Can We Stop Importing Invasive Plants and Insects?

invasive plants and insects
Cut down trees, marked as being "Diseased" from Phytophthora ramorum (Sudden Oak Death disease)

Importing Invasive Plants and Species With Our Nursery Stock

Can we please stop importing invasive plants and insects in our nursery stock? As we make our way through Invasive Species Awareness Week here in New York, we need to reckon with the fact that it’s been human beings who have been introducing them all along the way, whether for farming or simply for gardening. Along the way, we are destroying what is left of Long Island’s habitats, and with that the main reason we live here in the first place.

A Long History of Importing Invasive Plants and Insects


Our importation of invasive plants and insects has a long history. It began with the discovery of the New World by the Old World during the Age of Exploration / Age of Conquest. That transferred both non-native and invasive species to the invaded lands and to the home countries of the colonizers. They brought their plants and insects with their animals and returned home with what they found — coffee, bananas, corn.

Invasive Plants and Insects and The Globalization of Gardening


Plantations were established throughout, often as foreign monocultures. The introduction of invasive plants and insects became a by-product of international trade. The Age of Empire brought also with it a globalization of gardening. The importation of exotic species became big business starting in the 1820s. As China and Japan opened to the West, every estate, every university, and every well appointed garden came to feature exotics.

invasive plants and insects
English Garden in Dubuque, Iowa

Non-Native and Invasive Plants and Insects: Centuries of Damage

Today, over half of the plants in England are non-native. This has been disastrous for their native wildlife; it is estimated that 70% of habitat needs to be native to support local wildlife. Hawaii, with almost 60% of their forests non-native, and with 85% of state land non-native, is considered the invasive species capital of the world.

Habitat Destruction American Style


In America, the destruction of native habitat began with the first settlers. They brought their plants and animals with them, and our habitats have been unwinding ever since. With prosperity came aspiration. We could all become landed gentry, with our lawns, privet, and English Ivy, and whatever ornamentals our insects won’t touch belched onto a property.

All Ornamental, and Ecologically Useless

None of the above belongs here of course. These plants serve no native ecological purpose. Our insects haven’t evolved the means to feed off them. The non-natives steal resources the natives could have used. Having no natural enemies, they destroy native habitat, starving out our local wildlife, even when they are not flat out invasive. These three staples of the modern suburban yard — the lawn, the ivy, and privet — are all invasive.

One could argue that at least with grass you can graze livestock, but even here, the livestock that came with the European grass was non-native. Where once the bison roamed free on The Great Plains, today we have almost 100 million cattle fed by a vast monocrop of corn, and our habitats were utterly transformed, as local wildlife populations mostly plummeted.

Levittown as a Global Vector For Invasive Plant and Insect Species


What drives the spread of invasive plants today is what I would term “The Suburbanization of the Globe.” The cult of the lawn began in Post-War America, and arguably in Levittown, New York, America’s first suburb. Here the standard was set. Two trees in each yard, at the exact distance apart. All had to be “just so” as per Abraham Levitt, one of the founding brothers. A tidy, lifeless moonscape of a lawn was expected, or shame and even fines followed.

invasive plants and insects
Invasive Species: Suburbus Americanus

Dark Silent Nights in the Suburbs

Walk your street on a summer night. What yards have fireflies? Which ones cicadas? Are some yards dark and quiet? That’s where all the non-natives, all the fertilizer and pesticide went. Drive at night along a dark road again in summer. Note that today rarely does an insect hit your windshield. Look up at the streetlights. No more insects in their death spirals. That dance is done.

Remember So That Our Grandchildren May Live This

When we built our Post War suburban paradise, it was decreed that it would be insect free and that nature would play purely an ornamental role. That was what it meant increasingly to be American and middle class. That inattention to the importance of native plants and insects helped invasive plant and insect species establish to themselves. As we moved from the farms to the suburbs, we no longer encountered nature in our daily lives.

Home Depot, Lowes, local garden stores and nurseries, have helped to escalate the problem by barely stocking natives and otherwise selling non-natives that contribute very little to the local ecosystem. When they do sell natives, they are unlikely to be the local ecotype, but a loose fit. They are only selling what people will buy, or so they say, but there is never an attempt to educate the public as to why they should go native. Nor do these retailers take any responsibility for this epic disaster, for the collapse of habitats globally.

Our local environments are being disrupted by a global supply chain that sends us all the wrong plants, whether non-native, or invasive, and that spreads devastating diseases through our forests, grasslands, marshes, and lakes. The monetary cost, globally and domestically, is over $400 billion, and escalating.

Diseases For Imported Plant and Species Diseases Are Taking Down Our Forests Species By Species

Came Into Canada Early ’90s inside Shipping Wooden Pallets From China

The Trees Decimated By Accidental Importation Of Disease — The American Chestnut

With each imported disease, both nature and society suffer a great blow. Most famously, and as it was so poignantly depicted in the Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory, it was the importation of a Chinese Chestnut to New York City in 1904 that brought about the demise of The American Chestnut. An estimated 4 billion quickly perished as winds dispersed the deadly fungus. The keystone species of our forests on the Eastern Seaboard, The American Chestnut grew a hundred feet tall and ten around.

