A weed by any other name...

Just a few days ago, The New York Times ran an article about the role weeds might play in our changing climate, which I found rather interesting and thought I would share.

One portion that especially caught my attention:

“Weed” is a subjective label applied as a matter of personal judgment, a point that becomes obvious when you consider how many “noxious weeds” — plants now marked for destruction by federal, state or county authorities — were deliberately introduced into North America by individuals convinced of their beauty or utility...

There are countless definitions of weeds, ranging from the hardheaded one necessarily observed by farmers, that a weed is any plant that interferes with profit, to the aesthetic (a popular gardener’s definition of a weed is “a plant out of place”), to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sanctimonious assertion that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” But all agree on the central criterion: to qualify as a weed, the plant in question must be viewed with disfavor by humanity. Simply put, any plant, if we dislike it, becomes an intruder in our landscape and so a weed.

Arguably, then, there was no such thing as a weed until mankind developed the need to discriminate, which came with the development of agriculture.... In fact, many of the wild grains like red rice or wild oats that are among our most troublesome agricultural weeds today were valued food sources until we graduated from the hunter-gatherer stage of our existence.

One interesting idea is that our efforts to rid our gardens and farms of unwanted guests actually aid in their adaptation. That is, the plants best able to cope with such attacks are the most successful, produce the most seed, and become more tolerant to herbicides, etc. They don't get better with such treatment; they just get worse. The main gist of the article is that maybe invasives aren't such a bad thing, since they're filling in gaps within native ecosystems and might be better able to thrive when the climate warms and levels of CO2 increase. They could plausibly even be used for bio-fuels.

Certainly a different way of looking at weeds and invasives!