Introduction

everal years ago, I found myself on the front lines of an unexpected

war. It was 2010, and Id been hired as a botanist for the Lane County
Department of Public Works in Oregons Willamette Valley, where I live
and farm with my family. My job was to identify plants, collect seeds, and
strategize innovative ways to manage an emerging wetland restoration
site located on county land. The site had been farmed for more than fifty
years, most recently for ryegrass seed production, which the Willamette
Valley is famous for. The county had purchased the 64-acre site as part of
a mitigation planmitigating the effects of expanding an adjacent landfill
onto intact wetland. The goal of the project was to convert the site back to
a wetlandsimilar to what it might have looked like before agriculture,
ranching, logging, and mining altered the ecological character of the
region. At the time, I thought this was a valuable endeavor. Returning a
small portion of the valley dominated by grass seed farms to wetland habitat seemed like a noble, if inadequate, attempt to integrate more habitat
and ecological function into a landscape where it had largely been lost.
Before taking this job, I thought of restoration as an important undertaking, but I didnt understand what restoration meant in a modern
context. I knew it implied a process of improving habitat and biodiversity,
but I was unfamiliar with how organizations developed projects to achieve
these goals. I didnt realize that theres a subtext to restoration, as commonly
practiced, of native species as good and invasive species as bad and that
this dichotomy is the principle that underpins many of the decisions and
strategies driving restoration projects around the country. The Society for
Ecological Restoration defines restoration as the process of assisting the
recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.
My assumption was that restoration would align with this sentiment not
only in theory, but in practice.
Needless to say, my training is not in the field of ecological restoration
per se. Its in farming, agroecology, permaculture design, and ethnobotany. Before I started the job, I was familiar with invasive species as a land

Beyond the War on Invasive Species

manager, organic farmer, and permaculture designer, but not as someone
trained in restoration ecologyand I didnt realize how different these
fields would be. But I knew, for example, how frustrating the spiny vegetation of Canada thistle can be when it encroaches in a bed of peppers, and I
have found myself confounded by the persistence of field bindweed. I know
how rapidly the long thorny canes of Himalayan blackberry creep across
unmanaged pasture, and I have received my share of scratches in attempts
to cut them back.
But I never considered invasive species to be threatening or loathsome. I
thought of their proliferation mostly as a management issuethe result of
either too much, as in the case of Canada thistle spreading on overgrazed
pastures, or too little, as with blackberries that grow on field margins and
other underutilized spacesusually in highly modified ecosystems. I credit
permaculture and organic farming with teaching me that the proliferation
of invasive species represents an opportunity to understand ecological
dynamics at a deep level and to manage land based on that understanding.
Specifically, organic farming taught me how to manage these plants
using organic methods: mowing, cultivating, burning, and mulching.
Permaculture taught me that every organism is intrinsically connected to
the ecosystem of which it is part and that addressing the ecological conditions that promote a species proliferation, whether you wish to discourage
or encourage its survival, will enhance the ecosystem overall. I knew that
invasive Scotch broom is a hardy, drought-tolerant, nitrogen-fixing plant
that grows where soil has been disturbed. Blackberries and Canada thistle
also find their homes on land where conditions are less than ideal for native
or other desirable vegetation.
Admittedly, I came to restoration with a bias, or at least a sense that every
organism in an ecosystem is an indication of complex underlying ecological dynamics, whether it is considered native to an area or not. So when I
learned that the use of herbicide is common in the field of ecological restoration as a way to manage invasive species, I wasquite franklyappalled.
When I accepted the position with the Lane County Department of Public
Works, the restoration project was already two years into a five-year plan.
The first three years involved annual broadcast spraying of Roundup
known as nuking in restoration lingoacross the site. According
to the management plan, this regular herbicide application creates a