Their absence changed our forests, severely impacting all the many animals that fed on the chestnuts and lived in them. It’s demise effectively ended subsistence living in Appalachia One of four of our forest trees on the East Coast were American Chestnuts. In North Carolina, it dealt a devastating blow to the furniture industry.

If you find something vintage made with American Chestnut wood, keep it. The economic and environmental tolls were immense. We must never forget that trauma, recognize what we lost.We need to remember and learn because with gardening gone global, we continue to import invasive plants and insects into our country, with devastating results.

Dutch Elm Blight — Imported via Lumber

Dutch Elm Blight was brought to this country, it is believed, in the 1920’s by furniture makers who imported lumber from Europe for the veneers. Along with that wood came the elm bark beetle, and with the beetle, the fungus that caused the blight. The results, again, were devastating. So many sick and dying trees to manage. It is an ongoing cost for many municipalities.

The Spotted Lanternfly — Imported on Landscaping Stones From China

More recently, it was a load of landscaping rocks brought into Pennsylvania from China that gave us The Spotted Lantern Fly in 2012. Their infestations have been turbo-charged because they can feed off invasive plants that come from their home range in China, particularly Tree of Heaven, which renders them toxic to any would-be predator, much in the same way that common milkweed renders Monarch butterflies toxic. They are now wreaking havoc on our fruit trees and vineyards.

The Emerald Ash Borer — Hitchiked From China

The Emerald Ash Borer apparently arrived in Canada from China in the early nineties inside the wood used to build shipping crates. The Chestnut Blight wiped out 4 billion trees. The ash borer is threatening 8 billion ash trees. 280 arthropods depend on this tree for habitat. Losing this tree will have a profound effect on the entire ecosystem and in ways we can’t even calculate.

Beech Leaf Disease — A Japanese Nematode Suspected

invasive plants and insects
Struggling To Live


Then there’s Beech Leaf Disease, which was discovered in 2012 in Ohio. It is suspected that the nematode causing it is Japanese in origin. It is estimated that the loss of the beech trees will cost $225 Million in Ohio alone. I have five beeches. The youngest go quickly. I pray that it never reaches this ancient one, recently saved from being damaged by a gas line that was being dug.

invasive plants and insects
Sacred Beech, Shinnecock Nation

Sudden Oak Death — Another Nursery Import

Then we have Sudden Oak Death, first documented in the US in Marin County 1994. It is speculated that it was imported from Asia in nursery stock. It has only been seen on The West Coast so far, but again our forests are being devastated.

invasive plants and insects
Cut down trees, marked as being “Diseased” from Phytophthora ramorum (Sudden Oak Death disease)

Save Our Forests For Future Generations — Plant Native Only

From The American Chestnut, to the American Beech, to our ashes and oaks, our forests have been under continual assault because we keep importing plants, and, inadvertently, insects, from other countries. Given all this, there is only one logical conclusion, if we are to begin to stem the tide on invasive species: Place a moratorium on all imported plants, and curtail the import of materials like wood or stone that may harbor invasive insects.

Importing Invasive Plants and Insects: The Same Mistake Over and Over

As Doug Tallamy well notes, we keep importing nursery stock, and we keep importing invasive plants and insects. We keep pretending that somehow we can inspect / interdict the insects and pathogens among the plants and materials, but when we’ve never seen the insect or pathogen before, when we consider how tiny what you don’t know to be looking for is, and given the vast quantity of trees, bushes, flowers, etc that are imported every year, it is folly to assume that this would not lead to the wholesale destruction of ecologies globally.

Are We Planting Any Natives At All?

We really don’t have the time to list out all the ‘garden escapees,’ all the plants that someone planted in their yard one day which soon was everywhere and impossible to eradicate: Oriental Bittersweet, Wisteria, Japanese Honeysuckle, Japanese Barberry, Lesser Celandine. Then there are the bad choice street trees — Callery Pear, Norway Maple. They tend to fall apart if you sneeze too hard. and they are highly invasive, driving out native trees. Then there is the tasteless and useless, your forsythias and your Japanese Maples. Garish and sterile.

Restoring Our Native Habitats

invasive plants and insects



Let us commit to restoring Long Island’s native beauty with native plants. Local nature’s future depends on it. If we want all we still remember to vanish forever, we keep doing what we have been doing. Or?

Now That You Know The Problem, You Know The Solution

Our ignorance and indifference is costing the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It is disrupting our ecosystems irreparably. Is it not time to retool our nursery and landscaping industry to grow and plant the natives we so desperately need if we are to begin to reverse the globalization of invasive plants and insects, to where we witness over a million species vanish over the coming decades?

For hundreds of years, we did not know what we were doing. We know now. Now what?



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