Obama Tyranny Continues: Bivalve Mollusca Version

Comes now the news that the federal nanny state wants to stick its probing tentacles into Alabama yet again. First it was the stimulus money, what with trying to help solve our crippling financial problems. And now they want to mess with our food products.

I’m talking oysters here people. I’m talking regional traditions of wholesome goodness being thwarted by fat cats in D.C. who know nothing of the slimy delight of a raw oyster. From the New York Times:

Two-thirds of the nation’s oysters are harvested from the Gulf Coast and about 40 percent of them are harvested during warm months. Half of Gulf Coast oysters are eaten raw, but they are largely eaten in the South. Many upscale seafood restaurants north of the Mason-Dixon line refuse to carry Gulf Coast oysters.

What’s the problem?

Eating shellfish raw is risky since they can be infected with both viral and bacterial contaminants. The bacteria Vibrio vulnificus is commonly present in oysters, but warm water can lead the bacteria to grow rapidly, so the riskiest oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

Well la-de-freaking-da. How many people die of this? Answer? 15 people a year. Are the deaths horrible? Yes. The description of the guy in the NYT article with his blackened and blistered skin made me want to puke. But there’s a reason why we don’t make social policy with our queasy stomachs. We prefer to use rational risk assessments. And we don’t kill an entire industry and hundreds of years of “how to eat tasty food” just because a tiny handful of people out there have some kind of wacked out body chemistry.

5,700 Americans died last year from food-related illnesses. Do you see us banning peanuts or meat? Compared to 15 people dying from oysters, that’s practically a food Holocaust.

There are already warnings about oysters. If you have AIDS or your immune system doesn’t work, maybe you shouldn’t eat them. Also, if you are blind, you shouldn’t drive a motorcycle. Those things don’t mean that the government should come in and regulate with a sledgehammer, putting people out of business and confining the rest of us to eat rubbery pieces of shit while wearing our federally-mandated safety helmets and rubber teeth protectors (for those out there who might have a hidden dental stress fracture but don’t know it).

More articles about the freakout in Alabama’s seafood industry can be found here and here (Landrieu and Sessions together at last!). But my concern isn’t even the economic one, or the fact that you can take any side of any debate and still call yourself a “scientist.” It’s merely that a simple (marginally risky) pleasure is soon to be forbidden to all of us simply because a few people died. I’m not taking a stand against any and all food regulations, nor is this a Libertarian rant about why the guv’mint ought not to be paying for roads and nuclear weapons. But when 15 corpses a year merit gutting an entire culinary tradition (and fundamentally unique experience) for the rest of us, it makes you want to wade into the debate about skateboarding and seat belts and gun control. We deserve beauty queens slurping oysters, damn it.

Just chalk it up as a continuation of our nation’s slide towards weakness and nanny state governance, where it’s fine to dump toxic chemicals in the water and invade multiple overseas nations, but God forbid a fraction of the few of us out there who still care about living might want to taste a raw oyster or go hang gliding or any number of other “dangerous recreations.” Thank goodness the government is here to keep us safe from ourselves.

Let’s Make An Abortion Deal!

On Saturday morning we woke up and bounced into the living room excited to watch, of all things, the House health care debate on CSPAN. It was a good spectacle at first, as women lined up on the Democratic side for unanimous consent to revise & extend their remarks, or some such parliamentary procedure thing.

It was hard to miss the messaging on the Democratic side – the idea seemed to be to get a bunch of women up to talk about how the bill would support the health of women in a variety of ways. It’s no single-payer by a long shot, but the bill will increase access to health care for a lot of people (men and women), and go a long way to helping people with treatable and preventable conditions as well as reducing medical cost-related bankruptcies.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are now saying that the bill passed the House only by selling out the health of women, or at least their reproductive freedom. And probably they’re right – that is what the bill did. The Stupak-Pitts amendment means that insurance plans receiving new federal subsidies to keep costs down (for families making less that $88,000 per year) will also not be able to cover abortions. So those plans can continue at a higher cost to their customers, or they can drop abortion coverage to be eligible to participate in the health case exchange.

The result will likely be (if the plan passes with the Stupak amendment, something that’s now questionable in the Senate) a decrease in access to abortions among middle class women. William Saletan has a good explanation over at Slate, and he asks the provocative question: If this is the cost of health care reform, are we willing to pay it?

