the American continents- and calling any plant that arrived after that time as non-native. Ironically, we don’t use that same term to describe the people who brought the species, though the people have wreaked far more havoc to American ecosystems than the plants or animals they brought.
Not all non-native species are considered invasive either- for instance, plantain is a species brought by Europeans which is described as ‘naturalized’ in some botanic books. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how the plant was called ‘white mans footprint’ by indigenous Native Americans, as it tended to follow white Europeans as they travelled across the country. I have yet to hear a single plant aficionado describe plantain with any animosity. In fact, it is lauded for its medicinal properties- I myself use it if one of my kids is stung by a bee- it is a natural pain relief.
My first close relationship with invasive species began when I was in college. I wanted to do an undergraduate research project. I approached a few professors, and one, Dr. Bill Mitsch, pitched a couple of potential projects to me. One was to study the response of a bottomland hardwood forest near campus to invasive species control- mostly Amur honeysuckle, Lonicera maackii. This honeysuckle is a beautiful shrub, prized and planted for its curved branches, soft green leaves, white and yellow springtime flowers, and bright red fall berries.
Like most species dubbed “invasive’, honeysuckle is great at growing and hard to kill. The particular forest of my university studies, a mere strip along the riverbank, was a fragment of forest left when the rest of the land was turned into farm fields. These forest scraps have a lot of edges, places for invasives to get a foothold, and often are degraded by other human activities such as logging or recreational use. In this case, amur honeysuckle took advantage of this weakened ecosystem to invade and take over. In 2001 when I began my research, some places were a veritable tangle of solid honeysuckle, I often had to climb over and under branches- sometimes crawling on the ground- to get from plot to plot in the forest to take my measurements.
Other areas of the forest had been cleared of honeysuckle over the past couple of years. My research project was to compare the plant communities in areas which were cleared of the pesky plant versus uncleared to see how the forest understory was changing.
My results were disappointing. When cleared of honeysuckle, baby honeysuckle grew, and other invasive species took advantage of the increases in light and space to grow. While the community did shift a bit, it largely wasn’t in a direction any restoration professional would consider desirable.
The one difference I did find, however, was that other changes Dr. Mitsch had made to the forest were positively shifting the plant community. The forest bordered the Olentangy river, a large river running through Columbus, Ohio. To keep the river from flooding the farm fields, farmers decades previously had built a large dike along the side of the river. Bottomland hardwood forests are given the name “bottom” because they are low lying and next to waterways. They thrive on the nutrient influx the typically annual floods give them. New soil is deposited in these floods, usually rich in nutrients. The dikes had for decades blocked this essential process from occurring.
Dr. Mitsch cut holes in the dikes, giving the forest what he called “bypass surgery”, releasing the clogs and allowing the water to flow again. In these low lying areas, I found the plant community to be more native- the floods were naturally controlling the honeysuckle, which couldn’t deal well with the wet conditions, and allowing native plants such as Virginia bluebell to thrive.
My relationship with honeysuckle has been complex. I always loved the beauty of the plant, and appreciated the way it thrived- I loved seeing that vibrant life and growth. In a bonus question on my plant identification midterm in college they asked for our favorite plant- and I put honeysuckle, because of its beauty- and probably also because it really was, at that point, the plant with which I had the closest relationship. I was out there regularly monitoring it in all its forms- newly emerged from seed to large arching shrub. I saw it before leaf out, in glory of full bloom, with bright red berries, and beginning winter senescence. I understood- and lived- its life cycle in a way I had never done so before.
I still understood its detested status and the detriment it was having on native ecosystems- reducing species diversity, creating ecological traps for birds by giving them less nutritious ‘junk food’ in the berries than the more nutrient-rich native alternatives. And so I was in favor of removing it. But I also saw the futility of its removal, seeing it and other invasives quickly crowding back. I was confused about how I should feel about both the plant itself and the efforts to remove it. But, largely the restoration community said it was bad and wanted to take it out, so I tentatively got on that bandwagon, not knowing what other alternative there was.
