A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines

The Growing Threat Of Species Invasions

Yvonne Baskin

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559630511
  9781559638760
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610911009
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

The human love of novelty and desire to make one place look like another, coupled with massive increases in global trade and transport, are creating a growing economic and ecological threat. The same forces that are rapidly "McDonaldizing" the world's diverse cultures are also driving us toward an era of monotonous, weedy, and uniformly impoverished landscapes. Unique plant and animal communities are slowly succumbing to the world's "rats and rubbervines" -- animals like zebra mussels and feral pigs, and plants like kudzu and water hyacinth -- that, once moved into new territory, can disrupt human enterprise and well-being as well as native habitats and biodiversity.

From songbird-eating snakes in Guam to cheatgrass in the Great Plains, "invasives" are wreaking havoc around the world. In A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines, widely published science writer Yvonne Baskin draws on extensive research to provide an engaging and authoritative overview of the problem of harmful invasive alien species. She takes the reader on a worldwide tour of grasslands, gardens, waterways, and forests, describing the troubles caused by exotic organisms that run amok in new settings and examining how commerce and travel on an increasingly connected planet are exacerbating this oldest of human-created problems. She offers examples of potential solutions and profiles dedicated individuals worldwide who are working tirelessly to protect the places and creatures they love.

While our attention is quick to focus on purposeful attempts to disrupt our lives and economies by releasing harmful biological agents, we often ignore equally serious but much more insidious threats, those that we inadvertently cause by our own seemingly harmless actions. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines takes a compelling look at this underappreciated problem and sets forth positive suggestions for what we as consumers, gardeners, travelers, nurserymen, fishermen, pet owners, business people -- indeed all of us who by our very local choices drive global commerce -- can do to help. "

NOTES

Chapter 2. Reuniting Pangaea

1

Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 11.

2

Ibid.

3

Richard N. Mack, “Motivations and Consequences of the Human Dispersal of Plants,” in The Great Reshuffling: Human Dimensions of Invasive Alien Species, ed. Jeffrey A. McNeely (Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge, England: IUCN, 2001).

4

Alfred W Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

5

Tyler Whittle, The Plant Hunters (New York: PAJ Publications, 1970).

6

David J. Mabberley “Where Are the Wild Things?” in Paradisus: Hawaiian Plant Watercolors by Geraldine King Tam (Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1999).

7

Sidney W Mintz, “Pleasure, Profit, and Satiation,” in Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration, ed. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 112-129.

8

Katharina Dehnen-Schmutz, “Medieval Castles as Centers of Spread of Non-native Plant Species,” in Plant Invasions: Ecological Mechanisms and Human Responses, ed. U. Starfinger et al. (Leiden, Netherlands: Backhuys Publishers, 1998), 307–312.

9

Christopher Lever, The Naturalized Animals of the British Isles (London: Hutchinson and Company 1977).

10

James T. Carlton, “Marine Bioinvasions: The Alteration of Marine Ecosystems by Nonindigenous Species,” Oceanography 9, no. 1 (1996): 36-43.

11

William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1976).

12

Crosby Ecological Imperialism.

13

Mintz, “Pleasure, Profit, and Satiation.”

14

P S. Martin and R. G. Klein, Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984).

15

Richard N. Mack et al., “Biotic Invasions: Causes, Epidemiology Global Consequences, and Control,” Ecological Applications 10, no. 3 (2000): 689-710.

16

Raymond Sokolov, Why We Eat What We Eat: How the Encounter between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats (New York: Summit Books, 1991).

17

Francis L. Black, “Why Did They Die?” Science 258 (1992): 1739-1740; Alfred W Crosby “Metamorphosis of the Americas,” in Viola and Margolis, Seeds of Change, 70-89.

18

Ralph T. Bryan, “Alien Species and Emerging Infectious Diseases: Past Lessons and Future Implications,” in Norway/UN Conference on Alien Species, ed. Odd Terje Sandlund, Peter Johan Schei, and Aslaug Viken (Trondheim, Norway: Directorate for Nature Management and Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, 1996), 74–80.

19

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, (1719; reprint, New York: Heritage Press, 1930), 103.

20

Richard N. Mack, “The Motivation for Importing Potentially Invasive Plant Species: A Primal Urge?” in People and Rangelands, Building the Future: Proceedings of the Sixth International Rangeland Congress, ed. David Eldridge and David Freudenberger (Townsville, Queensland, Australia, 1999), 557–562.

21

Tim Low, Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders (Victoria, Australia: Viking, 1999).

22

Brian J. Huntley “South Africa’s Experience regarding Alien Species: Impacts and Controls,” in Sandlund, Schei, and Viken, Norway/UN Conference on Alien Species, 182–188; quote, 182.

23

Richard N. Mack, “Temperate Grasslands Vulnerable to Plant Invasions: Characteristics and Consequences,” in Biological Invasions: A Global Perspective, ed. J. A. Drake et al., SCOPE 37 (Chichester, West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), 155–179; quotes, 160–161.

24

Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies (London: Quiller Press, 1992), 3.

25

Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism.

26

Lever, They Dined on Eland, 26–27.

27

R. H. Groves, “Plant Invasions of Australia: An Overview,” in Ecology of Biological Invasions: An Australian Perspective, ed. R. H. Groves and J. J. Burdon (Canberra: Australian Academy of Science, 1986), 137–148.

28

Whittle, Plant Hunters; Toby Musgrave, Chris Gardner, and Will Musgrave, The Plant Hunters (London: Ward Lock, 1998); Vernon H. Heywood, “Patterns, Extents, and Modes of Invasions by Terrestrial Plants,” in Drake et al., Biological Invasions, 31–55.

29

Lever, They Dined on Eland, 97.

30

Ibid.

31

Crosby Ecological Imperialism.

32

Lever, They Dined on Eland, 77–78.

33

Ibid.

34

Jared Diamond, “Blitzkrieg against the Moas,” Science 287 (2000): 2170–2171; R. N. Holdaway and C. Jacomb, “Rapid Extinction of the Moas (Aves: Dinornithiformes): Model, Test, and Implications,” Science 287 (2000): 2250–2254; Michael N. Clout, “Biological Conservation and Invasive Species: The New Zealand Experience,” in Sandlund, Schei, and Viken, Norway/UN Conference on Alien Species, 161–166.

35

Clout, “Biological Conservation and Invasive Species.”

36

Lever, They Di...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ONE - Introduction: Confronting a Shrinking World
• TWO - Reuniting Pangaea
• THREE - Wheat and Trout, Weeds and Pestilence
• FOUR - Elbowing Out the Natives
• FIVE - The Good, the Bad, the Fuzzy
• SIX - The Making of a Pest
• SEVEN - Taking Risks with Strangers
• EIGHT - Stemming the Tide
• NINE - Beachheads and Sleepers
• TEN - Taking Control
• ELEVEN - Islands No Longer
• TWELVE - Can We Preserve Integrity of Place?
• APPENDIX A - 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species
• APPENDIX B - Index to Scientific Names of Cited Invasive Species
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX