A little known fact: Monsanto was one of the companies involved in setting up the National Invasive Species Council
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Tao Orion:
K: A lot of people have heard the term, “invasive species” and most of them of course are assuming it’s something bad, but when it comes right down to it, it’s actually very difficult to define the term and we could even say that there isn’t one definition of that term.
T: Yes, that’s something that I found really interesting as I was researching my book, because I was really trying to find out if there was a clear, objective description of what an invasive species is, and I found that even the National Invasive Species Council—which in the US is the federal government level board that looks at invasive species issues—spent years on deliberating on the definition and even so, they weren’t able to come up with something that I felt was purely an objective description that could be [applied] in all contexts. It seemed to vary from place to place and time to time.
K: Monsanto was one of the companies involved in setting [that council] up.
T: That’s another disturbing element about how the big frenzy around invasive species and the purported damage that they do came to be so popular; a lot of that was informed and funded by pesticide interests to spur the sale of products, herbicides in particular, to deal with species invasions.
Source link https://milliontrees.me/2022/03/15/beyond-the-war-on-invasive-species-interview-with-tao-orion/
by WindfallGarden
5 Comments
Monsanto is deplorable on so many levels.
That is interesting, b/c all the posts I see on removing Invasive species always say something along the lines of “Do what you can by hand, but if you must, use glyphosate.”
I would guess they were involved due to invasive species in cash crop (corn, soybeans, etc) farming that reduced crop yields. Stuff like Galinsoga, curly dock, thistle, etc. These are all crops that had Roundup-Ready cultivars developed so Monsanto could sell glyphosate. I don’t think a lot of the agricultural weeds are that destructive in native ecosystems because the disturbance of tilling doesn’t really exist in those ecosystems. But I wouldn’t downplay the negative impact of invasives in general. Stuff like buckthorn, garlic mustard, and honeysuckle have basically no impact on agriculture, so large agricultural interests don’t care, but they definitely have a big impact on more natural places.
The source is an activist blog dedicated to saving a non-natural forest of eucalyptus trees in California.
Good point. Personally I use desirable/undesirable. For example poison oak is native and birds enjoy the seeds, but I don’t encourage it in my yard.
Sub clover is introduced but I let it grow.
Having said that, there are introduced species like himalaya blackberries in the PNW and kudzu in the South, and Japanese knotweed that wreak havoc.
You do see on this very sub people saying things like “I don’t like to use chemicals, but” and “the only way to control it is to use X chemical” so it does look like big agrichem has jumped on the invasive species bandwagon with their advertising and outreach.