Abortion’s been a hollow right for many, many women for a long time – at least since the passage of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions and ensured that poor women would have a good chance of staying that way as long as they kept getting pregnant. Abortions are expensive, after all. Combine the financial barriers and geographic and social barriers (if you live in some states, odds are you won’t be able to get an abortion simply because the clinic will be too far away from you, and if you’re poor you might not be able to reach it anyway because of the lack of public transportation), and we’re left with a right without access for millions of American women.

This is not a reason to decrease access even further – just an observation about the long decline in reproductive freedom that we’ve been experiencing in this country ever since Roe tried to carve abortion rights, MacGyver-like, out of a handful of Amendments and some rubber cement.

There are a lot of people that want to see an end to the current bill on the grounds that it restricts access to abortion. I think there’s a lot to hate about this bill, including reduced access to abortion. But at the same time it’s worth considering whether it will do more harm than good if the bill passes. Lack of health insurance kills people. Lots of them. Others lives are ruined, sometimes forever, because of medical bankruptcies or preventable illnesses – all things that will be reduced after passage of the bill. Lack of access to abortion also ruins lives, but there are a lot more people whose lives will be improved with access to health care here than whose lives will be hurt by lack of access to abortion. And again, this bill only bans health plans for paying for abortions if they want to compete in the exchanges. Rich women who can pay for their own abortions will still be able to do so.

It would be great if the Stupak Amendment galvanized people interested in maintaining reproductive freedoms. If these rights were so easy to sell out, that’s a failure of the movement and a failure of advocates who haven’t been able to sell reproductive freedom as essential. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many pro-life Democrats acting as swing votes on critical health care legislation. We’ve been willing to roll far too long on rights without access, which are of course not rights at all, but privileges for the few. Just like health care. It should also be considered a matter of right in this country rather than a privilege that comes, for example, with working a certain kind of job or having a certain amount of money.

The danger is that reproductive rights will trump expanded health care access because health care is not seen as a right. This is a classic divide and conquer type strategy that the left should avoid at all costs.

The deal is objectionable, but so is the failure to expand health care.

Friday Randoms

Because work has been work lately, I feel like I have been a bit slack on the blogging front. As such, you, the reader, now get a reward that involves minimal effort on my part. A burst of random!

1. Fort Hood killings:

Fort Hood is in Killen, which is represented in the Texas House by the delightfully-Texan-named Jimmie Don Aycock, who replaced Suzanna Hupp, who, as a result of surviving the infamous Luby’s massacre, became one of nation’s leading gun enthusiasts and defender of concealed weapons law. Guns!

Also, how insane is it that the dude who did the shooting was the dude who talked to other troubled service members about their problems? Wow. Would have liked to have heard some of those sessions.

2. On the military theme, get your military debate on! Might just save some lives.

3. And as far as that goes, you know I can’t help but link to any article with the headline, “Armageddon in Alabama.” Good national piece on the crisis in Birmingham (written before the mayor was convicted on 60 felony counts).

4. If that’s all too heavy and bumming you out, might I suggest that you begin watching (or re-watching for some of you nerds out there), the Disney Medfield College movies. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about starting here and working your way through the variety of movies that feature this fictional school.

Afterwards, you can order yourself a custom-made bobblehead of you or a favorite stalking victim loved one.

Jordan, Inc.

I grew up in a house where Chicago sports were on the television often. Baseball was the first religion, north side only. But second to the Cubs were probably the Bulls. Sure, the Bears were good. We certainly owned a copy of the original Super Bowl Shuffle on VHS. But the Bulls were on the TV pretty often. Dynasty and all. My brother and I grew up liking Jordan and Pippen, just as so many did.

But as I got older, I started to look back on the career of Jordan: “The Greatest to Have Ever Played.”

I learned about his famous comment about why he doesn’t get involved in politics, when his endorsement could have cost Jesse Helms an election: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

I learned about how Nike shoes are made. I learned about Jordan’s image construction, the giant machine of global mega-capitalism, branding. I learned back stories about Jordan on the Dream Team and his affinity for gambling — essentially, all of the things that kids didn’t learn about their sports idols back in previous generations before there were billions of dollars at stake and round-the-clock news cycles.

We learned about his divorce from Juanita and how he was terrible as a front office GM. And most recently, there was the uproar over his cringe-worthy Hall of Fame induction speech, which was not gracious and was, in fact, was described by Bill Simmons as “an off-the-cuff, uncomfortable, petty, biting, rambling, vindictive, score-settling speech during what’s meant to be nothing more than a celebration.”

But what prompted me to post about Jordan was not any of this. It was news about one of his children, to whom he pointed during the aforementioned atrocity of a speech and said, “I wouldn’t want to be you.”

