When Two Hemispheres Collide: Where to Now for Rewilding in Ireland?

It looks like we were successful at removing murder hornets in the US so that's nice:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/18/us/invasive-murder-hornets-ar...

Where I live in the NW rocky mountains we've lost the battle against Tanzi sadly.

People who talk about 'our betters' destroying things, in the Rockies we've ended up with a ton of 'transplanted' plants at our campgrounds (we had enough out of area people introduce poison ivy with their camping gear the parks had a campaign to eliminate it, at least our 'betters' brought something they thought worthwhile not introduce friggen poison ivy) because of lazy/nasty people who can't be bothered to keep their camping gear clean. Our lakes are devastated from non-native species spread by lazy recreational boaters who again can't be bothered to clean up. The 'just living life' type roamers bear quite a bit of blame for the modern spread of damaging non-native species (this coming from a Santa Cruz hippie kid that moved to the mountains).

Come on people, clean your camping/boating gear when going out of your normal area!

I think you’re confusing ignorance for malicious indifference.

Our median wealth in this country allows us to be so destructive as an unnoticed byproduct of our ridiculous standard and method of living.

Sure, idiots go into the wilderness and cause damage, and the residue from boating "enthusiasts" is terrible, but it's the machine itself that is the problem and those that can do something about it are too busy profiting from it to give a sh_t.

All the problems you describe are real, and they can all be addressed by better seeing through eyes of compassion with a heart tuned to care for others and our mother Earth, herself.

More succinctly, I've heard the saying, "Shit rolls downhill.", as it applies to the qualities of the leader percolating down through the ranks out to the leaf nodes of the culture. Most people are trying to emulate those power-hungry sociopaths, who are nearly always wealthy.

"No more turning away." --Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away"

There's been numerous attempts at removing invasives, as you point out some successful, some not.

I found this one of New Zealand, which has particularly unique habitats, trying to remove rats (and others) to save 200 bird species to be particularly mind blowing [1].

Having just done a Rewilding course, my position has shifted a bit and I'm now in two minds about both the NZ experiment and ones like you mention. Much as yours and the other comments say lazy people spreading accidently, or historically, more deliberately non-native species at face value seems really destructive.

But as the Rewilding course pointed out, weeds generally thrive in areas of bare earth and similar niches where ecosystems are degraded and often then are outcompeted as part of succession, but during that time can often provide great food sources for say pollinators (e.g. ragwort).

I'm going to make a bit of an uncomfortable leap here and say, does a similar argument apply to invasives? Nature is nothing if not both resourceful and determined and it also (for better or worse) created us. I've yet to see many compelling reasons as for why that happended (from a design perspective), but it has to be said we're nothing if not the ultimate (so far) extension to that, hopping around the planet spreading species everywhere.

Is this, ironically, how nature "addresses" climate change by having the same actors that helped create it, also be the best actors to mitigate it. If climate change is going to cause such massive disruption to ecosystems, is the human quick spreading of invasives much better at bringing species to places they might now thrive and build future resilience than the slower method non-human forces can manage?

I have to say I don't feel comfortable saying that and I'm not an ecologist, but maybe, bringing this back to the main topic, that's part of a wider Rewilding discussion?

[1] - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-zealand-s-mind-b...