Introduction
moonscapeanother common term in the restoration lexiconthat
supposedly makes it easier for native plants to survive when theyre later
sown and planted. After this nuking, invasive species are spot-sprayed as
they crop up.
From California to South Africa, New York to New Zealand, invasive
species seem to be everywhere, their populations expanding and threatening ecological integrity around the world. A 1998 Princeton University
study found that invasive species are the second greatest threat to global
biological diversity.1 In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of
Nature, the worlds oldest and largest global environmental organization,
warned that invasive species wreak havoc on economies and ecosystems.2
Organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and the National
Audubon Society consider invasive species to be serious impediments
to healthy wildlife habitat and the survival of endangered species.3 And
government agencies, including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management, blame invasive species for losses and permanent damage to
the health of natural plant communities.4
Species invasions are also costly. According to The Nature Conservancy,
worldwide spending on invasive species totals $1.4 trillion every year, equal
to 5 percent of the global economy.5 The United States alone spends $137
billion annually to contend with them.6 The National Invasive Species
Council holds invasive species accountable for unemployment, damaged goods and equipment, power failures, environmental degradation,
increased rates and severity of natural disasters, disease epidemics, and even
lost lives.7
Given the apparent threats posed by invasive species, it makes sense that
their eradication has become a central organizing principle of the practice
of restoration. After all, if they are perceived as degrading ecosystems, then
the practice of restoration as assisting in the repair of degraded ecosystems
should focus on their elimination. I know that people who work in restoration care deeply about the loss of habitats, loss of ecological function, and
declining biodiversity that are readily apparent in seemingly every ecosystem on Earth. Invasive species in many cases are part of this trend, and
while I agree that invasive species are less ideal than the diverse and robust
native flora and fauna they appear to dominate and replace, invasive species

Beyond the War on Invasive Species

themselves arent the actual problem; they are merely a symptom. I remove
invasive species on my own property and in my own design work, but
always in the context of creating something greater, more robust, diverse,
and resilient than what was there before, and I have never considered using
herbicides to manage them. As individuals, we have to take responsibility
for the land. We have to draw the line.
Herbicides are favored as a restoration tool because they represent a
relatively cheap, readily available, and supposedly benign method of killing certain plants and favoring others. Herbicides can be applied in small,
targeted amounts, ridding the site of unwanted species with relatively little
disturbance (at least visually) compared to seemingly more destructive
eradication tools like bulldozers and tractor-mounted mowers. Planes,
helicopters, and people with backpack-mounted spray tanks can apply herbicide in remote locations that are not easily accessed by other eradication
equipment. Herbicide application can be selective, as it is easily applied
to certain plants and not others on a small scale. Working with a weed
whacker or machete does not allow for the same careful treatment. In some
cases, such as the Lane County project I worked on and others I visited,
herbicides are used on a larger scale in the hopes that the site can start with
a clean slate, leaving the desired native vegetation more or less free from
the competition expected from rampantly growing invasive species.
I understand the need for cheap and straightforward vegetation management strategies, especially on a large scale. Ive spent many a sweaty hour
at the helm of a well-sharpened hoe. But the idea that herbicides are considered a necessary part of restoring an ecosystem didnt sit right with me.
If organic farmers can grow nonnative plants like broccoli, potatoes, and
turnips without the use of chemical pesticides, why should native plants
need them, I wondered? I assumed that native plants and animals are supposedly more suited to local conditions than nonnative ones, so it seemed
to me that they should be easier to establish and maintain than those crops
commonly grown in a farm setting.
As I considered how to curb the rampant growth of invasive species
without chemical intervention on the site I worked, I turned to organic
farming for possible solutions. At the first organic farm I worked on, wed
used backpack-mounted propane torches for spot-burning the carrot beds.
Carrots take a couple of weeks to germinate, and many weeds emerge

