Invasive Species

I spent a not-insignificant-portion of my weekend wandering the woods musing about dying trees and pulling invasive plants from the ground where I found them.

Hemlock wooly adelgid, beech leaf disease, emerald ash borer, red pine scale, American chestnut blight…oriental bittersweet, garlic mustard and my personal favorite. Black swallow-wort. The forest here is changing. Fast. Maybe it’s been changing longer than I’ve been paying attention. I’m sure it has. But the outlook for the native species affected by invasives feels bleak. I pull swallow-wort and it laughs at me. For every mature plant I can sort of release from the ground a half dozen shoots are poking up at me from the ever spreading rhizomes. I think back to when the woods above my house were cool and dark in the shade of tall old hemlocks, where now only snags stand tall like sentries in a graveyard.

I want to restore this landscape. I can not. I want to see Atlantic Salmon and Shad swimming freely up the cold fast running rills of the Manhan, the Deerfield and the Millers uninhibited by dams made to power the lives of man. I want to know the name these rivers had before they were appropriated into revenue streams and bastions of “progress”. I want to sit on the banks with the people who knew this valley as home, as provider, as sacred.

As I rip another swallow-wort from the ground, I am overwhelmed. The sea of plants is never ending. More this year than last year. I cannot possibly turn this tide. I think only of the original peoples of this land I walk, as they faced the waves of colonial incursion by my ancestors. Invasive species indeed.