No, not Jeffrey Jordan, who quit hoops at U of Illinois and now is coming back to the team (just like Dad did in the pros!).

Jordan’s other son, Marcus, is a freshman in college at the University of Central Florida. And he also plays hoops. And since his dad sells Nike shoes, Marcus has refused to abide by the school’s contract with Adidas. He wore his dad’s brand onto the court, causing Adidas to cancel a lucrative contract with the school. So much for what the rest of the team was wearing. So much for the best interests of the program or the school. It’s all about the brand. It’s all about corporate loyalty.

True Jordan.

What’s in a name

I’m sure only the most naive among us believe that there’s such a thing as “truth in advertising.” There are, of course, many truths in advertising, including all the ones we construct to explain our relationships to products and the reasons we buy them or not. But advertising is about persuasion, and persuasion has a complicated relationship to truth, at least as conventionally understood. Who among us really believes that tiny animated bubbles with personalities (and, one assumes, hopes and dreams) are among the “Scrubbing Bubbles”? And if we did, why would we feel comfortable putting them into a can or down the drain rather than, say, releasing them into the wild or studying them for Science?

There’s a whole strand of advertising that purports to get asymptotically closer to the truth – Burger King is a good example, with their Whopper Virgins campaign and that silly lie detector ad they did recently. What makes those ads work is an open admission that most ads lie – they try to get beyond that by saying to the consumer: “Yes, yes, but this is really real.”

Product naming skates around this strand. You want to convey the idea of the thing and its aspirational brand-type qualities, but don’t want to get into a situation where you can be sued for making claims you can’t deliver on. But if the FTC doesn’t push back, the sky is the limit. I’ve always thought that the people behind the highly misleading Freecreditreport dot com campaign should have gotten some heat from the FTC. The name (and the evilly invasive commercials with the slacker band guys) makes it seem that you’re getting a free credit report. Which credit report you are, in fact, legally entitled to receive once a year from the big three credit vampires monitoring agencies. The site actually tries to sell you a “credit reporting” package that is expensive and unnecessary. Only now is the FTC moving to try and force some more regulations on that site. We’ll see how that goes.

Sometimes names are designed to produce trust by trading on another established brand. This is how we got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Most people think that Good Housekeeping has an evaluation process to get the seal. But actually any product that advertises in the magazine gets the seal (as long as it passes tests in this lab,  the magazine will give you a refund within two years if a product proves defective – many exceptions, typically, apply). It’s nothing like the vetting process over at Consumer Reports. In September, Paul Smalera wrote a great article about a new Good Housekeeping venture called the “Green Seal” that is even more troubling. The new seal will still be pay to play, like the old one. And there is no word on the standards of sustainability that will be used. Will it be enough to be “natural?” How about “nontoxic” or “organic”? None of these words has anything necessarily to do with the relative environmental goodness of a product. Bottled water can be all three of these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for the environment than tap water.

T. S. Eliot was right – the naming of things is a difficult matter.

Under construction

So only now has ICANN decided to allow Internet addresses that use scripts other than Latin. It’s pointless to ask what took them so long, since the answer is obviously some combination of tech-topian faith in the irrelevancy of the culturally specific and the inertial drag of the lingua franca (no, not this Lingua Franca. Or this one, which I still miss.). I’ve been thinking about the early days of the Internets a lot recently, spurred partially by the recent death of Geocities and a friend’s link to this wonderful archive of “Page Under Construction” graphics (and then I found the “Please Mail Me” page – wow)

I think it’s sad that Geocities is gone. I know that blogs (especially standardized platforms like this here WordPress thing) have largely replaced the DIY websites that Geocities represented, and I know that Geocities sites were basically crap, but I hate so much the loss of those musings and webrings, oversharing and overanimation. The idea that this whole outpouring of humanness would just be deleted is too much to bear – it’s certainly not burning the Library of Alexandria, but is certainly worse than burning the downtown Montgomery library. At least the stuff there is replaceable and catalogued somewhere.

Enter the Archive Team, who staged an amazing initiative to store Geocities (Also check out their Deathwatch list.). You can read about the details of the project here, but I think the best part is that they took seriously the imperative of saving cat graphics and flashing Jesuses without regard to their cultural contribution. As if that were the purpose of archiving. Archiving is not the same as choosing a personal art collection. We don’t need archivists to be gatekeepers for the remainder of human history; we need archivists to help us store as much as possible so future minds can make different senses of our weird history.

