Every Tuesday morning, a group of volunteers meets at the Intervale Center to spend three hours tackling the ubiquitous invasives that have established roots all over the Intervale. Since the beginning of our internship, these Tuesday mornings have become a staple of our week. While much of our time is spent scheming creative and questionably effective invasive removal strategies as well as researching ways to repurpose these plants, this is a time dedicated to simply using our hands and shovels and moderate muscles in an attempt to keep the sheer numbers of invasive plants at bay to allow native non-invasive plants a chance to reestablish themselves in harmony.
Luckily, all three of us find this pretty fun. Duncan Murdoch, Stewardship Coordinator at the Intervale, leads the group and selects a target spot each week. There’s a small bunch of regular attendees, a mishmash of ages, origins and life experiences that make the conversation stimulating and the work fly by. We’ve worked on patches of Garlic Mustard, but most weeks we’ve focused on Japanese Knotweed, partially due to its abundance and likely partially due to the fact that many of the volunteers now have a vengeance for this wildly overabundant plant whose stalks will snap off in your hand and roots that will spray your face with dirt. While Nora, Libby and I are actively unlearning the concept that plants can be either good or bad, I find that cultivating a little vengeance into your attitude can increase efficiency in these scenarios.
Japanese Knotweed was introduced from Asia as an ornamental, it has an aesthetically pleasing resemblance to bamboo and pinkish stems that give way to wide flat arrow shaped leaves.
Knotweed spreads vegetatively by rhizomes and also sprouts from fragments of root and stem material, fostering the ease in which it forms dense monocultures. In addition to blocking biodiversity and disrupting the symbiosis of the ecosystem, Knotweed can contribute both to stream bank erosion and to flooding. Follow the Calkins Loop Trail and you will see that it can be found all along the Winooski River bank.
This past Tuesday we had a group of 4 volunteers and 4 staff, a large group compared to past weeks. After everybody grabbed a shovel and put on bug spray, we walked about 30 minutes on Calkins Loop Trail to reach a site that we had partially pulled the week previously. It only took a little over an hour to pull out all of the Knotweed, due to our enthusiastic and vigorous team! Unfortunately, it was a little disheartening to see Goutweed shoots coming up in the patch we had pulled last week, but I often remind myself of that long-term nature of our work. The work became slower when the Knotweed was interspersed with Jewelweed and other native plants that we wanted to remain undisturbed. While I dislike curbing my rampage, I recognize that it would defeat the point to non selectively unleash my inner fury on the very plants we are trying to save. Some of the Knotweed plants were young and hand pull-able, others were the size of small trees with thick, hollow stalks and deep roots that required a shovel to remove. Once the plant is removed, we drape them over a tree branch so that there’s no chance for the plant to re-root and spread.
Once we are finished, we have a startlingly bare expanse of soft, claylike soil on the side of the trail, scattered with the wreckage of crushed leaves. It’s satisfying physical work and it’s a great way to build community, spending several hours talking to people that I would likely never encounter in any other sphere of my life.
However, I have a complicated relationship with the targeted removal of a certain species and am vaguely concerned about the ease that I am able to villainize a plant. My concerns stem from my feeling that the war on invasive species seems powerfully analogous to the by-products of globalization and the resistance that many people feel towards the integration and shifting of communities due to immigration. I battle my sense that the biological rationale for striving for balance and harmony in plant life can be compared to anti-immigration arguments that draw from supposed harm to the economy, a thinly veiled argument that simply reveals a commitment to the status quo. I believe that resistance toward, for example, New Americans is founded upon false thinking, narrow mindedness and a lack of compassion. I think that prizing “native” persons is arbitrary and often founded upon a false narrative of what is “natural” in a constantly evolving world. I also appreciate the weight that labels have in justifying human behavior, and that the ability to degrade humans through alienating labels has been an important catalyst in discrimination and even genocide. I wonder why I feel it is acceptable to disregard this value when it is applied to plant life and ecosystems. There are too many similarities in these spheres for me to feel confident in my actions.
As I process these feelings and draw comparisons, I find myself questioning the legitimacy of the way the term “natural” acts as a stand-in for the word “right”. Removing invasives is, at its core, an attempt to return to what is “natural” and as it should be. I superficially define “natural” as something that exists without the intervention or impact of humans. In that light, it would seem unnatural to assert our influence over the spread of species by eradicating invasives. However, it’s imperative to recognize human influence in the presence of invasives in areas unequipped to challenge them. That is when the distinction between humans and nature becomes impossible to sustain because humans are a part of nature and it is only arrogant anthropocentric views that believe differently.
None of this introspection and reflection leads to any concrete course of action. In fact, the only conclusion that I can draw is that in order to justly address invasive species and honor our ecosystems, we have to strive to be humble in our decisions, recognize how our actions are reflected in our changing ecosystems, and how inextricably entwined we are with our environment. I am confident that a universally right conclusion is impossible to reach, and that the most truthful way we can approach stewardship is with the attitude that there are an infinite number of ways to unknowingly create both harm and good.
I’m grateful that there is a community of people who join us on Tuesday mornings who are willing to engage in this nuanced and fragile conversation, willing to unlearn old concepts, embrace new possibilities and understand that to know definitively is an illusion, an illusion that has historically harmed systems and the organisms within them. That being said, sometimes the conversation is just a heated debate concerning the superiority of one movie franchise over another and that’s important too.