I saw the most American thing I’ve seen in a while the other day at work.
Or rather, outside of work.
I noticed that all of the earthworms had crawled out of the grass and died. Maybe not all of them — I didn’t dig through the soil to see if any remained — but certainly a huge number. Hundreds lay dead on the sidewalk, and not due to rain.
And then I remembered a few days earlier that the lawn crew had been treating the grass nearby, probably with some sort of insecticide or worse.
Now instead of having healthy dirt with earthworms and other desirable creatures, it was most likely a completely sterile wasteland that absent further constant chemical onslaughts would probably quickly deteriorate.
Congratulations, I thought — you’ve gone from a fairly self-sustaining system to one that is fragile and requires constant maintenance, especially since most if not all of the beneficial microbes are probably now dead too. Perhaps fruitful for the bottom line of the lawn service company, but even homeowners who benefit not at all from such ecological destruction still do the very same thing.
So very American — the utter destruction of something to “improve” it, which then necessitates making the environment even worse to “perfect” it in some carnival of artifice and perpetual maintenance to uphold the simulacrum that left alone would be much more pleasing and healthy.
Likely trying to kill Japanese beetle grubs (invasive!) that eat grass roots and are bad for the lawn – also attract raccoons and birds that tear up the lawn trying to get to the delicious little things. But lots of the insecticides used on the grubs kill just about everything. Much better to use milky spore or beneficial nematodes – some kinds of nematodes don’t even need to be reapplied unless it gets quite cold. Fun fact: many earthworms are harmful invasives.
Thanks. I found this article too about that which was pretty good. Looks like they are mostly harmful to forested environments. I’d read somewhere before that most North American earthworms currently extant were non-native, but didn’t realize that it was the latest Ice Age that had wiped them out.
It’s interesting that earthworms were likely much more prevalent pre-Ice Age. I wonder what it means when an ecosystem has plenty of something — like North America with earthworms, horses and the like — and then loses them in the relatively-recent geological past, and then the creature or plant is re-introduced?
Not quite an invasive, yet not quite “native.”
If we re-introduce the passenger pigeon through genetic engineering, is it invasive or native? What if we do it in 1,000 years?