world travel

as you may recall, i am not particularly impressed by the threat of invasive species, though some nasty asian grass is indeed overwhelming my garden. the concrete dock from japan with hundreds of species aboard washing up in oregon is called 'destructive' and 'appalling' by environmental scientists. no, it's amazing. let it teach you something. it makes you realize that like human beings, other species are always traveling, probing, roving in watercraft across the seas. it should make you see that species have been travelling the globe on logs or boulders or breezes since there was life. i don't know: do you really want to conceive of 'eco-systems' as little insulated zones of perfect stability? that is an ideology or a religion, not a science, because it doesn't come from the world that's actually there. now we may interpret the arrival of some species as destructive, and it might indeed fuck up our crops or fisheries or forests. of course, from the point of view of the brown marmorated stink bugs or brown asian algae, that's neither here nor there. and maybe even from our homosapienscentric view we ought to get on to the opportunities and improvements that such invasions might also represent. anyway, if there were no invasive species, there'd be no life.