Introduction
sooner, impeding their growth. With a few well-timed passes of the torch,
I could drastically reduce the number of weeds competing with the carrots,
making successive weeding more efficient.
I reasoned that a similar approach could be taken at this wetland restoration siteeliminate the early germinating and rapidly spreading invasive
plants, and make room for more slowly emerging desirable native species.
Although backpack burning is standard in organic farming, it had not been
used as a restoration tool in the Willamette Valley. Still, my supervisors
were willing to let me try it.
We found that spot burning worked successfully to eliminate populations of rattail fescue and worked reasonably well on false dandelion and
the pennyroyal that grew along the pond margins. We sowed seeds of native
tufted hairgrass and American sloughgrass into the burned patches, which
germinated readily in the moist soil. This approach seemed to work well, at
least as well as spot spraying.
However, as I stood out in the middle of the site one cool, windless
morning in April, eight months into the project, with my propane torch
in hand, I burned a native spotted frogan amphibian recently listed as
a threatened species in Oregonthat had been hiding in a patch of the
invasive rattail fescue. Its skin was badly charred, and it died soon after.
I couldnt help but feel that my actions were not serving to enhance the
ecosystem in the best way possible. I was glad to keep herbicides out of the
watershed, but there had to be better ways to improve ecological functionality and habitat value than by removing certain plants, especially if their
eradication caused harm to the very creatures that were supposed to benefit
from restoration of the land. This was the same problem I had with herbicides: No matter what, the ends justify the means. Spot burning invasive
plants was supposed to be a tool that would create more and better habitat
for native frogs and plenty of other creatures over time. Did burning a few
frogs along the way matter in the context of the long-term goal of creating
a wetland ecosystem on the site?
These questions haunted me as I continued to work on the project. I
began stamping around in the patches of rattail fescue and pennyroyal,
hoping to scare the frogs out of their habitat before I ignited the torch. But
then I realized that the patches were everywhere and that the pennyroyal,
rattail fescue, and false dandelion were serving other valuable roles in the

Beyond the War on Invasive Species

ecosystem of the project site. The false dandelion and pennyroyal were covered with honeybees and native pollinators when they bloomed, and these
too fell as ashes under my torch, leaving the pollinators to forage elsewhere.
I realized that even though I was using a technique borrowed from organic
farming instead of herbicide-based eradication, I was still working within a
paradigm that viewed invasive species as threats to ecological health when
my assessment of reality on the ground demonstrated the opposite. The
invasive species were serving ecological functionsthe bees didnt appear
to mind that the nectar they sipped came from a flower that originated in
Europe nor did the frogs seem to care that the low-growing thatch of rattail
fescue hailed from the same region. They may have preferred native vegetation, but it was hard to tell, especially since native plants were not thriving
and certain invasive species were. Was the success of the invasive species
based on the fact that they were supposedly more aggressive or more competitive, or were other factors contributing to their proliferation? And were
the pollinators and frogs just making do with what was available, or were
their pollination activities reflective of a changed and changing ecosystem?
I realized that in order to develop a truly holistic approach to restoration,
one in which the ends and the means were justified by enhancing ecological
integrity every step of the way, I had to take a step back and look at the
bigger picture, taking what ecologist H. T. Odum called a macroscopic
view of observed ecological phenomena.
So I decided to zoom out from the frogs, the grasses, and the ponds and
look at the site in terms of its own history, as well as how it was situated
within the changing dynamics of the surrounding ecosystem. The 64-acre
site had been farmed for more than fifty years and probably had been a wetland within its long history, prior to the construction of flood control dams
and the massive wetland draining efforts throughout the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries that enabled the development of tillage-based
agriculture in the Willamette Valley. From wetland to farm to wetland
again, each of these transformations engendered ecological changes, some
more obvious than others, in soil characteristics, species assemblages, water
flows, and other dynamics.
The plan to restore the site to wetland characteristics had called for the
removal of 30,000 dump truck loads of soilenough to fill a football stadium 330 feet deepin order to reach the water table and create year-round

