[APWG] Philosophies about the Invasive the Potential of Imported Plants?

[Craig Dremann]

Dear Paul, Andrea and All,

I think Paul and Andrea are bringing up very good points.

There's a distinctive gap between botanists, National Parks managers and
most of the rest of America.   Most people are barely aware of the local
native plants or exotic plants in their wildlands surroundings, because
their lives almost never touch them or interact with them.

Sure, people can see the big picture, like the towering Coast redwoods,
or the huge Sierran Sequoias---but what's all that stuff underneath the
trees and covering all the hills of California that catches fire each
year?  Gee, it is almost 99.99% solid, three foot tall, exotic annual
grasses from Europe!  

And there's also the 490 year old philosophical concept here in North
America, from 1492 to about 1982, where you never brought local native
plants into your lives---everything from the front year lawn to the
trees, shrubs and flower garden were all imported from some other
continent, usually your own continent of origin, like Europe.  

For 400+ years, we have wanted to be surrounded by what was familiar.

If you are not adding parts of the local native ecosystems around your
own home, how can you ever develop any awarenesses of your
surroundings?  

Plus, there's still a HUGE amount of RESISTANCE from some government
agencies to stop using exotic plants when planting things on their
lands, and start the conversion to the use of local ecotypes of natives,
like most State DOTs and the BLM in most states.

Every state DOT has an environmental division, but almost none of them
are using local natives along their roadsides, and plant exotic plants
each year instead.  

The USDA, Agriculture Research Service and Cooperative Extension
services HAVE botanists and ecologists, but unaware of their
surrounding, they are still importing and releasing new exotic invasive
plants for our wildlands, like the new "kudzu" of legumes that has been
tested to successfully invade California's rangelands, a group of 14 new
annual exotic legumes: 12 Medicago species and two Trifoliums.

The Department of Interior HAS botanists and ecologists, but unaware of
their surroundings and the public lands that they manage, they are still
planting each year up to a million pounds of exotic seeds onto our
public lands in the Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado,
etc.   Here's what the fall 2002 seed-buying contract looked like:

(Sol. No NAR020155, P.O. Box 25047, Denver, CO. 80225-0047) issued
8/27/2002, shows the following staggering annual amounts of exotics:

Crested Wheatgrass.......Total bulk pounds......28,200
Siberian wheatgrass......Total bulk pounds......29,200
Intermediate wheatgrass..Total bulk pounds...... 5,500
Pubescent wheatgrass.....Total bulk pounds......66,100
Russian Wildrye..........Total bulk pounds......70,000
Smooth Brome.............Total bulk pounds...... 4,300
Orchardgrass.............Total bulk pounds...... 4,400
Annual ryegrass..........Total bulk pounds......16,500
Triticale................Total bulk pounds......12,500
Alfalfa..................Total bulk pounds......47,200
Yellow sweetclover.......Total bulk pounds...... 7,100
Sainfoin.................Total bulk pounds......11,100
Small burnet.............Total bulk pounds.....128,300
Forage Kochia............Total bulk pounds......23,200
=============================================================
Persistent exotics being sown on BLM land......453,600

So unless this exotic-seed-tsuname isn't stopped by the State DOTs, the
US Department of Interior, and the USDA stops importing and releasing
new exotics, all the discussions about the importation of new exotics
might become academic, when millions of acres of North America are
annually being converted to weeds?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333