In commemoration, then, this graphic of Ralph eating paste will live forever here until WordPress closes down, or we get a C&D from the copyright holder. Either way.

 

Passion Parties

Crappy American economy got you down? Recession turning into depression?

Well mope no more, because the hot new growth industry of the next decade is here for you. Step into the fast-paced and exciting world of Passion Parties, where women help women investigate sensual aides while improving their erotic lives. As a side benefit, you (the coordinator of said parties) make a hefty profit in this classic pyramid scheme. Move over Madoff! The lack of sexual fulfillment of women is at an all time high (er, not that I would have any reason to think that or anything … cough). That creates a steady boom market for that batch of ladies who can’t get on the Internets and buy their own vibrators and sex ointments.

If you’ll just send$149 to Las Vegas-based privately held company, Passion Parties, Inc., you’ll get a Holiday Party-to-Go Passion Pac.

Includes: Bullet, Jelly Osaki, Velvet Curve, Progressor, Blossom Bliss, G-Spot Creme, Soft & Silky Shaving Creme-Plumeria, Alluring Body Lotion-Green Tea, Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel, Revelation Lubricant, Spice Lubricating Massage Lotion, Tasty Temptation Strawberry Massage Candle, Gigi, Pure Instinct Roll-on, Tickling Trio, Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry, Love Is In The Air Catalogs (25), Let’s Play Catalogs (25), It’s the Most Passionate Time of the Year Brochures (25), Tote Bag, Hostess Rewards Brochures (25), Customer Order Forms (50), You Can Have It All Brochures (25), New Passion Consultant Training Collection.

That’s right. Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel. Hawt.

But what’s great here is how this is being promoted as feminist capitalism:

You will feel proud that at Passion Parties, we believe that each and every woman can reach her individual potential, and that is why we support the philosophy of “women helping women.”

Well, only within certain limits:

Our products assist loving couples to enhance their sexual relationship, thus making “Every Day Valentine’s Day.” We stress monogamy, safe sex and the importance of keeping a relationship exciting.

It’s kind of depressing to see that people you went to high school with are getting sucked into these sorts of things as their “business.” Another friend has gotten into this weirdness, which wonderfully blends hilarious and depressing. I guess it’s better than going overseas to kill strangers for the government, but you hate to think that there are all these women out there who are likely losing money by buying into this “business plan.” Then again, maybe these folks are making plenty of money and helping women break out of sexual and social prisons by forming gender-based ties of solidarity and discussing topics that still in many places are rather taboo (even if selling crap ultimately lies at the heart of the gathering).

Maybe those Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry are worth a second look. Anybody want to come over?

Please?

Schadenfreude

Noun. Pronounced \ˈshä-d^ən-ˌfroi-də\, meaning enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Lisa Simpson teaches us the word in the episode “When Flanders Failed“:

Lisa: Dad, do you know what schadenfreude is?
Homer: No, I do not know what shaden-frawde is. Please tell me, because I’m dying to know.
Lisa: It’s a German term for “shameful joy,” taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
Homer: Oh, come on, Lisa. I’m just glad to see him fall flat on his butt. He’s usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel. … What’s the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?
Lisa: Sour grapes.
Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.

Here at Toxic Culture, schadenfreude’s not just a noun. It’s also a pastime. We’ve been reveling in it recently what with Birmingham Mayor Larry “Do Something” Langford’s conviction on 60 bribery counts (he’s not the Mayor anymore, and awaiting a sentence that could be as long as 805 years), and the sad-but-hilarious exchanges between Sarah Palin and soon-to-be-Playgirl-model Levi Johnston.

Halloween on Ice

Since we love Halloween and recently went to the best haunted house in the state, it was absolutely vital when flipping channels during a NFL commercial break on Sunday, that I stop on some NBC programming called “Halloween on Ice.”

The subject of things “on ice” is pretty much an endless source of hilarity. It’s truly the end of the celebrity chain. Where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a bloody black and white edgy kung fu comic about ninjas and radiation, that tale ends with a Macy’s Thanksgiving float and actors in foam turtle suits wearing ice skates and singing in front of kids waving $15 glow sticks. And it’s true of any item you put “on ice.” Whether you are talking about Lion King or He-Man on skates (you must click on that one), or the classic Ice Capades, things are just more pathetic and hilarious when you slap it onto an ice rink.

So here we have Halloween on Ice, sponsored by an apple sauce company. Kids are interested because (I guess) there are people dressed up like a vampire or a mummy. Mom can say “wow” when they do a lutz or whatever (first performed in 1913!). And Dad can look at the boobs of the witch and try to remember when it was that Nancy Kerrigan was in the Olympics and gosh wasn’t it sad when that hillbilly smashed her in the knee that once.

