[APWG] Biological controls hopes instead of ecological restoration funding and inventing?

[craig at astreet.com]

Dear Marc and All,
Happy New Year in the Common Era.
 
In California's European history which only started in 1769,
we are now covered with over 1,000 exotic plants, and in most places
across the State the understory is close to 100% exotic plant cover.
 
The perennial hope for the " pobrecitos" (as we say
in California)  out fighting the weeds, is that somebody like the
Feds. or some king in a wealthy kingdom will spend decades and tens of
millions of dollars to import or discover some exotic biological control
to help manage all these weeds.  
Unfortunately, the first and
last success for biological control in California occurred about 50 years
ago, was the introduction off the Chrysolina sppbeetles to control St. John's Wort in northern
California.  Otherwise, all the kings' biological controls have not
made a dent in the millions of acres of other exotic weeds, like yellow
star thistle for example. 
 If we admit that biological
controls per se are never going to come to our rescue, then we can start
looking for the millions of dollars we need to invent other methods for
the management of these weeds, like ecological restoration technologies.
 Or using allelochemicals from native plants to suppress the weeds,
for example. 
That is exactly what I am doing in Palo Alto,
finding the stronger native plant to suppress the soil-weed seedbank from
ever sprouting again, after over a century of dominance, at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/arastradero.html.
For example, poppies can
suppress a lot of the weed grasses, but cannot suppress the thistles.
 However, the perennial native grasses can easily suppress the
thistles.
Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650)
325-7333
 
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