Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
green_achers wrote:I agree that it's usually futile to try to eradicate the invasives, but that doesn't mean that it's a waste of effort to try to find ways to bring them into a better balance with their new ecosystems. Often they outcompete the natives because they are missing a natural predator or pathogen that keeps them under control in their native lands. Kudzu is an example. When I returned to MS after being gone for about 30 years, I was surprised to find that it has not spread a whole lot. I'm told that native pests were introduced that have helped to keep it from taking over. Same thing was done somewhat successfully with the cactus in Australia,and there are many other examples.
It takes a lot of research and care to deliberately introduce a species to control another and avoid further unintended consequences. Unfortunately, this requires money and energy, but it can be worth it.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tanada wrote:green_achers wrote:I agree that it's usually futile to try to eradicate the invasives, but that doesn't mean that it's a waste of effort to try to find ways to bring them into a better balance with their new ecosystems. Often they outcompete the natives because they are missing a natural predator or pathogen that keeps them under control in their native lands. Kudzu is an example. When I returned to MS after being gone for about 30 years, I was surprised to find that it has not spread a whole lot. I'm told that native pests were introduced that have helped to keep it from taking over. Same thing was done somewhat successfully with the cactus in Australia,and there are many other examples.
It takes a lot of research and care to deliberately introduce a species to control another and avoid further unintended consequences. Unfortunately, this requires money and energy, but it can be worth it.
Agreed, any basic cost~~benefit analysis should demonstrate when and where an invasive can be eradicated, where it can be countered with a natural control species, and where it is better to accept it and move on with exploitation.
Tanada wrote: However what I see on Wikipedia and on Google lead me to believe that the New Zealand authorities are choosing to attempt eradication without any study on if it can be accomplished and how much effort it would require compared to the other two options.
americandream wrote:Rural New Zealand has been ravaged by gorse. Native birds have all but been exterminated by house cats. Cities and towns are a sprawl of patchwork development and spaghetti roading. And we voted in another conservative government with more free market remedies just as the world descends into deregulation horror. Introduced pines are the least of our worries!
yeahbut wrote:americandream wrote:Rural New Zealand has been ravaged by gorse. Native birds have all but been exterminated by house cats. Cities and towns are a sprawl of patchwork development and spaghetti roading. And we voted in another conservative government with more free market remedies just as the world descends into deregulation horror. Introduced pines are the least of our worries!
Actually, gorse is an interesting one. In another classic case of colonial homesickness, some Scot thought it would be nice to have a gorse hedge like back home, only of course here the climate is a bit milder and it went crazy, growing 15 feet tall and smothering everything in sight. However, gorse is really only a problem for farming. If you want to re-establish native bush, it's a great plant. It's a nitrogen fixer, it provides great shelter for a growing tree, and best of all it needs full sun, so as soon as the trees start getting established it dies. An ideal nursery plant. It is, of course, an absolute bastard if you want a nice green paddock for your stock to graze, another self-inflicted blow...
For me, one of the saddest ones is the European wasp. We had no social wasps at all in NZ, it must have been really something to have a picnic on a summer's day without being harassed by these buggers. They only got here in 1945, my dad remembers there not being any. They really took off, and now reach densities in our beech forests at least three times that in their native range. They disrupt the food chain in two ways; one by taking almost all the honeydew as it drips out of the beech trees, depriving honey feeders, and two by stripping out practically all other insect life when their hive numbers are peaking. This combined with predation by exotics such as the cat, rat, stoat, weasel, etc creates irresistable pressure for many native birds that respond by reserving their energy and choosing not to reproduce. Attempts have been made ovet the last 20 years to control wasps with parasitic wasp species, no luck yet tho.
americandream wrote:I'm not entirely certain that maintaining a pristine native landscape is possible or desirable in a constantly changing world but what we have in New Zealand is a far cry from what foreigners think we have. Some of it's just plain old short term thinking for private profit (and the Greens didn't achieve much apart from the anti-smacking law...what a waste) but try complaining to the average joe. You might as well piss in the wind.
dunewalker wrote:Another example in my mind of mis-allocation of limited resources was what I observed today, on a trip to the county seat to cash in my recycling. There's a California agricultural inspection station between here & there, designed to screen out-of-state traffic for pests. Hard to imagine that these stations are effective, as they are sometimes closed, sometimes open, & wave lots of traffic through without inspection. Now that California is bankrupt, I was surprised that today the station was "open for business", although of course the attendant merely waved me through. With the terminator on the ropes to find ways to cut state spending, this would have been an obvious first round cut, but no. Hard to sympathize with the budget issues in the face of this, to me at least, wasted use of public money.
yeahbut wrote:americandream wrote:I'm not entirely certain that maintaining a pristine native landscape is possible or desirable in a constantly changing world but what we have in New Zealand is a far cry from what foreigners think we have. Some of it's just plain old short term thinking for private profit (and the Greens didn't achieve much apart from the anti-smacking law...what a waste) but try complaining to the average joe. You might as well piss in the wind.
