One of the penalties of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds.
---Aldo Leopold
Fort Ebey State Park's Bluff Trail caresses the rim of the glacial bluffs overlooking a wide-open span of the Salish Sea. It is one of my favorite big view strolls anywhere in Washington. Windswept, with a panorama of island, sea and mountains, it is a place that begs for contemplative musings and flights of fancy accompanied by rhythmically crashing waves and vividly colored sunsets.
My 2019 visit to Fort Ebey State Park came in conjunction with my attendance at a writer's workshop in nearby Coupeville. Writing, reading and sharing my work with a group of more experienced writers, I marinated in the well-honed guidance of authors Ana Maria Spagna and Laura Pritchett, with an aim toward "re-wilding" my writing in new directions. My mind spun with new ideas to incorporate into this burgeoning blog by day. In the evening I retired to campsite #14 next to the Bluff Trail and its calming vistas. Strolling the trail in the springtime twilight, perhaps slightly distracted from close attention to the path, I suddenly found myself impaled on a bit of prickly vegetation. Surprised more than wounded, I knelt for a closer look at the offending attacker. Gorse.
Gorse is an invader. Why is it here? In 1942, Puget Sound's defense was enhanced with Fort Ebey and its two 6-inch Naval Model 1905A2 guns with a range of 15.3 miles over a 142 degree field of fire. This site, with its unobstructed view west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, seemed essential for securing the homeland from a Pacific Ocean naval attack. To preserve the element of surprise against any would-be attackers, the site was camouflaged with replanted trees complete with tree wells, ivy and, yes....gorse....gorse having the added advantage of providing some additional defense in the form of its spines.
While it might not have been considered in the decision to arm the site with this plant, few invasive species dominate a site like gorse. Fixing atmospheric nitrogen for its own growth, and rapidly expanding its roots, it out-competes native plants (primarily grasses here) by altering soil chemistry to prevent nutrient exchange by other plants and producing hardy seeds that are viable for more than 30 years. As the plant matures, the leaves become narrow and pointed, eventually thickening and secreting a wax, hardening into the spines I found.
In spite of more than 40 years of efforts by park staff and volunteers to cut, dig and burn the gorse here, it is still prevalent enough to wound this ecosystem and provide an unpleasant encounter!
Nursing my wound, I began musing on the drama slowly playing out here and throughout much of the world. As humans move from one place to another, we frequently bring along species from other realms. Some fit into an existing niche without deleterious effects on the natives. Invasives like gorse have traits that result in displacements. Their physiological characteristics (high photosynthetic rate, nitrogen content and efficiency, optimal water use), growth rates, and reproductive fitness (profusion of flowers and seeds, germination advantages, and survival advantages) give them an edge, resulting in the extirpation of natives and diminished local biodiversity.
To restore native species managers often eliminate all of the non-native species and reintroduce the desired natives, investing in work that will require continuous intervention. In rare instances where resources exist to pay for and carry out the work and the ecological system is otherwise healthy, this can be successful.
Some ecologists are confronting this restoration strategy by suggesting that we should embrace "novel ecosystems," places modified by non-native or invasive organisms that cannot be returned to a native state. After more than a decade pursuing restoration in Hawaii, botanists Susan Cordell and Rebecca Ostertag began an experimental forest management program utilizing non-native species to fulfill functional roles in evolving ecosystems--providing shade to protect native seedlings for example, testing their hypothesis that "the complementary traits (of native and non-native plants) would be more effective at reducing invasions."
My childhood introduction to the natural world was heavily weighted with vacation trips to iconic protected areas in national parks and wilderness areas, places that are branded as "pristine," "untouched," and "look just the same as they did when Lewis & Clark passed through," places that usually exhibit species assemblages that are much less modified than the places we live. I continue to believe that public land management policies should lean towards every effort to foster the preservation of such places, where, to quote the Wilderness Act, "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
We will need to very carefully enter into discussion and experimentation with adaptive management in ecosystems that will need human intervention in order to weather the stresses of the Anthropocene. I first heard this idea many years ago in a lecture by David Peterson, a forest scientist who posited that forest managers should be reforesting harvested areas with trees from hundreds of miles to the south in order to ensure their survival into maturity in a changed world. I was horrified at the idea of tinkering with wild nature this way!
There is actually a word for the feeling of loss that I experienced on that day-- solastalgia, or ecological grief.
Ecological Grief--the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.
---Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo
Assuaging this pain, geologist Robert Thorson has found inspiration in an interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's writings:
[Thoreau] teaches us that wildness is much, much more than raw nature. It’s a perception emanating from our minds. A base instinct, uncluttered by rational thought. The creative genius of artistic, scientific and technological creativity.
Perhaps this is just what homeland security really is-- a perception. An ecosystem (or a nation) establishes its security not by purging and isolating at great expense but by finding ways to embrace and utilize the complementary contributions of newcomers to create a "novel ecosystem" that best nurtures the species (or values) that truly define the place, strengthening its resistance to invaders.
While I have not heard a novel ecosystem solution that can exclude gorse from Fort Ebey, our grandchildren will probably find something different when they walk the Bluff Trail 50 years from now. Hopefully it will be a re-wilded ecosystem that exists in balance with a diverse and engaged population, inspired by the vista of the broad reach of the Salish Sea, still home to salmon and orcas, protected by wisdom and love.
--David
