Ever since I was a kid on my parent's farm, I was interested in environmental protection. I loved watching songbirds at the birdfeeders, so when I read about how house sparrows, starlings and pigeons were non-native and a threat to native birds, I promptly picked my pellet gun and got to work exterminating them.
When I read that buckthorn and Tatarian honeysuckle were invasive shrubs that threatened our woodlands, I grabbed a handsaw (and later a chainsaw when I was a teenager) and got to work cutting them down and spraying the stumps with Round Up.
When I read about the damage feral cats do to native small game and songbirds, I started live trapping them and bringing them to the local humane shelter to get them off my property.
All this time, I kept planting native trees, shrubs and flowers, mostly grown from locally collected seed, thinking I could undo the damage 150 years of human settlement had done to the area.
But now, in the face of rapidly advancing, potentially catastrophic climate change, I've started to think what kind of habitat I should truly be trying to rebuild. Minnesota has already warmed 1-2 degrees in the past century, and plants native to southern Iowa in my grandparent's time are now thriving in the Twin Cities. By the time my daughter is an old woman, the ecosystem I'm familiar with here in southern MN will be on the Canadian border or beyond; our land may be closer in climate to Memphis than Minneapolis. The oak savanna and basswood/sugar maple climax ecosystems in my area aren't going to survive this. If we're lucky, they'll have migrated hundreds of miles north, displacing the spruce/pine/birch forests that form Minnesota's iconic North Woods. Frankly, I have no idea what the ecosystems of my state will look like. Lately, I've been purchasing seed from more southern species (magnolia, sycamore, tupelo, bald cypress, pawpaw, persimmon, etc) and growing them on my property alongside my natives in case they prove to be better suited to a warmer climate. So far, I've had surprisingly good success, which scares me a little because it shows just how warm we have become already.
With this background of uncertainty, who am I to say that the invasive species I've spent 25 years fighting aren't the ones who will survive and speciate out to fill all the empty niches once our current mass extinction event is finally over? A million years from now, those starlings I shoot could be evolving into eagle substitutes, and those buckthorn shrubs I remove evolving into maple tree substitutes.
It could be that trying to wipe out the invasives in my area is like going back to the Permian mass extinction and trying to wipe out all the Lystrosaurs because they were overrunning the place*.
*For those not familiar, lystrosaurs were one of the only vertebrate land animal survivors of the Permian mass extinction, and went on to speciate out into dozens of new species afterwards, forming the base of a new ecosystem.
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