The dust has settled a bit, so it's time to respond. Jane Shevtsov raised some interesting points in her rebuttal of my analysis of her post. Most of them further exemplify the conceptual confusion and questionable communication practices I was highlighting.
First, she reminded us: "I was speaking casually" Of course she was, and obviously so. Why, having admitted to speaking casually, try to defend it as if that casualness had formal underpinnings? It any case it is a poor justification. Does 'casually' mean carelessly, vaguely, imprecisely or misleadingly? Is this an appropriate forum for casual remarks? For that matter, should any conversation between ecologists about the objects we study be shorthanded either ambiguously or misleadingly? Jane's based her rejection of anthropomorphism primarily on what a person may do or be described as doing. That underlines my point. Truffles aren't persons. Appealing to the fact that "doctors may speak of invasive cancers" doesn't have anything to do with whether truffles can invade or species are invasive. (Species aren't cancers, although that broad metaphor of reflexive fear and loathing has been applied to them as well.) Appealing to "what we often say" hardly implies that what we often say has been well said. Ecology's 'house' of casually applied metaphors (see Science 301:52-53) accumulated like a woodrat midden. It's stable the way any heap of miscellaneous material can be stable, but it isn't much of a structure. Volition is important because invading is purposeful. Invading isn't a synonym for diffusing or dispersing or being moved along a gradient or by an applied force. We say species are invading because we mean to be pejorative, not merely descriptive. It's a revealing category error. Any research project that has ever set out to compare 'natives' to 'invasives' (there are MANY such) carries a "casual" tacit presumption that those twp categories are ecologically meaningful. They aren't (see Chew and Hamilton's 'The Rise and Fall of Historical Nativeness…). That's why the results of those studies are broadly inconsistent. So yes, Jane, research has been significantly undermined. It's not a problem of comparing apples and oranges. It's a problem of comparing mermaids and hippogriffs. In her rebuttal Jane appropriated my point about causality and suggested it was her own. Hardly so. She (originally, casually) claimed truffles were causing a problem. Finally, Jane wrote "One of the reasons I highlighted this article is that it describes concrete harms arising from an exotic species…" But it doesn't do that. The presence of two superficially similar (to casual inspection) fungi in the same place doesn't cause concrete harm. It may violate someone's sense of place or require them to learn to differentiate between the two. Change is not harm. Demanding the world to conform to prior expectations or beliefs (especially while expecting to be able to manipulate it to one's own advantage) seems naive. David McNeely doesn't like brown tree snakes or Phytophthora ramorum. He casually failed to contextualize either. Charitably assuming that he meant brown tree snakes on Guam, and further assuming that by social damage he meant the climbing instincts of brown tree snakes are incompatible with the way people have traditionally strung electrical wiring, we still can't say the snakes caused a problem. David apparently assumes that humans should be free to do things the way they always have even when newly prevailing conditions render those habits ineffectual. Eradicating brown tree snakes on Guam may or may not be possible. Changing the way electricity is distributed is an engineering exercise. Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results indicates the usual results are actually more acceptable than the costs of adapting. David's "ecological damage" to Guam was caused by humans acting on naive and tacit expectations that a remote island could be industrially militarized—with all the coming and going that entails—without fundamentally and practically altering its connectivity to other ecosystems. Guam has been only hours away from many islands and several continents since the 1940s. Focusing on brown tree snakes and blaming them for happening to have survived inadvertent transport there seems intentionally myopic. Calling them invaders when they are evidently established and occupying virtually all usable habitat on the island is another category error. The advent of P. ramorum in North America produces effects more troubling to more people than than power outages or ecosystem restructuring on Guam. But P. ramorum is doing what it always has, necessarily without reference to continents or forests or even trees, for that matter. Fungi aren't moral actors and they aren't morally accountable. If a P. ramorum spore arrives in suitable habitat (on, but without awareness of a tree) it grows and reproduces. But that isn't invading, or it shouldn't be—to an ecologist. This may be one of the most important points in this discussion. It doesn't take an ecologist to anthropomorphize the advent of a taxon we don't like by labeling it an invasion. Anybody capable of noting and disliking the arrival—for any reason, or no articulable reason— can do that. It doesn't explain or even describe the event in other than personal, subjective terms. Ecologists need to do better, and differently, than everyman, or else 'ecologist' becomes a category error, too. Matthew K Chew Assistant Research Professor Arizona State University School of Life Sciences ASU Center for Biology & Society PO Box 873301 Tempe, AZ 85287-3301 USA Tel 480.965.8422 Fax 480.965.8330 [email protected] or [email protected] http://cbs.asu.edu/people/profiles/chew.php http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew
