An Elegy for Invasive Species

An elegy.¹ A lament for the slandered, maligned, loathed, and reviled life. They have earned the official and violent moniker of “invasive species.” Their offense? They are not native to the arbitrary borders of nations. These doomed foreigners face campaigns of extermination. A drawn-out ecocide through poisons, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides; to be burned, scorched, or singed by fire; to be mauled through mowing, hoeing, tilling, chopping. Finding themselves in foreign lands, they are now the accused and accursed.  

And yet, most did not come on their own. They were brought here by centuries of human movement—through generations of migration, both forced and voluntary; through the extractive regimes of colonial exploration, the circuits of capitalism and economic globalization; through serendipity and the gentle hand of the curious and adventurous. They were chosen because they were beautiful, useful, unique, tasty, spicy, or just weird. Some were desired to be showcased, bred, and controlled. They adorned living rooms, front yards, colorful gardens; they became produce on grocery shelves, dried spices in the aisles. They were processed, canned, juiced, frozen, and transported to the ends of the earth. Agricultural plants were hijacked, subjected to harsh regimes to thrill the quirky imagination of breeders; cross-bred and cross-pollinated with wild genetic abandon across species lines as commodities and property. A flounder gene in a tomato? A lightning bug gene in a tobacco plant? Why not? There are no ethical or sacred lines in genetic engineering for nonhuman life. And thus, an infinite number of organisms have been bred for mutations and mutants that pleased the master. 

Through colonialism, plants were reimagined as botany—the deep time of plants compressed into the regimes of human time and capital. They were reimagined as gentlemen and ladies on nuptial beds as husbands and wives, their reproductive parts imagined as human genitalia.² Inhabited lands were deemed terra nullius where colonists “discovered” plants long known to locals. Renamed after western colonizers, they were transported far and wide into plantations of monocultures. Generation after generation, plants toiled to feed ravenous appetites. When they outlived their usefulness, they were reviled and abandoned to the discarded piles of forgotten history. 

So many tales to tell. Kudzu, first exhibited as an ornamental vine, was adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and given to willing farmers who were paid to plant it on their impoverished lands to nourish the soil and prevent erosion. When it grew too prodigiously, it was rendered invasive.³ So with the Amur honeysuckle, Japanese knotweed, and the Japanese barberry. Lady Marian Hastings, the wife of Warren Hastings, Bengal's first British governor-general, introduced the water hyacinth into the country for its beauty.⁴ Today, it is known as the invasive “terror of Bengal.” Purple loosestrife, introduced in India for its ornamental and medicinal use, is now also deemed invasive.⁵ Other plants were imported for biological control and vilified when the experiments failed. The list goes on: garlic mustard, phragmites grasses, tamarisk, Japanese honeysuckle, Chinese privet, and the curiously named “tree of heaven,” Ailanthus altissima. The vast majority of these plants were brought here not by lay people but by trained professionals—plant explorers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, breeders, ecologists, forest managers.⁶ This was the hubris of so-called science and scientists gone awry. The victims? The organisms that, through guile or persuasion, through greed and desire, were invited into the borders of nations.

As I argue in my recent book Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, if we think about contemporary invasion biology alongside colonial botany, what is revealed is a profound sort of botanical amnesia.⁷ During colonial rule, there was a laissez-faire attitude and unlimited mobility across borders. As the late historian Alfred Crosby argues, the roots of European domination of the Western world lie in colonial practice creating “New Europes” in the new lands being explored.⁸ Settler colonists ravaged native populations of humans, plants, and animals. Where Europeans went, their agriculture and animals went, too. They thrived while Indigenous ecosystems struggled to accommodate newly introduced organisms and practices on the land, in some cases collapsing as a result. 

Capitalist logic fueled a detrimental approach to flora on a global scale. The mass export of resources out of the colonies, alongside growing ravages of the environment through unchecked industrialization and development in newly independent postcolonial nations, created destruction the world over. For example, in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries, the USDA sent biologists as “explorers” to roam the globe for new and interesting plants of economic and aesthetic interest. Indeed, David Fairchild, director of the USDA’s Section of Seed and Plant Introduction from 1898 to 1928, introduced more than 200,000 species and varieties into the United States.⁹ The American Acclimatization Society introduced all of the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare’s works to New York City’s Central Park in the 1890s.¹⁰ This sort of open policy was the norm until late in the 19th century. White settler colonists remade themselves as natives on colonized lands and enacted strict racial border policies to exclude the foreign-born as both plant and animal quarantine laws developed alongside human exclusion acts.¹¹ In an ultimate act of irony, after centuries of global expansion and ecological decimation, those very colonial nations now insist on preserving the “new Europes” from even newer immigrants from Asia, Latin and South America, and Africa.

A botanical reckoning means undoing botany’s theories of global flora to unravel the colonial elision that ideas of nature both “in” and “out of place” are political constructions. In this way, biological nostalgia is fundamentally an unecological project. A true botanical reckoning, then, would acknowledge that we are all migrants, dispossessed or dislocated, albeit in unequal and hierarchical strata.

