On Native Plants
Talking about the word and meaning of Native is often quite controversial. Native has been ascribed to people, to plants and animals. In English, native is to denote an origin. This originated and is from here. Yet, what we know about all ascribed topics that can have the label native attached is that origin is hard to identify, and is ever changing. We ourselves as human species differ in cultures, religions and scientific thinking about our origination. Origin is often based off of time. When this or that was first spotted, identified or seen here, there. At times origins have been completely revamped when new evidence comes to light that an item changes the timeline for our ascribed topics origin.
Why I am wasting your time discussing the linguistic dance of the words native and origin? I’m hoping that this elicits in you some questions. Why does something being native and or something/ someone’s origin matter to us?
We have used native and origin as justification for our actions. We are righteous in our ideas of removing nonnative or invasive plants (more on this later) because it does not have the word native next to it. People, some people I deeply respect in fact, even get angry at the siting of something that is not native. It’s also really curious that we are open to making these angry decisions with plants and yet don’t see the fault or make efforts to resolve these feelings with how native people have and are currently treated. For the moment, let me solely focus on our two ascriptions plants and animals.
Here is the fault in ascribing native, it limits our understanding of the value of what that plant or animal provides and by shear label makes us be agreeable to liking or wanting to enhance that plant species survival. We don’t understand or know the value of that animal or plant and then make important decisions about our interaction to encourage the growth or propagation of it based solely on a label that at times can change based off new information of origins. Likewise it blankets that all species of plants and animals that are not native then have no value and has someone unquestioningly seek to remove, destroy or diminish the population of these species. I hope you have already gotten from my posts that I’m Buddhist and killing of anything is not something I take lightly. You do not have to be Buddhist to be sensitive to eradicating species based off of some historical information or scientific community denoting that something is not native.
Plants and animals that are not native are not always invasive and these that are ascribed invasive are also not always harmful to a given ecosystem. We again are getting into the wrong or right thinking that entitled people to do acts of harm against groups of people because they believed they were righteous in their actions. So what I’m saying here is this, it’s more complicated than labeling a plant, animal or person native.
In all cases, all have value and we need to take responsibility and discover what the value or each entity is and only then decide how or if we should intervene.