Now, the applesauce company (mushin’ up apples since 1907!) has decided to sponsor all sorts of figure skating events. Not sure if they lock up washed up Olympians under contract or what. But if you liked Halloween on Ice, there’ll soon be the Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular and Kristi Yamaguchi Friends and Family! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Halloween on Ice is coming to you live from from the Qwest Center in awesome Omaha, Nebraska. And it doesn’t look even close to sold out.

This thing runs for two whole hours, from 3-5. Needless to say, I didn’t tune in for the whole thing, but can only comment on clips. The first thing I noticed was the jammin’ music by Mannheim Steamroller! All members of the band were wearing costumes and playing amid cheesy props (like cobwebs and ghost-shaped sheets). Let me just say here that I hate Mannheim Steamroller. I hate the Christmas music that made them famous. I hate their secular jams. It’s canned Disney music — synth-heavy, faux-classical music for people for whom Rush is too edgy. If you are into that sort of electro-prog crap that you can play around your parents, Mike Oldfield might be more up your alley.

Anyway, the fact that they were wearing zombie makeup didn’t make the Steamroller suck any less.

Add to it, a dude in all black with a Fu Manchu skating around and doing super fancy little hand gestures at the audience. Throw in some dry ice to add a little fog on the rink. What’s that? The evil wizard is Canadian Olympic silver medalist Elvis Stojko? Zzzzz.

Oooh! A mummy came out to some synth-Egyptian music. The announcer comes on. “Why don’t mummies take vacation? They’re afraid they’ll unwind.” Then the skater/mummy threw a roll of toilet paper into the crowd and started skating around. Oooo!

To get a further feel for the atrocities, click here and watch this YouTube video of an ice skater doing the Monster Mash at one of the previous year’s incarnations of this eye-gouger. See? It’s cute because he skates like a Frankenstein!

Evidently, there is a market for this shit. Nancy Kerrigan is selling her 2004 Halloween on Ice show on Amazon here. And evidently, these former champions are hard up enough for the cash to keep doing the events. And I guess it’s cool that they get to keep getting paid for “entertaining people” doing what they love, which is more than you can say for Olympic pole vaulters or even swimmers.

So here’s to you legion of ice skating enthusiasts. May you always land your triple axles and may your televised events long be sponsored by our nation’s leading sellers of fruit mush.

Invasive species and NAPPRA, Part 2

This is the second part of two posts. Read the first one here.

A few weeks ago I received a 2,500+ word email from the person behind J.L. Hudson. Turns out his name is David Theodoropoulos, and most of his comments (and any number of other interesting things) are available on his website (there is also an anti-Theodoropoulos website, much less populated, available here - I love that Theodoropoulos links to his “anti” site from his own website…is it also a matter of how his ideas are taken by his peers that there are no comments on the “anti” site?). The highlights of the email are as follows:

NAPPRA is an end-run around “Option 1,” otherwise known as the “white list,” or universal screening. The white list concept has already been adopted in Australia and New Zealand, and seems to mean that all “exotic” (non-native) species would have to be pre-approved for importation through a variety of tests. Right now, importation is relatively unrestricted unless the plant you are trying to import is on a “black list.” Recently, the USDA leveraged additional restrictions requiring all imported seeds to be accompanied by a “phytosanitary certificate” – the best I can figure out is that this certificate shows the seeds are free of weeds. But NAPPRA and the white list are both moves that would shift the burden of proof on importation. NAPPRA creates a new category (“Not Approved Pending Pest Risk Assessment”) that would basically put a hold on some imports while their risk is assessed. It is not a white list. The white list was originally proposed by Bruce Babbit when he was the chair of the National Invasive Species Council. The major argument against the white list seems to be that it risks corporatizing species – the kinds of testing that would be required to get “clean listed” would be very expensive and only affordable by major corporations. One proposal that has been floated is, evidently, to give the patent rights for the form of life to the corporation that bankrolls its testing; additionally, it has been proposed that the tester gain immunity if the species in fact becomes invasive. Theodoropoulos argues that NAPPRA (which is not quite a white list, in that will “initially list taxa of plants for planting that, to our knowledge, have not yet been imported into the United States but present a potential risk”) is the “camel’s nose in the tent” of the white list – note the word “initially” there.

