Purists
In one of his most revealing passages, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “nature is the vehicle of thought.” In another he wrote that “Nature always wears the colors of the soul.” In the first passage he suggests that the life, collectively, mirrors our inner lives because it is the raw material for ideas and meaning; we cannot have a stormy thought without the actual storm. In the second he suggests that we bring a lot of our own moods and pre-conceived ideas to our interactions with the life, collectively. His challenge to us in Nature is to have the Discipline to distinguish these poles of meaning.

Aldo Leopold, like Charles Darwin, severed the human imagination from questions of nature. There is no vital interaction on this level; this is the veil of the modernist sciences, I think. For Aldo, the natural world was simply material that could be and had been “forged” into civilization; or a location where we must go, by foot or pack train, in order to renew our humanity and democratic spirit. The “land mechanism” was finished before we got there. Wilderness (the perfect, the finished “land mechanism”) could only shrink. We had trammeled the Garden, and once trammeled, no possibility for redemption. Leopold followed his metaphor too far, I think; we should be cautious not to do the same. When you take a cog and a wheel out of a machine, it is no longer a machine; it is only a hunk of metal (in a way, it becomes nature again). But when you take a cog or a wheel out of an ecosystem (by which we can understand Leopold to mean the removal of an entire species; his life example was wolves) it is changed, but it does not cease to be an ecosystem. This is a fundamental confusion that seems always to follow Leopold¹s wilderness logic. These ideas have spawned a kind of environmentalist Taliban, the evangelical fundamentalist naturist, extremists who, in their zeal to prove their faith, work to deny us our full birthright, “the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us.”

Historically speaking, concern about invasive species was first articulated and first noticed by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature (1863). It grew out of Marsh’s reading of Darwinism, which cast Nature as the only perfect force and exiled humans from membership. But the idea did not emerge as a broadly noticed issue until the past decade. Hmmmm....? Now it has come to function as one of our most common shorthand condemnations of a species or ecosystems. “It’s pretty, BUT it’s an invasive.” Indeed, most of my environmental studies students can actually identify more invasive species here in Florida than native ones; in other words, the natural world they know is an illegitimate one as far as they have been told. They crave the pure, they long for some other place where the Garden has not been soiled; they have been taught to have nostalgia for someplace else. Without diminishing the need to actively manage a wide variety of plant and animal species in order to maintain particular kinds of ecosystems and the natural aesthetics and trophic complexity they provide, I would like to suggest that the separation of human imagination and nature embedded in the wilderness ideal and in the fear of invasives is exactly the opposite kind of ideology than we need to solve our habitat crisis.

Addendum
Brazilian pusley (Richardia brasiliensis) and coast sandspur grow in the four-acre wilderness on the succeeding dredge heap next to my campus here in Florida. Both of them are beautiful plants, elegant in their structure. They are ubiquitous, and so unnoticed ­ unless one of those spurs catches your ankle. They have, along with two strains of carpet grass, dog fennel, castor beans, ragweed, capeweed and Brazilian pepper, reclaimed a large pile of fill left in a barren heap behind the Chapel Pond two years ago. A slow amble through these places reveals a stunning display of diversity and resilience and tenacity. Each individual plant, a remarkable structure on its own, together, something else even more inspiring. Not Darwinian at all, no brutal competition, inter-dependence, and a gentle form of it at that. There are otherwise well-meaning nature lovers who turn up their noses at these tremendous plants. Weeds, non-natives, invasives, they spit. Yet they are all plants, valid in their living, and all of them advancing an ecosystem where human disturbance had taken one away. Thoreau was right about this, our home soil is always rich in Emersonian metaphor.

Tugging Seeds
There is a wilderness of grasses and trees and anoles and large birds all living in the palm hammock at the edge of my campus, a dredge heap of invertebrate detritus less than four feet above sea level. This coast sandspur (Cenchrus incertus which means uncertain millet) is a member of this wilderness. This is a remarkable grass whose bite is as stinging as it looks. Its seeds are ensconced in hard fibrous barbed shells that hook clothing and pierce bare skin. You learn to keep an eye as you walk, you learn that this grass hides beside its less agressively built cousin, the crabgrass. You learn to watch where you step. And you still forget. Each barbed shell gets pulled from your clothing, by finger tips with skin pores just large enough for the barbs to sink themselves again, sticking to your fingers. It takes a delicate brushing of hands in the air to slight the barped pod off of you and to the ground, where you let it lie. The genius is the patience. It will wait for rain, a season of growth, the proper fertilization, and another hapless saunterer in search of vegetable game and all its progenitors will take flight again. The sandspur is a common plant along coastal areas impacted with frequent foot traffic. They follow the walker, depend upon him, rely on his careless habits and broad dispersal. Next year, a survey of the new generation of sandspur would track my studies this past Fall, retracing my footsteps of exploration as I sought new species of plant and came to know new groups of communities. The wild has multiple expressions and what amounts to a changed complexion under the steady warmth of the Florida sun.

Journal: 10-23-06 -- A flock of turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) descended on the Palm Hammock today. More than a dozen. Resting, then flapping their awkward unbalanced bodies into the sky. Gliding with an uncertain wobble. Then resting some more. They have a keen sense of smell and find hidden carrion with their noses. Something must have died. They silhouette against the slightly overcast sky, silently carving figure eights through the atmosphere. They perch like hulks of feather and flesh atop the chapel and on the Eucalyptus snags. What are they scouting? What do they expect to find? They were here two weeks ago as well, although not as many, gliding through in a pack, silently seeking the dead. Craving flesh, but wishing no harm, doing no killing. The turkey vulture is a kind soul.