Indeed. And that's why the greens didn't achieve much- the average joe doesn't vote for them. Labour chose to make an alliance with the Huntin' Fishin' Smokin' and god-bothering party rather than with the Greens, which told you all you needed to know about that shower of morons. Three terms and nothing to show for it except being much further down the wrong road(but at least they made heaps more of those, eh cuz...)
americandream wrote:yeahbut wrote:americandream wrote:I'm not entirely certain that maintaining a pristine native landscape is possible or desirable in a constantly changing world but what we have in New Zealand is a far cry from what foreigners think we have. Some of it's just plain old short term thinking for private profit (and the Greens didn't achieve much apart from the anti-smacking law...what a waste) but try complaining to the average joe. You might as well piss in the wind.
Indeed. And that's why the greens didn't achieve much- the average joe doesn't vote for them. Labour chose to make an alliance with the Huntin' Fishin' Smokin' and god-bothering party rather than with the Greens, which told you all you needed to know about that shower of morons. Three terms and nothing to show for it except being much further down the wrong road(but at least they made heaps more of those, eh cuz...)
The Greens worldwide are a bunch of sellouts. The scumbags in Germany supported the invasion of Iraq which just about sums them up...bloody useless.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tanada wrote:I want a healthier planet, BAU clearly is not the way to go to achieve that. Running around screaming bloody murder is not either, headlines only influence people who care about headlines. Doing a Wilding Pines project or a Pull the Dandelions project will get you headlines, but nothing ultimately is accomplished because in a year or 5 or 10 nature will undo everything you did. This sort of thing just makes me sad at the lack of common sense pervading our entire culture.
yeahbut wrote:Tanada wrote:I want a healthier planet, BAU clearly is not the way to go to achieve that. Running around screaming bloody murder is not either, headlines only influence people who care about headlines. Doing a Wilding Pines project or a Pull the Dandelions project will get you headlines, but nothing ultimately is accomplished because in a year or 5 or 10 nature will undo everything you did. This sort of thing just makes me sad at the lack of common sense pervading our entire culture.
Yep. With most of the 'pest' control programmes, I want to ask the Department of Conservation "so what's the plan here?". As far as I can see, there is no long-term strategy- the programmes will always require the same level of human input and resource cost, no natural equilibrium will be reached.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
yeahbut wrote:Tanada wrote:I want a healthier planet, BAU clearly is not the way to go to achieve that. Running around screaming bloody murder is not either, headlines only influence people who care about headlines. Doing a Wilding Pines project or a Pull the Dandelions project will get you headlines, but nothing ultimately is accomplished because in a year or 5 or 10 nature will undo everything you did. This sort of thing just makes me sad at the lack of common sense pervading our entire culture.
Yep. With most of the 'pest' control programmes, I want to ask the Department of Conservation "so what's the plan here?". As far as I can see, there is no long-term strategy- the programmes will always require the same level of human input and resource cost, no natural equilibrium will be reached.
One of the most frustrating things for me would have to be the attitude towards possums. These animals cause tremendous damage to native forest when left unchecked, as they have no natural predators. DOC's response to this is to carry out regular aerial drops of 1080 poison(lil old NZ is the largest consumer of this poison in the world), it's a mammalian killer, and as there are no native mammals apart from the bat, it is a very effective way of killing rats, mice, possums and also cats and mustelids that eat poisoned animals. However, it's a stupid approach IMO for a couple of excellent reasons. The first is as already mentioned- there's no exit strategy. Poison will have to be dropped, at great expense and in all likelihood, some environmental cost, for ever(or until we go over the peak and this all becomes a silly memory anyway ). The second, and most irritating reason, is that if DOC would just get the hell out of the way, people would take care of the possums in all but the most isolated and extreme areas anyway- for money. Possum fur is quite valuable, it's a high quality fur and is used in a number of ways, in particular at the moment as a blend with a fine sheeps wool for clothing. With a bit of an advertising campaign it's also possible it could become the acceptable face of fur as well- 'wear fur and save the environment' type of thing.
The point is, there are already lots of hunters and trappers out there making good money and controlling possums at the same time. They are held back tho by the fact that their business is made unreliable and inconsistent, because every now and then DOC kills off most of the animals in their area and they have to move, or wait for a recovery in numbers. In essence, there actually is a predator for the possum- humans- and DOC keeps scaring them off. If DOC would just stop the poison drops, and re-direct the money saved to training hunters and trappers, and building up the possum fur industry, we could save money, create employment and business, and introduce a permanent biological control into the ecosystem. Of course, there is basically zero chance of this happening currently. Really freaking annoying.
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