Introduction
standing water. Bulldozers, scrapers, excavators, and dump trucks rolled
over the site day after day, for months on end, digging, shaping, and
compacting the soil. The site was sprayed and sprayed again. Thousands
of pounds of native seeds were broadcast across the site, and yet invasive
species still thrived.
In fact, the treatment of the site during the course of its restoration, as
well as its recent history as a grass seed farm, created the niches for invasive species to thrive. The soil excavated from the site was mostly organic
matterrich topsoil that was trucked away to cap the adjacent, nearly full
landfill. Wide swathes of false dandelion radiated out from the imprints
of the tire tracks in the bare clay subsoil, and pennyroyal spread along the
wet margins of the newly excavated ponds where nothing else grew. False
dandelion, with a taproot like its more famous cousin, will over time break
up the most compacted soils. Pennyroyal, though it forms dense mats,
attracts pollinators, which in turn feed birds, amphibians, and fish, each
in their way contributing to the development and diversification of the
emerging ecosystem.
And though thousands of dollars worth of native seeds were purchased
and sown on the site, relatively little germinated. Native wetland plants are
not adapted to bulldozer tracks and compacted clay subsoil. Restoration in
this case entailed fabricating a novel ecosystem, so from an objective standpoint, the proliferation of novel species could be considered an expected
outcome. However, the restoration plan was based on the concept that once
the physical environment (in the form of a wetland) was created, and the
pesky weeds removed, native species would flourish on the site. Were the
native plants we chose adapted to early-, mid-, or late-succession wetlands?
As far as I could tell, we were mixing plants from all different parts of the
ecosystem succession spectrum, hoping that some of them would take root.
I suggested that we choose seeds from native plants that were similar in
form and habit to the invasive species, reasoning that the invasive species
were filling a functional role in the ecosystem on some level and that if we
wanted native species to flourish instead, we should mimic the characteristics of the invaders.
We decided to give it a try. We chose native self-heal and mat-forming
checker mallow to mimic the pennyroyal. We sowed tufted hairgrass,
American sloughgrass, and various sedges to fill the void of the rattail

Beyond the War on Invasive Species

fescue. We planted yampah tubers and bulbs of native lilies including camas,
narrowleaf onion, and harvest lily to mimic the decompacting action of the
false dandelions deep taproots. In the spring, the wetland bloomed with
flowers, and pale green grasses and sedges sparkled on the pond margins.
In order to stock the site with the native plant species we were looking
for, we scouted the region for robust populations of native plant seeds,
bulbs, and tubers. We harvested 30,000 camas bulbs from a location where
a new road was being constructed. We collected wapato tubers from a
local farmer who happily plowed up the mucky ground where they grew
in the hopes of expanding his grass seed operation. We picked seeds from
the endangered Bradshaws lomatium growing at the landfill and Oregon
gumweed, tule, and water plantain from roadside ditches. Mules ears and
tarweed grew next to the interstate, their full seed heads whipped back and
forth by passing traffic.
It was difficult to reconcile the irony that we found the largest stands
of native seeds, tubers, and bulbswhich were so critical to restore to
the wetland sitefrom places where they were obviously unwanted or
unutilized. As I thought more deeply about this conundrum, I realized
that it was the heart of the issue. The native plants, which have been, and
continue to be, cultivated and valued as food, medicine, and fiber crops by
the indigenous people of our area, are marginalized by most everyone else.
If restoration of native species and habitats is critical enough to warrant
the use of herbicides to maintain and enhance their populations, then why
doesnt our culture value these organisms and the ecosystems where they
thrive? Native plants and animals should be valued in agricultural, forestry,
mining, and ranching operations; shopping malls, golf courses, and power
plants should be habitats and havens. But, for the most part, this isnt the
case. Restoration focuses on native species in certain isolated contextslike
the 64-acre wetland where I workedbut not in others. It typically occurs
in so-called natural areas that are artificially separated from the majority of
productive ecosystems where less than optimum ecological outcomes are
considered normal.
It occurred to me that if we are to restore and enhance populations of
native species, then we must restore our sense of belonging within the ecosystems that we depend upon. We must reimagine restoration as a practice
that takes place in all ecosystems, especially those from which we derive our