An elegy for invasive species. First the lament, and now for praise and celebration. The accursed species did not comply. Species brought to new lands for exploitation in many instances refused to follow their masters’ orders. They thrived. They covered damaged and destroyed land and greened ruined landscapes. They offered bountiful produce, but the new “natives” did not recognize them as food, so they grew unchecked. Critical contemporary plant-studies literature pushes back on false claims to an idyllic past, demonstrating how “invasive” species in fact thrived in cracks and crevices of urban cities, building islands of rich biodiversity. They produced rambunctious gardens and ruderal cities, offering new, salvific narratives for how to heal the toxic elements of the Anthropocene.¹²

Some plant species came to colonized lands as beloved companions to humans creating embrangled communities, a continual reminder of home and belonging. I use the term embrangled instead of entangled or intertwined to capture the state of being embroiled and mired, indicating how all species’ histories are fraught with complex relationships. Invasive species are no different. Migrants together, they built new worlds with memories of the old, a transnational, transhistorical palimpsest of life and living. Humans may pillage the land, but we also nourish and enrich it—and ourselves. Foreign plants grew, survived, reproduced, even thrived across millennia. What can we offer but praise for their tenacity? 

An elegy for language. And now, consolation and solace. Invasive species are not the problem, but rather the symptom of a much larger problem: unchecked development, exploitative environmental policy, unbridled greed, rapacious growth to feed the gods of modernity. In fact, the distribution of plant species across the world today is a product of the histories of European colonialism, a legacy that has indelibly shaped and structured all contemporary ecosystems. The continued destruction of habitats and the willful refusal to deal with the devastating impact of climate change means we have already passed the point of no return. No restoration is possible—even if that were a goal worth pursuing. 

What then does it mean to save native species and native geographies, when there are no longer “native” environments? What has emerged is something different. Migrant plants have created novel ecosystems, and novel ecosystems have created novel natures. The complex history of mobility and the migration of multispecies biologies is a story of our planet: its past, present and future.

Male/female, masculine/feminine, white/black, rich/poor, straight/queer, native/alien—all these binaries emerge from the scientific categorization of sex, gender, race, class, and the biogeography of belonging. Yet these are not obvious categories by which to understand life. They emerged from histories of colonialism that helped organize society into hierarchical formations—one superior than the other. How can we jettison the unhelpful and unproductive language of native and foreign amid other colonial categories, like the binary of male and female? How else can we rewrite the stories of life on earth? Like the language of invasive species, colonial scripts made floral biology into “an entertaining, cunning, and crafty game of love, an evolutionary arms race where males try to outwit females and compete with each other.”¹³

The plant-evolution researcher Madelaine Bartlett and I suggest we understand plant morphology and anatomy not through human genitalia, but through plants themselves. The easy conflation of plant and human sex simplifies and mischaracterizes plant reproductive biology. For example, we could eschew the language of male and female to discuss flowers as staminate and pistillate and gametes as dispersed and retained gametes. Indeed, we suggest rejecting the terms sex and gender altogether, or at least understand both as quantitative traits.¹⁴ Plenty of plant species do not conform to traditional gender binaries: Plants can be hermaphroditic (roses, tomatoes), monoecious (oak, corn), dioecious (holly, spinach), sex-switching (ginkgo), asexual (dandelion, strawberry). Our categories for thinking with and about plants should seek to be as flexible as plants themselves. 

Likewise, how can we distance ourselves from colonial theories about plant origins? Just as humans are more than a few races, plants are more than their binary designations. They, too, have complex histories and biologies. We must move beyond the colonial, Eurocentric origin stories that serve as litmus tests of biological and botanical origins to reimagine our futures with plants. 

I wish to conclude this elegy by proposing five questions we might ask to begin the work of replacing the binary of native and invasive plant species as we face the prospects of our planetary future in a fast-changing world. Before we continue headlong in our eradication of invasive species, let us think with plants, asking about their history, form, and function. The method is simple: what, where, when, who and why. Each question requires curiosity, care, and accountability. 

What is the question, issue, or problem we are addressing? Invasive species rhetoric is often monolithic, broad, and insufficiently nuanced. Nonnative plants are marked as bad actors in need of eradication. But the concerns facing various biotic communities vary considerably. In fact, there is no singular invasive-species-problem narrative. In some cases, the problem is economic loss; in others, it is aesthetics, or the impact of these species on a beloved native species or ecosystem; in yet others there is a worry about biodiversity or species diversity. These are not equivalent issues, and it would behoove us to name these problems clearly without a one-size-fits-all solution of total eradication. To ask what is to take a step in the direction of clarifying the issues so-called invasive species create as we consider options for responding more creatively moving forward.

