Aliens in the Backyard

John Leland

Description

A fresh look at the origins of our iconic immigrant flora and fauna, revealed with wit and reverence for nature

Aliens live among us. Thousands of species of nonnative flora and fauna have taken up residence within U.S. borders. Our lawns sprout African grasses, our roadsides flower with European weeds, and our homes harbor Asian, European, and African pests. Misguided enthusiasts deliberately introduced carp, kudzu, and starlings. And the American cowboy spread such alien life forms as cows, horses, tumbleweed, and anthrax, supplanting and supplementing the often unexpected ways "Native" Americans influenced the environment. Aliens in the Backyard recounts the origins and impacts of these and other nonindigenous species on our environment and pays overdue tribute to the resolve of nature to survive in the face of challenge and change.

In considering the new home that imported species have made for themselves on the continent, John Leland departs from those environmentalists who universally decry the invasion of outsiders. Instead Leland finds that uncovering stories of alien arrivals and assimilation is a more intriguing—and ultimately more beneficial—endeavor. Mixing natural history with engaging anecdotes, Leland cuts through problematic myths coloring our grasp of the natural world and suggests that how these alien species have reshaped our landscape is now as much a part of our shared heritage as tales of our presidents and politics. Simultaneously he poses questions about which of our accepted icons are truly American (not apple pie or Kentucky bluegrass; not Idaho potatoes or Boston ivy). Leland's ode to survival reveals how plant and animal immigrants have made the country as much an environmental melting pot as its famed melding of human cultures, and he invites us to reconsider what it means to be American.

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Fungi
• Fungus
• Boll Weevil Eradication Program
• Florida woods cockroach
• American cockroach
• Entomophagy
• Pigweed
• Bark beetle
• Applied ecology
• Tumbleweeds (comic strip)
• Bedbug
• Dung beetle
• Colorado potato beetle
• Ergotism
• Dutch elm disease
• Boll weevil
• Africanized bee
• Alien invasion
• Zoonosis
• Ecology
• Bombyx
• Mycota
• Dust Bowl
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172133
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Aliens in the Backyard
Aliens in the Backyard
Plant and Animal Imports into America
John Leland
© 2005 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2005 Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Leland, John, 1950– Aliens in the backyard : plant and animal imports into America / John Leland. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57003-582-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Biological invasions United States. 2. Alien plants United States. 3. Introduced animals United States. I. Title. QH353.L49 2005 578.6′2 dc22
2005000544
ISBN 978-1-61117-213-3 (ebook)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

As American as Apple Pie: An Introduction to Weeds
Out of Africa: How Slavery Transformed the American Landscape and Diet
A Green Nightmare: The Un-American Lawn
A Sow’s Ear from a Silk Purse: The Legacy of Sericulture
Psychedelic Gardens: What Grandmother Grew in Her Backyard
Bad Air and Worse Science: Malaria’s Gifts to America
Bioterror: Older Than You Think
Cowboys: And Their Alien Habits
. . . and Indians: Less Native Than You Think
An Entangled Bank: Roadside Weeds
House Pests: Some of Those Who Share Your Quarters
It Seemed a Good Idea at the Time: The Well-Intentioned Ecological Disaster
Misplaced Americans: As Rootless as the Humans Who Invited Them In
Gone Fishin’: An Unnatural Pastime