The USDA’s evidence is bad. Theodoropoulos says that the three pests cited as reasons for the NAPPRA would not be stopped by it (briefly, citrus longhorned beetle came on maple trees but maple trees were already present here; Asian longhorned beetles are on untreated wood products not covered by NAPPRA; and Ralstonia solanacearum race 3 biovar 2 was found on geraniums which were already present in the US).

Exotic species aren’t so bad. Here’s where it gets a little strange. I had always thought (maybe reflexively, although I’d certainly read a bunch about invasive species for debate preparation) that exotic species were bad. Like, really bad. There’s all kinds of information across the Internets about this. Evidently the USDA’s main source for the costs of invasive species is a 2000 paper by Pimentel, et al. (it can be downloaded here, as well as any number of similar papers). The best part of Theodoropoulos’ email is his critique of their cost estimate, which I quote here for all the cat lovers among us:

In order to justify NAPPRA, the USDA cites Pimentel et al. (2000) as their primary source for the costs to society of non-indigenous species. This paper has been shown to be pseudoscientific and an example of serious misrepresentation  many of the “costs” are grossly over-inflated and have no actual economic basis whatsoever. For example, economic loss from cats is placed at $17 billion, fully 12% of the total, yet this figure is derived through completely speculative estimates of the number of birds killed by pet and feral cats, then valuing each bird at $30 through a contorted and unjustifiable logic involving birdwatchers, hunters, EPA fines, and the costs of rearing birds by ornithologists for release. This figure is a “value” essentially picked out of the air and entirely outside of actual economic costs – no actual money was spent or lost on account of cat predation on birds. The estimate also did not account for economic savings provided by the number of “pest” birds like starlings taken by cats, nor was any accounting made of the tremendous economic gains from rodent control (the original reason for the long association between cats and man), nor of the value of the cats based on dollars spent acquiring, feeding, and providing veterinary care for pet cats. No estimate of any differential in predation rates between cats and missing native predators was included. While cats are not plants, it is important to note this as an example of the poor quality of Pimentel et al.’s data and reasoning, as well as the professional misconduct that this represents. If the USDA is citing this sort of misinformation to justify NAPPRA, this demonstrates a level of scientific incompetence that should disqualify the Department from making any determinations under NAPPRA.

There is no doubt that some invasive species, like the much-maligned zebra mussel, are bad, right? Not so fast, says Theodoropoulos. He claims that zebra mussels have improved water quality and clarity in the Great Lakes, leading to improved fish populations and decreased eutrophication. When you add in the argument that there’s no such thing as an “exotic” species, things begin to seem a lot more complicated.

We can’t determine what species will be “invasive.” Theodoropoulos points out that we simply do not have good methods for risk assessment – we can’t even assess what species may become “invasive,” since “invasiveness” is by definition a relationship between any number of other plants, animals, etc. in an ecosystem. As an example, consider the humble asparagus fern (not a “fern” at all, as it turns out). It is widely used all over the US but considered to be highly invasive in Florida – presumably because of climate conditions. This casts some doubt on the reliability of the “risk assessment” part of NAPPRA, especially as it related to stopping invasive species.

When researching this post, I found the website for the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health – interesting for any number of reasons, but mostly because I

Vinca...seems harmless, right?

was able to find and name all of the horrible vines that continue to infest our yard despite repeated diggings and prunings and burnings. Without fail, the recommendations for getting rid of these things involve combinations of pesticides I’ve never heard of and don’t particularly want to purchase.

Take the vinca major on the right (it’s periwinkle to some). It’s commonly sold in nurseries, and would not be held by NAPPRA, or white listed, or anything, since it’s already here. In our climate it is highly invasive. In New Mexico it is happily contained, makes some nice flowers, and that’s about it. I hate that it strangles our tomatoes and won’t go away, but I’m not about to go buy a bunch of pesticides to pour on it. We eat stuff that comes out of that soil, after all.

After all this, I’m not sure I have an opinion on NAPPRA. It doesn’t seem especially well conceived, and I do know that the US has fairly stringent laws regarding control of noxious weeds that should solve much of the problem. I am very sympathetic to the work done by J.L. Hudson and others trying to preserve global biodiversity by encouraging propagation of rare and endangered species. In particular, I am appalled at the idea of patenting those species, especially as a payoff for dubious-at-best risk assessment. I wish there was more of a moral to this story – especially for those of you who have struggled through to the end of this long post. Myself, I’m taking away the idea that even issues that seem obvious (“exotic species are bad”) are more complicated than they seem, and that their solutions may create other problems. Also I’m thinking about what I’m going to plant in the spring.