Where is the question, issue, or problem located? “Invasive species” rhetoric looms large as a problem because it has been framed as a universal issue; the problem is assumed to be the same worldwide. As we have seen, this rhetoric collapses vast human and plant histories, biologies, and ecologies into a universal framing. But asking questions about the ecological, geographical, historical, and environmental contexts of individual plants and animals is critical. Surely the conditions of a desert or wetland, small island or mainland, coast or inland, mountain peak or valley are wildly different. Surely the varied histories, ecologies, and biologies of habitat and organisms contribute to different adaptive futures. How an organism can succeed with too little, too much, or unpredictable watering is just one element that has led to divergent adaptational behaviors. Where are we, then, is a key question we must ask, and it can lead us to invest in the questions, issues, and problems we must address. 

When are we talking about? How does time shape the question, issue, or problem we are addressing? When did a given plant emerge in its space? We must always recognize that myriad species have long existed in small numbers before they turned invasive. The question, more specifically, is in fact, Why now? By applying questions of when, we problematize the narratives around invasive species as inevitable in order to focus on the temporality of invasion. We must consider the histories that brought plants into particular geographic spaces, and what actors, both human and nonhuman, have helped to create this particular moment. 

Who are we talking about? Whose questions, issues, or problems are we addressing? Not all genera are the same. Who is the plant organism? How did it find itself in this place? What kind of life history does it have? How is it propagated? How is its pollen dispersed? How are its seeds dispersed? Who are the local humans and what do they want? How do complex nature-cultural histories link plant diaspores with human diasporas? Whose histories, cultures, and biologies should we reckon with?

Finally, why do we find ourselves here? Which histories, colonial or otherwise, have ushered us into this moment? Which political genealogies brought us here? Why this plant? What were the conditions of possibility that led to its becoming invasive? Inevitably, the why offers a rich nature-cultural history filled with human hubris. Instead of a universal, monolithic rhetoric of invasive species, I suggest we begin to think with plants through their rich and diverse histories. The what, where, when, who and why helps us name them.

The story of plant life is the story of Pangaea, the supercontinent that fractured into smaller continental formations, moving species and leading to dizzying evolutionary adaptations. Much later, in the early-modern and modern periods—a mere flash of planetary time—colonialism re-knit the “seams” of Pangaea.¹⁵ Biological exchanges made through movement sped up to create a world-spanning economic system. Yet in the deep history of time, who is native and who foreign? 

The embrangled story of life on earth is not singular or universal, but complex and multiple. Some live where they were born, but others, like me, are shaped by generations of migration. My grandparents, parents, sister, and I are migrants through and through. Complex histories shape these migrations. As the quip goes, “We’re here because you were there.”¹⁶ Migrations have been forced and coerced as well as voluntary. Migrants tell tales of abjection, enslavement, victimization as well as stories of opportunity, adventure, celebration, and joy.

I am primarily trained as an evolutionary biologist. Life on earth for me is never about stasis or being rooted in one place—literally or metaphorically. As Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen famously quipped, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”¹⁷ Inspired by Charles Darwin, I dreamed in a polyphonic, polymorphic biological imagination. Growing up in post-independence, multireligious India, life was about cultural plurality. In my lifetime, I have been stunned by the rise of an insular nativism and nationalism in the country of both my birth and my citizenship; a violent, virulent xenophobia applied to human and nonhuman alike. Even more remarkable is that, in both the nation of my birth and where I live now—in the United States—the majority claim to be dominated by the needs the minority express.

While the biota of the world has been profoundly shaped by colonialism, migrant life did not begin with European colonialism. Humans, animals, and plants have always moved. After all, in the deep history of life on earth, who belongs where? Life evolves through the everyday, through peace and tumult, greed and grace. Pathologizing or celebrating migrants or native species misses the complex histories that have shaped human, animal, plant and fungal life. None are immune to these histories, whether colonial or otherwise, and we ignore them at our peril. 

We have the tools to address our embrangled histories. Biologists already possess rich biological classificatory information; environmental historians offer multiple genealogies of plant-related problems; postcolonial, decolonial, and Indigenous scholars chronicle complex analyses of the legacies that brought us here; literary scholars deploy a robust language of rhetorics and counter-rhetorics; feminist, queer, and crip scholars remind us of the gendered, racialized, and ableist underpinnings of nature-cultural histories. Once freed from disciplinary silos of purity, a promiscuous, polymorphous, interdisciplinary approach is precisely what we need to remind us that we are complex beings in complex nations with complex histories. 

Rather than vocabularies of austerity, damage, and restoration, how do we move to a language of abundance, flourishing, and ecological maximalism?¹⁸ We can do so only by abandoning our botanical amnesia and narratives of purity. Instead of retreating to an idyllic past, we should revel in our impurity, embracing it as central to our politics, our methodologies, and our methods.¹⁹ What we need are impure politics, in fact: impure theories for impure times.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Nick Anderson, Xan Chacko, Sushmita Chatterjee, Courtney Fullilove, Molly Hardy, and Rebecca Herzig for their helpful feedback.