After college, I put the question of invasive species control in the back of my mind as I spent the next 15 years moving around the world, delving into academia while working on my PhD, trying to understand conservation motivations at a theoretical and global scale. I moved back to Ohio in 2013, and in 2015 became a restoration manager trying to control invasive species on nearly 9,000 acres of reclaimed mine land. This land was tough for anything to grow on- topsoil either buried by mining or piled for years before being spread back onto the land and run over with heavy machinery to prevent erosion. Few soil microbes and nutrients were left on this highly compacted land. And so invasive species- largely Autumn olive Elaegnus umbellata, were some of the few things that would grow well on this highly modified landscape. Autumn olive had been purposefully planted post-mining because of its ability to thrive in what looked much like the surface of the moon during and immediately after mining.
At first I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of my task. Remove millions of thriving invasive bushes, which would regenerate, hydra like, from nearly 9,000 acres felt like an impossible herculean mission. I visited sites that previous managers had removed the invasives a decade before only to see a sea of autumn olive. I continued the funded projects removing the plants but privately despaired at the futility.
Eventually, some sense of the situation slowly fell into place. I focused my invasive removal on a few areas where I could maintain control, AND applied for grants to plant other species in their place- native trees, shrubs, and seeds for herbaceous species. Instead of just hoping that after removal, magically these invasive plants would not return despite having strong roots and plenty of seeds, I tried replacing them with carefully selected natives. And had more success.
It was through this that I realized the reason invasives thrive in ecosystems, largely, is because the ecosystem was sick, essentially. You rarely see invasives in largely healthy, resilient old growth or mature forests. It’s when disturbances happen that invasives make their way in, and even then they don’t do much more than get a foothold unless there are other issues with the forest- maybe pests or disease, or continued disturbance. On these reclaimed mine lands- and the sliver of bottomland hardwood forest which hung on by a fingernail next to highly disturbed agricultural land for years, the invasive species were the ones that could grow well, and so grow they did. In the case of the mine land, the autumn olives were largely healing the land as they grew- helping microbes grow, fixing nitrogen, adding organic matter to the soil. Yes, maybe we would have preferred if natives did that job, but really, the plants had transformed a moonscape into a successful shrubland with high plant growth and fruit production.
Finally, this coalesced into a realization that invasive species are only a symptom. We can hate them and remove them all we want, but if we don’t treat the actual problem, the hydra heads will continue to regenerate, and we will be running on a perpetual hamster wheel. I now try to preach this to other restoration practitioners, and advocate for always following invasive removal by planting, or possibly other things as with the bottomland hardwood forest bypass surgery, another way of changing the conditions to make it unconducive for the invasives to thrive.
During my self-rebuilding phase, I started to apply my lessons from ecosystems into lessons about the larger world. One of my realizations is that invasive species are much like emotions. In this culture, we are often taught that we shouldn’t be emotional, it’s bad to overreact, we could be labelled as hysterical and dismissed as a person if we feel and express too much. I myself was told more than once that I was “too sensitive”. Like invasive species, we should chop down emotions and get rid of them. Our culture teaches that emotions are problems, and if we can suppress them, everything will be fine.
Instead, I posit that invasive species and feelings are both signs of larger problems. My anxiety, rather than being a problem that I can solve in isolation, is a product of the fact that I am a queer non-binary neurodivergent person trying to navigate an unfriendly world filled with microaggressions cutting me like a thousand papercuts. I spent decades trying to hide who I really was out of fear, and whenever my feelings leaked out, I was invalidated and told I was to blame. I was trying to cut back the invasive species, my emotions, but they kept regrowing hydra like because of the highly disturbed forest I was living in where fear, frustration, and anger thrived.
Since the pandemic, I have been looking under the surface at the ways in which the culture I was surrounded by didn’t serve me and envisioning what an accepting world would look and feel like. I have taken many steps to change the environment around me so that the invasive species of my anxiety doesn’t thrive. I have figured out how to remove the honeysuckle and replace it with other, more desirable plants, and change the processes of the ecosystem so that the invasives can’t reinvade. Sharing this journey has been key to my personal environmental transformation- I'm not only changing myself, I’m influencing others to shift their perspective as well, which hopefully both creates an atmosphere where I feel loving and accepted, but also ripples beyond me to help others feel safe as well.
The lesson of honeysuckle, for me, is important because it helped me to take a step back and acknowledge the reality of my life, instead of blindly trying to do what others told me I should. Honeysuckle, though an invasive plant with potential negative impacts on biodiversity, thrives for a reason. Acknowledging the validity and reason for its presence, or my emotions, is essential to creating an ecosystem where honeysuckle- and overwhelming anxiety- don't have a place.
