First in whinge watch, a perfect story in the BBC green lexicon: nutter scientists call for new EU laws that will see billions of pounds of our money spent on driving out so called alien species from Europe. Of course, the BBC website reports this buffoonery with bated-breath admiration because it involves their beloved EU doing what it does best, that is, pouring cash down the drain. I’m all for sensible husbandry, but the idea that Europe can be returned to a pristine, pre-industrial, Garden of Eden state is green eco-fascism. I can think of hundreds of ways that 12 billion euros could be better spent, for example on new coal-fired power stations that would ameliorate fuel poverty. Or on stimulating economic expansion.
WHINGE ONE….
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Hang on this is a good idea. Here’s the first ‘alien species’ I’d like driven out.
Martin, they do look to be somewhat lost in space.
Are they on their way to Broadcasting House to pick up their luggage before moving to the planet Salford ?
We already have that nonsense going on in the US. In fact, the large park which is essentially my back yard has been affected. For the last few years, the Parks Dept. has been on a mission to remove all the “invasive species” of plants, under the aegis of restoring it to its original natural state.
Now, I do appreciate the concept, as the park is already the only park in the entire city that contains old growth and resembles in places the woods as they existed before the Europeans took over. It’s a great park, and the main reason why I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the city. The Parks Dept. has in general done an excellent job fixing it up, with big projects to stop the hillside erosion, improving drainage, trying to bring bald eagles back, etc.
But this “invasive species” thing is a joke. They picked some arbitrary period of time to draw a line and declare things native or non-native, which means they’re creating an essentially artificial construct. This means that over the last three or four years they’ve completely wiped out all the lovely wineberries I used to pick every summer, but little else except a few weeds. They also cut down two of the trees on my block – not even in the big park itself, but at the bottom of another hill which is a park in name only – which produced the most amazing mulberries. They’ve left the others, fortunately, because they’re too big to bother with.
All this destruction of plants which brought enjoyment to many, and for what? An imaginary ideal, really.
I’ve just posted this comment on the BBC website. Let’s see if they have anythign to say.
Please could you pass this comment on to your reporter Pamela Rutherford. She has written a piece called ‘Urgent call on EU to stop billion-euro alien invasion’.
However, this is a truly bizarre scare story which is selective in the species which it chooses to consider ‘alien’. She says there are 1,300 alien species which ‘cause at least 12 billion euros of damage in Europe each year’. The ‘scientists’ who provided her with this information are meeting at the Neobiota conference in Copenhagen.
Ms. Rutherford does not explain who ‘Neobiota’ are. She says they have defined an ‘alien species as one ‘introduced accidentally or deliberately into a place where they are not normally found.’ She quotes figures of ‘10,000 alien species in Europe’ of which, she says, 1,300 have ‘some kind of impact’ ‘on the environment, economy or, on human health’. As well as the Ruddy duck, she mentions the water hyacinth, the Asian tiger mosquito and Canada geese. She provides a link to the DAISE database which identifies those species considered ‘invasive’. But this database omits several species which are clearly ‘invasive’ within this definition yet which contribute to the European economy. Why? Presumably so she can justify the ludicrous figure of 12 billion euros per anuum which invasive species allegedly cost us. Let me give you some examples.
One of the clearly invasive species missed off is a bipedal hominid which evolved in Eastern Africa and which very suddenly left its domestic environment and invaded most of the rest of the world. It’s impact on the biodiversity of Europe was profound, transforming it from largely deciduous woodland into what we now call farmland. Its scientific name is Homo Sapiens sapiens and its common name is human being. The IMF estimated the GDP of the European Union in 2009 to be €11.8 trillion, which is 984 times larger than the alleged ‘cost’ of all the ‘invasive species’ identified (selectively) by Neobiota and quoted unchallended by Ms. Rutherford. Surely a moment’s thought would have told her that this ‘cost’ of ‘invasive species’ is utterly spurious?
