How to unvade
Poetry Prompts #16
In the nature nerd world, there’s a distinction not just between invasive and native species. Those terms describe non-comparable ways of interacting with an ecosystem. There are four large buckets a species can be lumped into: native noninvasive, native invasive, nonnative invasive, and nonnative noninvasive.
Native noninvasive things can range from endangered ferrets all the way to something as ubiquitous where I live as gray squirrels or white oaks.
Native invasive or aggressive species can be things like white tailed deer and tall goldenrod. There are features of the altered landscape that allow for those species to take more of their share of ecosystem resources.
Nonnative invasive are also aggressive and evolved in places further than where you are. Spotted lanternfly, common buckthorn, Phragmites australis, and a bunch more.
Nonnative noninvasive actually describes most of the species that come here from afar. Many can’t thrive at all here, and many - like apple trees, tulips, and monk parakeets - don’t bother anyone at all. Many are delicious! And if they escape the confines of human attention, they don’t bother anyone too much. They’re chill bros.
Anyway, all of this is colonized language and colonizing species on colonized land. It’s hard to untangle all the messes Europeans like my ancestors brought with them. And it’s highly problematic to say anything nonnative is bad because of the many anti-immigration people in this country. Often the nonnative species we revile the most—pigeons, rats, cockroaches—are the ones who are the most like humans in their adaptability and resilience.
A framework I am trying to live by is the imperfect metaphor of the nonnative noninvasive. Species that participate in their natural communities but share space and resources freely. If there’s a big row of 100 year old nonnative lindens planted on a parkway, it wouldn’t be cool to just chop them all down trying to help the natural ecology. It would actually harm the many native species who are able to use those trees as food and shelter.
As a white guy who was planted here, who comes from the seeds of white people who also germinated here, I want to be as less like an invasive bully as possible. Nonnative noninvasive.
The metaphor does break down when you consider what power we have to make substantial positive changes to whatever land we live in. It’s like if the nonnative linden trees were ents traversing the countryside, tearing Amur honeysuckle out of the ground and giving indigenous people their land back.
Anyway, all that to say, here are some poetry prompts.
Read “Carnivorous, with a varied and opportunistic diet” Daria-Ann Martineau
List five times you invaded someone’s habitat
List five times your habitat was invaded
Write a poem about one.
Read “Hell Pig” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
List 10 made up things that have power over you
Write a poem about one of them.