MYTHS OF THE ALIENS - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 65

CHAPTER 7
MYTHS OF THE ALIENS
The idea that alien species are things to be feared is relatively recent. Victorians and their acclimatization
societies had no such concerns. But as scientists developed ideas about ecosystems as tightly knit asso-
ciations of species that had evolved together to create a unified whole, the conclusion that outsiders are
“other” and malign was almost inevitable. The sense that aliens represented a global scourge was first
given full scientific expression by the British zoologist and ecologist Charles Elton. He is the founder of
what academics today call invasion biology.
A mild-mannered and unpretentious Oxford academic with a balding head and round glasses, Elton
hated conferences and committees and preferred working alone in the field. But he was also something
of a pugilist, both as an amateur boxer and a scientific iconoclast. Elton made his name in the 1920s
researching Norwegian lemmings ( Lemmus lemmus ). He recorded how these small Arctic rodents re-
produced rapidly until they ran out of grass. They then went on mass migrations, sometimes swimming
huge rivers in their efforts to find food. Often they drowned. This discovery made him the originator of
our myth about how lemmings commit mass suicide. 1
During World War II, Elton used his knowledge of rodents to write reports for the government on
improving the use of pesticides to reduce food loss to rats, mice, and rabbits—all of them, as he noted,
aliens from continental Europe. 2 From this work, he developed a rather doom-laden view about migrat-
ing species in general. He went public with these fears, first in three BBC radio programs broadcast in
1957 and then the following year in a topic.
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants began with the observation that “nowadays we live
in a very explosive world. . . . It is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us . . . this topic is
about ecological explosions.” It went on to describe the spread and impact of a range of migrant species,
some familiar today, like the starling in North America and the Chinese mitten crab in Europe, but oth-
ers largely forgotten, like the muskrat and the cabbage butterfly. He called their spread “one of the great
historical convulsions in the world's flora and fauna.” He used the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in
Lost World to describe the task of repelling the invaders as “one of the decisive battles of history.” 3
Elton was not the first to use such militaristic language about alien species. It had pervaded thinking
about nature in Nazi Germany, notes Michael Barbour of UC Davis. 4 A leading German botanist of
the day, Reinhold Tuxen, argued that purging the biological invaders would “cleanse the German land-
scape of unharmonious foreign substance.” A common Eurasian weed, Impatiens parviflora , was con-
demned as a “Mongolian invader” that should be repelled “as with the fight against Bolshevism.” In
advocating native plants along the Third Reich's new autobahns, “Nazi architects explicitly compared
their proposed restrictions to Aryan purification of the people,” said evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould, whose mother was Jewish. While nobody would accuse today's environmentalists of being secret