invasives – The Contemplative Mammoth

Can we please stop calling wild horses invasive?

The horse has a complex and fascinating environmental history. Wild horses have become such an icon of the American west that it’s easy to forget that humans introduced them to the continent five hundred years ago, during the age of European exploration. Horses quickly became part of Native American livelihoods and played an integral role in […]

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Why I was not one of the 141 scientists who objected to Davis et al.’s invasives comment in Nature

Last month, Mark Davis and 18 ecologists argued in a Comment published in the journal Nature that the native-versus-alien dichotomy in conservation is not only increasingly impractical, but potentially counterproductive. The authors acknowledged that while some invasive species (e.g. zebra mussels) have widely-documented negative impacts, the application of the “invasive” […]

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes