ASHEVILLE-JAN22-WEB

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HENDERSON COUNTY ANIMAL SERVICES 828 Stoney Mountain Rd. Hendersonville, NC hendersoncountync.animalshelternet.com (828) 697-4723 A FOSTER HOME SAVED MY LIFE OTIS is an adorable 1-year old male who has been neutered. It would be great if he could find his forever loving home for the holidays! Hours: Mon. - Fri. 10 am-4:30 pm This SWEET GIRL is a beautiful 10-month old kitten who is looking for her new loving home— and a name! She’s simply precious and would make a great BFF! Sat. 10 am-2 pm There was nothing wrong with me. I JUST RAN OUT OF TIME. Foster homes give great dogs time to find homes. If you have room in your heart and your home for a temporary pet, please consider fostering. It costs you only time and love. For a dog who runs out of time, it means the world. CONTACT ANY OF THE SHELTERS OR RESCUE ORGANIZATIONS IN CRITTER MAGAZINE. PAGE 22 • CRITTER MAGAZINE • JANUARY 2022
POV— continued from page 18 Laura Ogden — Dartmouth University professors of Indigenous environmental studies and anthropology, respectively — in an ethnographic study of Anishinaabe perspectives on invasive species. (The Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related First Nations peoples in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the US.) Anishinaabe ideas, Reo and Ogden found, reflect a worldview that sees animals and plants as belonging to nations with their own purposes and believes people have the responsibility to find the reason for a species’ migration. The authors’ sources recognized parallels between the extermination of species deemed invasive and the dark history of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. The interviews “helped me recognize the ways in which different philosophies of the world shape our ethical response to change,” Ogden says. Life is “extremely adaptable and regenerative and dynamic,” Wallach says. “Go back 10,000 years, and it’s a completely different world. Twenty thousand years, it’s different. A million, 2 million, 500 million … There is no point that things aren’t shifting and moving.” Another scientific idea that captures this notion is “novel ecosystems,” or, as environmental journalist Fred Pearce has termed it, “the new wild”: ecosystems that have arisen, intentionally or not, via human introduction. In Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Chile and Argentina, a particularly dramatic novel ecosystem is taking shape. In 1946, beavers were introduced there in a futile attempt to create a fur industry. Instead, the animals proliferated and munched down the region’s Nothofagus — southern beech — forests, creating dams and ponds. “They are these miraculous world builders,” says Ogden, who wrote an essay imagining the beavers not as invaders, but as a diaspora. (Beavers have also been a boon for ducks and other marine species.) The invasive species paradigm, Ogden adds, is devoid of nuance, history, and politics; she prefers a concept that gives expression to the moral complexity of the beavers’ presence in South America, as well as the fact that they had no choice in being moved there. The beavers should ultimately be removed from the forested areas, Ogden believes, though she doesn’t think we can do so with a clear conscience, and says eradication “seems very unlikely.” But the idea of a diaspora opens up a way of thinking about what we owe the beavers, as opposed to how to expel them. After 75 years in South America, don’t the animals have a claim to living there? What right do we have to exterminate them? I posed this question to Daniel Simberloff, the prominent invasion biologist. “I don’t believe they’re endangering any of the Nothofagus species,” he acknowledged, noting that there hasn’t been enough study to know what impact the beavers are having on species that require the southern beech forest habitat. Still, “I think it’s a disaster that this native ecosystem is being destroyed and replaced by pastures of introduced plants,” Simberloff says. “Other people may not agree with me.” Even when it’s packaged as objective science, conservation always entails value judgments. One might say that the deaths of 100,000 beavers should count as a “disaster” just as much as the demise of an old-growth forest. Conservationists will have to choose whether to meet ecosystem disruptions like this one with the “war machine” of invasion biology, as Ogden calls it, or to come to terms with a changing world. For now, the dark unicorn, the thumbnail-sized snail that caught marine ecologist Piper Wallingford’s eye, continues inching up the coast of California. “The question of how they’re getting from one site to another is still one that we can’t answer,” Wallingford says. There is something humbling in seeing other species’ will to survive in an interconnected world undone by climate change. Though the dark unicorns’ movements elude our understanding, they already know where they need to go. They Can’t Read or Write. But They Sure Can Multiply. Fix Your Pet. CRITTER MAGAZINE • JANUARY 2022 • PAGE 23
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