[APWG] Exotics are our enemies in the West, and Bookends of Muir

Mon Jun 6 12:12:44 CDT 2011

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your replies.

If you check http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html I have been mapping
vegetation Megatransects all over the State, and the average in areas
outside of the deserts and below 1,000 meters elevation, is 99% covered
with an exotic  understory, and that includes our oak woodland
understories also.

On a brighter note, once you get into mountain areas where the horned
land-ticks and woolly land-tick (called that because their mouth pieces
seem to be always attached to the land--and Muir called then the Hooved
Locusts in his book Mountains of California) have difficulty in treading
or there is a lack of water --then you get to see a tiny glimpse of how
beautiful California originally looked only 200 years ago, like at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/wild.html.

When you convert a native perennial grassland habitat, into an annual
exotic grass habitat, with scattered oak woodlands and shrubland habitat,
you are putting that oak woodland and shrubland habitat at risk for
extinction, for several reasons.

The definition of a desert is annual plants with scattered perennial
shrubs or trees.  By getting rid of the perennial grass understory, and
replacing it with exotic annuals, you are converting to desert.

And when those exotic secrete herbicide-like chemicals that kill the
native seedlings as they are trying to sprout, that is another strike
against what was native here originally.

Then, when the burnable biomass of the introduced exotics is 2000% more
than the perennial natives that you got rid of, that causes all sorts of
new problems for the survival of what is left of your poor original native
ecosystem.

This is what has been happening for the last decade or more, all over the
Great Basin and was reported in the latest June 2011 Scientific American,
page 92 article “Up in Flames”?

Then, when the exotic grasses carry devastating grass diseases, like
Blind-Seed disease, which is a fungus that stops the remaining 1% or less
of perennial native grasses that you have left,  from producing viable
seeds, by eating the embryo out of each seeds.

Then you pile on top of that, the soil changes in nutrient levels in most
of the arid West, that the cattle and sheep have caused, since 1769.

This is where, if a native seed is able to find a nice area where it could
sprout, unmolested by the 40 exotic grass seedlings per square inch that
are germinating at the same time--BUT WAIT, oh, noooo, the cows and sheep
ate up and walked away with all of the soil phosphorus and potassium, that
you needed to sprout and survive with?  Like you can see at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/good.example.html

My view, is our generation here in the arid West, and perhaps elsewhere in
North America, we are the BOOKENDS FOR JOHN MUIR.

What I mean by that, is that John Muir saw California when it was
pristine, and he was so moved by the beauty, dedicated his life to trying
to preserve some of it, almost single handedly.

Our generation has the opportunity to save the teeny tiny, itty-bitty few
good  pieces of what is left, after the hurricanes of decades of tens of
million of cattle and sheep have had their way with the California
landscape, and after the tsunami of over 1,000 exotics came in after the
horned land-tick and the woolly land-tick, reclothed the land with these
desertifying plants.

Our goals for our generation, could be like Muir, to manage these exotics
in California, could be that we want to preserve some examples of the
native beauty, but I am voting for a much more practical, human-based need
also.

I think everyone will agree, we do not want our state to dry up any more
than it already is, and that there is a link between water supply outside
of the Sierra snowpack, and what type of vegetation is covering the land
in the arid West, and what vegetation is protecting our riparian areas,
our stream and river banks.

You can see the effect of stripping off the perennial grass understory in
the Southwest right now, and the droughts and fires that are raging right
now, and what massive fires we will have in the Great Basin and Rockies
later this year.   Just take a look at that June 2011 Sci.Amer. article to
see the future.

Our two choices in the arid West appear to be, allowing those
desert-creating, flammable-like-gasoline exotic annual grasses to
continue, or start the process of restoring our original safe and sane
bunchgrasses that conserve the water and soil, with almost no burnable
biomass (see http://www.ecoseeds.com/flames)?

I think we need to look at these exotics as mortal enemies to our way of
life in the arid West--the kindling for a lot more fires than if we had
the original native bunchgrass understory in place--and perhaps poised to
end our civilization by drying out the West, as they convert us from a
native grassland savannah to a desert as empty and barren as the Empty
Quarter of Saudi Arabia.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333