Introduced Species
Ferdinand Von Mueller is often credited/blamed for introducing blackberries into Victoria. For many, they are a prickly curse whose seeds should never have been tossed over Von Mueller's back fence, but as an edible pioneer species they do have a lot going for them if you’re lost and hungry in our cool southern forests. They are one of a litany of species (both plant and animal) that have arrived in Australia over the past 300 years. Like the blackberry, many have first been appraised as either economically useful or as a nostalgic whimsy of Europe. Almost all have then gone on to be demonised and combatted as a foreign invader.
There has in fact been many such invaders over the past 10,000 years, long before Europeans hit these shores. During the last ice age, Australia was a brutally dry and cold place. The native mesic (soft leaved/humid) vegetation had retreated to the isolated pockets on the coast (including and especially New Guinea) leaving the familiar xeric combinations of Eucalyptus, Acacia, Casuarina et al that we associate with inland Australia. Since the ice age ended and our current warm period began, Asian families of mesic vegetation have swept in from the north to take up vacant niches, most likely on the wings of birds heading first to New Guinea and then the mainland. These include some of our most famous east coast trees - Red Cedar, White Cedar, Morton Bay Fig and a myriad of others.
The movement of species across continents has been a constant flow throughout the history of life, but it is admittedly quite brutal to live through. Animal extinctions take off at an unprecedented rate as long stable systems are whacked out of alignment, and biodiversity takes a large but temporary hit. But on a long enough time scale this is all temporary, and a new biotic community will develop from a fusion of the old and the new. The scale at which this would have occurred when North and South America came together would have been above and beyond what has been witnessed in Australia.
It is hard as a nation not to feel desperately guilty for this massacre, both from introduced species and white man’s hand. This leads naturally to an intense love of all things here before 1770, and an intense dislike for things introduced after (only in the ‘wild’ though it seems). Unbeknownst to most Australians, this militant love of gum trees and koalas and hate of willows and sparrows is in a roundabout way a West European cultural left over. It is puritan through and through, and by being so against introduced European species we are reinforcing our European cultural heritage in the most powerful way possible.
Aboriginal Australian ways of thinking are radically different. Any living thing that arrives in Australia becomes a part of it, and the whole concept of introduced species doesn’t really make sense because time is not viewed in a linear fashion. If time is not linear, how can you mark a point of introduction? The people of the inland deserts have embraced the camel, the people of the north have embraced the buffalo, just like all had embraced the dingo many years before.
It is an interesting thought experiment to consider what a biologist with historical amnesia would think of Australia today. There is now mega fauna for the first time in over 10,000 years, with all sorts of impacts. Perhaps the most significant is nutrient cycling, as large herbivores move about the landscape. This has come with added factor of an enormous bounty of fertility injected into the Australia landscape via mineral fertilisers. This is not much discussed, except in the negative sense of waterway pollution.
It is also worth noting too that the Australia of 1770 was in many ways a large garden estate, rather than a robustly resilient system that would maintain its state without human intervention. Human intervention favoured certain systems at the expense of others, which required this constant maintenance to prevent succession to a different state. Once the human intervention was taken away, these systems have gone in new directions. It could be said that some parts of Australia are ‘wilder’ and more unmanaged today that they were before European contact.
If we take the mountain perspective professed by Emerson, what does this bounty of new diversity and species look like in thousands of years? Will there be new species of deer and camel that are unique to Australia, or a deciduous ‘native’ riparian flora adapted to the conditions of the southern states descended from the despised willows of the present? Or will there even be a native feline predator, as the increased fertility works its way up food chains allowing larger carnivores to roam the continent. These new arrivals will be mixed in with a bunch of the old, creating the slapped together novel ecosystems that will be required in the future. These things are certainly possible in the long term, and from the point of view of Gaia perhaps they are preferable.
Does this mean we should forget about conserving biodiversity? Of course not, but perhaps a more nuanced view is required, one that sits outside our Puritan cultural heritage and adopts a more subtle and future focused approach.