Introduction
daily needs. Ecosystems should be restored and enriched by every action we
take and decision we make, including the methods we use to procure our
food, shelter, water, and other necessities of daily life. Restoration should
be designed into every facet of our lives.
It is here that permaculture design, rooted in the close study of dynamic
living systems, offers a unique set of solutions to a series of complex and
seemingly intractable challenges. Although permaculture design is usually
associated with farming and gardening, its ethics and principles can and
should be applied in any contextfrom urban planning to alternative currencies to democratic decision makingand best practices for enhancing
ecosystem structure, function, and diversity are especially well-served by
these ideas. The movements mottoIngenio patet campusmeans the
field lies open to the intellect. Permaculture design theory offers a framework for thinking of restoration not just in terms of eliminating invasive
and favoring native species, but by providing a roadmap of how to integrate
ecologically restorative practices into home landscapes, cities, suburbs,
farms, and forests.
Based on close observation of natural systems, permaculture design
theory teaches that everything gardensthat everything from a bulldozer
to a bullfinch to a bull thistle is affected by and affects its surroundings.
From this whole systemsbased perspective, the proliferation of a particular invasive species is not simply a quality of the organism itself, but a
reflection of the ecosystem where it is found. Because permaculture design
is focused on the relationships among elements rather than on considering
an element in isolation, it offers a unique way to understand how rampancy
of a particular species might be indicative of larger processes at work. It is
interdisciplinary in the broadest sense of the word, examining the relationships between ecology and economics, politics and history, design decisions
and land use planning, as well as the relationships between people and the
ecosystems that sustain them. And it moves from patterns to details, making assessments on how big picture patterns such as climate, geology, site
history, and offsite influences like flows of wind, water, nutrients, and pollution affect the details of an ecosystem, whether its shifting populations
of plants and animals or the ways that water moves and soil profiles change
over time. Because its rooted in this kind of thinking and decision making,

Beyond the War on Invasive Species

permaculture design offers a unique framework to understand invasive
species and engage in a more holistic, and more successful, restoration
planning process.
Permaculture design also works in real time and plans for the future.
Restoration as it is commonly practiced is based on the concept that an
ecosystem can or should be brought back to a previous time or historic
species assemblage, and it follows that invasive species would be considered
impediments to these ends. But turning back the clock on the ecosystem
evolution is not only impossible; it distracts us from understanding how
the ecosystems of today are responding to real and serious challenges.
Permaculture design gives us a path forward, to the future.
The process of permaculture design is ethically based, meaning that
every action and decision should evaluate how best to care for the earth,
care for people, and reinvest surplus into regenerative systems. This offers
an important advantage over more conventional approaches to managing
invasive species, which can include the use of herbicides and other ecologically destructive practices. It factors in environmental harm, health effects
on people, ecological or social benefits, and financial support of large
agrichemical corporations as part of the decision making around best land
management practices.
Permaculture design ethics and principles offer simple but elegant
ways of conceptualizing the relationships of dynamic living systems from
understanding the time-based nature of how they change to the multiple
functional relationships present between the living and nonliving elements
they contain. In this light, the idea of invasive species is peculiar since
all plants and animals are native to our singular and unique planet. Bill
Mollison, co-originator of the permaculture concept, states, I use only
native plants, native to the planet Earth. I am using indigenous plants; they
are indigenous to this part of the Universe.8
This doesnt mean that permaculture-based restoration entails a laissezfaire approach to land management. Instead, the solution-oriented practice
of permaculture promotes the creative utilization of invasive species as a
by-product of holistic landscape planning. Invasive species have stories to
tell and information to offer, and permaculture design strategies offer tools
to interpret them in the context of moving ecosystems toward more desirable ends. Instead of inciting fear or frustration, perhaps we can come to see

10

Introduction
the presence of invasive species as an exciting opportunity to engage with
the land in deep and meaningful ways.
And active engagement is exactly what we need in order to curb the loss
of ecological integrity and global biodiversity as the climate changes and
other ecological pressures intensify. The ecosystems that we live in and
depend upon require our thoughtful, diligent, and protracted participation
within them to ensure their resilience. Restoration as it is often practiced
aims for this by attempting to stem the tide of invading species, but it too
often misses the mark by failing to address the wider ecological context of
which invasive species are part. We must widen the focus of restoration
to encompass the human-designed and human-driven processes that are
leading to declines in ecological function and biodiversity. When we do
so, we will bring the restoration process home, to farms, forests, cities, and
suburbs. The design of each of these has ecological ramifications that ripple
through ecosystems near and far. In their redesign lies the solution to the
challenges they present.

11