Notes
Index
Illustrations
A nineteenth-century lawn
Ailanthus glandulosus
A female gypsy moth
Datura stramonium
Cannabis sativa
Cannabis indica
A eucalyptus tree
Lord Jeffrey Amherst
An Osage orange
Russian thistle
Chiefs of the Osage and Assineboin Indian tribes
A gourd used as a purple martin nest
A wild carrot
A common, or broad-leafed, plantain
German cockroaches and an Oriental cockroach
An American cockroach, or palmetto bug
A black rat
A brown rat
Two mice
A carp, along with a mirror-carp, goldfish, and barbel
A European starling and a Sardinian starling
An armadillo
Potato bugs and potato bug larva
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the help of others. I wish to thank the Virginia Military Institute for encouraging me to pursue a topic only tangentially related to my professional interests and the Jackson-Hope Committee for the generous support and confidence in giving me my first-ever sabbatical. The late Elizabeth Hostetter of the VMI Preston Library was both a helpful colleague, by attaining interlibrary loan materials, and a joy to visit. Diane Jacob and Mary Laura Kludy of the VMI Archives helped me obtain the illustrations that appear in the text. My copy editor, Monica McGee, has been invaluable: her professional and perceptive edits have refined my text and improved the book.
My sisters, Cheves and Elizabeth, kindly read a rough draft of this book, their comments and suggestions improving it greatly; any remaining mistakes or infelicities are mine. My son, Edward, continues to inspire me to discover the stories behind the plants and animals we see on our walks together, and I enjoy revealing to Isabella les plantes et les animeaux qui sont, comme elle, moitie europeane et moitie americaine .
Aliens in the Backyard
As American as Apple Pie
An Introduction to Weeds
No Native American ever ate an apple pie before 1492. It couldn’t have happened. While there was water aplenty and salt enough, there were no apples for filling, no lemons for juice, no cinnamon or cloves for spice, no sugar (other than maple) for sweetening, no wheat for flour, and no butter for pastry. Nor did any North American Indian before Columbus graze a horse on Kentucky bluegrass, eat an Idaho potato, see Boston ivy growing, get stung by a honeybee, or use a night crawler to catch a brown trout because none of these was here back then.
Of course, the very notion of an America to be a native of is post-Columbian. The year 1492 is arbitrarily picked as the cutoff for things that came here “naturally.” But a “natural” America is a cultural fiction. Not only did the Native Americans bring with them an “un-American” flora and fauna, they also reshaped what they found here, with the result that the forest primeval greeting the first Europeans was less primeval than it was man-made. Our “native” plants and animals themselves were and still are on the move. We tend to forget that a mere ten thousand years ago, a continental ice sheet covered everything north of Pennsylvania and boreal forests grew in Florida. What biologists a hundred years ago assumed were age-old forest or prairie communities that would, without human interference, perpetuate themselves as climax communities are thought by some today to have been catch-as-catch-can assemblages of opportunistic plants and animals scrambling northward to colonize land liberated from the Ice Age. Like participants in Mother Nature’s version of the Oklahoma Land Rush, plants and animals, independently of each other, pushed farther north each year, light-seeded maples outpacing heavier chestnuts, nimble squirrels leaving slower possums behind, and winged mosquitoes trouncing earthbound worms. Nor did this progression stop with Columbus. Possums plodded into New England only after the colonists had arrived; armadillos reached the East Coast five hundred years after the Spanish; and we only just managed to kill off the chestnut before it crossed the Great Lakes.
Nevertheless, the European “discovery” of America set off an immense biotic exchange. Tens of thousands (nobody knows the exact number) of alien plants and animals are thought to inhabit North America, and nearly 50 percent of America’s threatened or endangered natives are victims of introduced biota. Some places are worse off than others. Exotics have overwhelmed Hawaii, an isolated island that is home to a highly indigenous flora and fauna. Many of its native species are extinct or threatened with extinction. Florida and the Gulf Coast have been inundated with aliens. The distinctive flora of California and the Pacific Northwest is under siege. The Great Lakes are under attack, and the headwaters of the New and Tennessee rivers are in peril.
It’s now fashionable to decry the threat aliens pose to our native environments. In some cases, concern is warranted. Who doesn’t wish that someone had stopped the chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, and gypsy moth before they devastated our eastern forests? But the vast majority of alien plants and animals, like the vast majority of human immigrants, are quietly going about their business without really threatening anyone or anything. Like their human analogues, these immigrants often have fascinating stories of how they came to be here, stories that are as much a part of our history as the wars and presidents we studied in school.
Often cited as the “bible” of the environmental costs of nonnative species, the Congressional Office of Technology and Assessment’s (OTA) 1993 report, Harmful Non-Indigenous Species in the United States , guesstimated that more than four thousand such species call America home. The OTA admitted that this was wildly underestimated, since half of all insects in the United States have yet to be classified, for example, and because it takes into account only the last one hundred years, ignoring the previous ten thousand years of tinkering that began when the first nonindigenous human walked into Alaska with a dog. Not that all nonnatives are bad. Our food is almost entirely un-American. Only the sunflower seeds and Jerusalem artichokes in our groceries can boast American roots. The chickens and their eggs, the cattle, and the pigs we eat are from the Old World. While the rainbow trout or bass that was either just caught or ordered did originate in North America, odds are that the fish was stocked in a river its ancestors could never have reached or in a lake that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. The night crawler used to catch the fish came from elsewhere, as did the bamboo pole. Our gardens’ lilacs, roses, peonies, lawns, and apple and cherry trees are as nonnative as the animals in our zoos. Even our forests are suspect, with 30 percent of all plants in many of our states originating from other lands. Even those forests sporting made-in-America trees, like southern pine plantations, are probably growing where no such trees grew before commercial forestry took hold.
The OTA had to decide what to call all these plants and animals from elsewhere. They decided that nonindigenous was the least loaded word they could pick. The words alien and foreign have obvious negative connotations, and exotic has equally positive ones. Nonnative ignores that many natives are growing where nature never intended them. So nonindigenous it was, meaning “the condition of a species being beyond its natural range or natural zone of potential dispersal.” The OTA then had to define “natural range,” which means “the geographic area a species inhabits or would inhabit in the absence of significant human influence.” 1 All of this seems clear enough until you examine individual cases. I live near a Buffalo Creek and a Buffalo Gap, named after the bison herds that early settlers found grazing in the grassy Shenandoah Valley. But that grassy valley depended on fires set by Native Americans; suppress the f