Do you mean the Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton [1] (also a movie) and I seem to remember it being a good watch when I last watched though that might be a good 15 years ago. The idea was novel enough it's stuck with me since and I do often joke with people about it, especially given from what I gather that certain types of funghi can now digest certain types of plastic [2].
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
Yeah that's weird. The Guardian has a global catchment area. It's no longer a Manchester or UK paper. A lot of foreign readers wouldn't subscribe to a print sub because it's not worth the hassle.
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
Not an expert on this by any means, but I always found this short series [1] quite fascinating on how cyanobacteria over a period of 200-300 million years coverted the planet from being methane based to being oxygen based, created the ozone layer and paved the way for photosynthesis, oxygen and life as we know it. I can't remember if I'm being too optimistic when I'm recalling bacteria doing something similar for the mass extinctions?
I'm not sure of the licence specifics related to downstream water, but in general:
The impact on downstream water is almost entirely positive, the leaky dams they build filter sediment and excess nutrients (often from fertiliser run off).
They also smooth out peak water flow to help alleviate downstream flooding. Obviously this comes at the cost of flooding areas behind their dams, but this can also be positive, because in the increasingly dry summers, the ponds they create help keep the land upstream cooler and wetter.
The beaver site in Ealing, London was mostly funded because it was a cheaper solution to help with downstream flooding than equivalent hard infrastructure and a significant cost of that project was the fence to keep them in.
Even fish which need to navigate upstream, can leap these dams because they have co-evolved with the beaver, and also beavers are vegetarian so don't predate the fish.
Obviously the main problem, is because in the UK we wiped them out, we've not co-evolved with them, hence the problems of them flooding land that would regularly have flooded, but we have decided to use for other purposes.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in ecosystems go visit an established beaver site, the mosaic of habitats they create can support large amounts of biodiversity.
I suspect burning $1 notes one at a time might take a very long time (it takes longer than you might expect burning bundles of £50 notes [1]) and as you say "What this guy is missing is creativity", just burning $1m dollars just for the sake of it, unless you're making some creative comment some would probably see as pointless/divisive.
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?
The Rewilding term is definitely mercurial, Isabella Tree (Knepp) in this talk [1] sums this quite poetically by saying it's a term that "rewilds itself".
Alastair Driver (Director of Rewilding Britain) in the same talk summarises it as "The large scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself" though there's obviously many other definitions and perspectives.
I think part of the charm of the term, is the ability to apply it in many contexts, e.g. Rewilding people which would be harder if we narrowed the scope to say just natural habitats and landscapes.
This would also allow me to drag in one of my favourite short pieces on Rewilding - Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold.
"The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." [2]
"I now suspect that just as a deer herd Lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer." That's a great quote, right there.
Yes, as you both mention, great prose and great insight.
One of my favourite pieces of nature writing as it succinctly cuts through what seems to be the modern disease of problem creation masquerading as problem solving so elequoently and hard hitting. Obviously because we so often seem to fail at taking the long term and/or ecological and/or interconnected system view.
For any Slay the Spire fans, the Downfall fan expansion is well worth playing. The ability to go backwards through the game as some of the various bosses challenging the normal characters alone makes it a great variant.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain
[2] https://www.shroomer.com/mycoremediation-plastic-eating-mush...