By Donald Wright
The United States Department of Agriculture publishes a list of “species declared invasive, noxious, prohibited, or otherwise harmful or potentially harmful” for the population of our country. The list of 192 species is necessarily selective. According to the USDA, “more than 6,500 invasive species have been established across the United States.”
After reading the list, I find myself wondering if hammerhead worms and giant African snails inhabit my back yard, if I’ll land a round goby when I go fishing, or if veined rapa whelks lurk offshore as I walk the beach at Hunting Island. Kudzu covers trees along the Spanish Moss Trail, brown marmorated stink bugs (when squashed) foul our air, wooly adelgids chomp our hemlocks, and don’t get me started on giant hogweeds.
Missing from the list of invasive species are creatures from the genus homo, however, and this strikes me as strange since it’s the deeds of humans, mostly, that are making life on earth increasingly dangerous and unpleasant. After all, it isn’t Rapa whelks or round gobies that are behind the drought in Arizona or causing wildfires in California, nor are giant African snails driving the cars backed up a quarter mile from stoplights on Ribaut Road.
There are already too many humans for what our earth can handle comfortably, in the opinion of small-minded folks like me, and these numbers keep expanding. Perceived short-term needs or out-and-out greed bring us to cut down forests that enhance the air we breathe, extract petroleum in vast amounts so we can burn it to propel us where we want to go (even if it’s slowly-slowly up Ribaut Road at mid-afternoon), and construct massive new apartment complexes (think Boundary Street or Salem Road) near streets and roads that already cannot handle the traffic upon them.
It’s bigger than a local problem, of course. A retired hedge-fund manager at a noted national investment bank tells me that a requirement for the economic well-being of every nation in our global system is population growth. Capitalism is measured in growth, and to achieve such growth, more people are needed to consume, spend, save, invest, and, yes, produce more children, who will consume, spend, invest, etc.
Modern nations worry over their solvency and their social stability when they don’t have increasing numbers of young people to bring growth for the economy and enough income generation to support those older folks who are no longer making more than they’re taking.
Now, smart species lacking invasive tendencies might come together and work to sort out such problems, which hold the promise not only of altering their comfortable existence, but, over the long term, of leading to their end. They might recognize, too, that global problems require global solutions; that individual nations might best set aside their notions of sovereignty and enable a world body to seek and implement solutions to the problems that threaten survival of life on earth, including war, overpopulation, and an economic system that seems to thrive on both; and that those in all corners of the earth, who profess to care for the lives of their offspring, might attempt to see what the more-distant future is likely to hold and implement measures to guarantee their long-term survival.
Alas, we humans don’t do these things. “Don’t tread on me!” we state, our self-defined national groups not wanting to give up their ideas of what’s best for them in the near future for what might be best for all plants and animals on earth over the centuries to come. “Drill, baby, drill!” we vow, not giving sufficient thought to how the burning of petroleum is altering the air we breathe and the climate we live in and, indirectly, the oceans that lap our shores (and rise to threaten our coastal dwellings). “We’ll attract more people to the Lowcountry,” we promise, worrying more about property values and tax rates than we do about the quality of our lives.
What are the most invasive species? The cartoon character Pogo answered over half a century ago when he altered Commodore Perry’s famous statement of U.S. victory over a British fleet: “We have met the enemy,” Pogo said, “and he is us.”
Donald R. Wright is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, Emeritus, at SUNY-Cortland. In 2005-06 he held the Mark Clark Chair of History at The Citadel. He is author of books on African, African-American, and Atlantic histories. Don and his wife Doris live in Beaufort.
