Allie Kleber’s Reviews > The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth > Status Update

Definitely! This is a lot like climate change. Opponents of green energy transition point out that the Earth's climate changes all the time. This is definitely true. Species colonize new areas all the time too. If a plant (or animal!) gets access to a new environment it will absolutely colonize it, and that process is very often disruptive. Eventually the ecosystem will adapt. If you have hundreds of square miles of knotweed that nothing local can eat, the first thing that cracks the digestive code for knotweed is in for its own boom cycle. It absolutely is just a matter of time.

The question is - how long is the time and how much are we willing to disrupt our local ecosystems in general? The naturalization of a colony species often happens on the timescale of centuries. Are we willing to put up with a severely disrupted ecosystem for that long? And how will it affect the way WE use that ecosystem, in terms of things like farming or even recreation?

And, the other question is scale. Generally species spreading into new areas in a highly disruptive way is relatively rare. We're packing on dozens of colonization events simultaneously. If it was just knotweed the ecosystem might not see huge disruptions, but if it's knotweed and swallowwort and woolly adelgids and lantern flies and kudzu and multifloral rose and a dozen more, we can expect the corresponding disruption to be much more severe.

Again, ecosystems will stabilize. They're really good at it. They've had billions of years to practice. The question isn't if the EARTH will make it through, the question is how much economic and social disruption are we willing to put up with while it does, and over what timescale?

The history of ecology as a science has been the realization that ecosystems are constantly changing. The idea of an ideal balance we can somehow artificially maintain is ridiculous. Trying to keep current ecosystems in some kind of frozen state would probably be as damaging long term as total neglect. There's definitely some middle ground though, between "It'll all work itself out, we can do whatever we want" and "We can't let anything change ever."