Current Events > Get woke, stop demonizing some animals as "invasive species"

(+) Yeah! (+)

Climate change is forcing some animals to move. Dont call them invasives.

The scientific community largely views this kind of habitat shift as a good thing, Wallingford and other ecologists told Vox. But the primary lens available to the general public and to policymakers is less forgiving. Invasive species is a concept so ingrained in American consciousness that its taken on a life of its own, coloring the way we judge the health of ecosystems and neatly dividing life on Earth into native and invasive.

Consider the effort in North Carolina to prevent coyotes from breeding with endangered red wolves, which bears uncomfortable parallels to Western preoccupations with racial purity that only recently went out of fashion

Whats more, the very notion of invasion draws on a war metaphor, and media narratives about non-native species are remarkably similar to those describing enemy armies or immigrants. For example, a recent news story in the Guardian about armadillos besieging North Carolina described them as pests and freakish. It also gawked at the animals booming reproduction rate, an allegation that, not coincidentally, is leveled against human migrants.

Many scholars have explored how anxieties about humans and nonhumans crossing borders, or going places where they dont belong, map onto one another. The fear of immigration is never isolated to humans, writes science studies scholar Banu Subramaniam in The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology. It includes nonhuman migrants in the form of unwanted germs, insects, plants, and animals.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/down-to-earth/22796160/invasive-species-climate-change-range-shifting

Critical Wildlife Theory

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I generally like Vox, but is a trash, filler article.

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Its an interesting subject. Invasive species arent necessarily bad for their new environment. Their presence changes things, but thats not inherently bad. However, our culture considers all invasive species to be a bad thing.

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we are the invasive species

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Well, thats just silly

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So do they want to change the word or the negative connotation about "invasive species" because I can see people labeling all invasive species as bad when the effects vary.

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poe's law

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Vox. lol

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I'll invade vox's species if ya know what I mean

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I mean, if there's an invasive species homo sapiens clearly counts as one. Humans are everywhere and expanding constantly, almost always at the direct expense of some other species. And this is without even considering climate change.

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AloneIBreak posted...

I mean, if there's an invasive species homo sapiens clearly counts as one. Humans are everywhere and expanding constantly, almost always at the direct expense of some other species. And this is without even considering climate change.

how dare you

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But a lot of Australian wildlife have become extinct or endangered due to invasive species.

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That is an impressively stupid article. Animals, plants, etc becoming established where they weren't before due to climate change is usually a pretty good indication what is already living there is about to be fucked up. Invasive species also are pretty important from a biosecurity perspective; if something is not only going to decimate the environment but also food crops that doesn't bode well for a planet dealing with food insecurity

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Nukazie posted...

we are the invasive species

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Save the Amazonian hippos!

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AloneIBreak posted...

I mean, if there's an invasive species homo sapiens clearly counts as one. Humans are everywhere and expanding constantly, almost always at the direct expense of some other species. And this is without even considering climate change.

I mean, it's one thing to drive one or two local species to endangerment/extinction

and another entirely to be the species responsible for the Anthropocene mass extinction event

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Cocaine Hippos

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