Another species missing is a bird which is native to the jungles of Indonesia, Gallus domesticus, and which arrived in Europe even more recently that Homo Sapiens sapiens. The common name for Gallus domesticus is the hen. In 2005 Gallus domesticus generated wealth in the UK alone of £1.6 billion. Why was this valuable, but invasive, bird omitted from the list of invasive species?
Presumably the reason was that the authors of this report made a partial selection of species, picking those invasive ones which are or could be harmful, and omitted those which can be seen to be beneficial. In short, the story is complete nonsense. There IS an interesting story here, which is why this self-serving group of individuals are scare-mongering in this way. And why the BBC chooses to assist them in their scare-mongering. Perhaps Ms. Rutherford would care to investigate this?
Please don’t let this set off another round of reports and programs about overpopulation.
The best way to ‘spend’ 12 billion euros is not to take it from our pockets in the first place.
Yes, don’t take it from our pockets at all. Note that the ‘experts’ assessments of the ‘costs’ of invasive species are very tentative, yet the IMF give us a clear calculation of the contribution which humanity makes to Europe – €11.8 trillion a year.
An eco-activist might say, you can’t make financial comparisons with biological concepts. And I would say, I agree, but you started it.
Please note this is not just a specious ‘humans are an animal’ point. You can look at all domesticated animals – horse, sheep, goat, cattle, pigs, chickens. They are all invasive and their economic value, which is VAST, can be quantified.
Why is there no-one at the BBC who can’t work that out for themselves?
“The scientists are meeting at the Neobiota conference in Copenhagen.
They are demanding Europe-wide legislation to be in place by next year to ensure the threat doesn’t worsen.”
Demanding? – not advising. So they are political activists. QED
Quite. THis is not journalism. It is no more a story, no more science, than if I asked the BBC to write up a Press Release for my business and publish it on their website. In fact I don’t know why I don’t ask them to do that…
Because unless your business is an unproductive waste of time, and you are a frothing-at-the mouth left-winger, then they’d only say no.
(CNSNews.com) – John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that the term “global warming” is “a dangerous misnomer” that should be replaced with “global climate disruption.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/75296
Look out for the new terminology being used by Harrabin and his comrades soon..
“Calamitology a new kind of journalism where reporters have a template in their minds that whenever some unusual weather event is occurring sets in and creates catastrophic headlines.”
http://climateclips.com/archives/207
Good term for Harrabins reports, “Calamitology”
Does “alien species” include immigrants ?
Mind you I would be quite happy to get rid of Grey Squirrels.
Grant,
Quite seriously this is entirely an arbitrary question of timescales. What constitutes an appropriate timescale is itself quite an interesting question, but not apparently one which attracted the curiosity of the BBC’s science correspondent.
You could define an alien species is one which was not here 100 years ago. But why 100? That is almost instantaneous in geological and evolutionary times. On the other hand it does makes species which are clearly artificial introductions, such as the Rhododendron from the Hamalayan foothills, ‘alien’ But it makes other equally clearly alien species such as sheep, which are native to northern Iraq and southern Turkey and which could only have got here because they were brought by man, ‘native’.
Sheep are artificial transplantation which were brounght here by our ancestors the first farmers with the explicit intention of altering the environment by moving from a hunting and gathering economy to a farming one. If you claim that sheep are ‘native’ then you completely undermine any distinction between ‘native’ and ‘alien’ species, and between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ migrants. And you can hardly put a price on the ‘cost’ of species you don’t like moving in to Europe if you ignore the profits of those which make agriculture possible.
A moment’s thought tells you that while species transfer is always going on, and will always bring problems in its wake as well as opportunities, it is not either a recent phenomenon or one that can be ‘costed’. So why bother? Purely to spread ecoalarmism. I suppose.
17,000 years ago much of northern Europe and practically all the British Isles was covered by a solid sheet of ice and almost nothing lived on that ice. Was it an ‘ecological disaster’ when the ice melted and ‘alien species’ colonised the land that was revealed? On that basis every living thing in Britain north of a line drawn from the Thames estuary to the Severy estuary is an ‘immigrant’.
And since humans, which evolved in eastern Africa, are included in that, please bear in mind that in biological terms every human being in the UK is a recent immigrant or the descendant of one.