Excellent presentation. Thanks for sharing. It will certainly be a guideline to understand beautiful landscapes as well as creating them in accordance to sustainability and ecology.
This is a great lecture. Thank you. I'm learning a lot and Rainer and West's book is one of my favorites. But I wanted to challenge your counterargument against native plants. You are trying to deconstruct the concept of native plants. You are trying to have native plant enthusiasts to be thoughtful and I get it. However, there's a number of problems in your argument in my opinion. First of all, nobody assumes that just bringing native plants will "restore" habitats all of the sudden. You say that "it will not solve the problem entirely..." Of course... Who does? This is a straw man argument. You build the case assuming that native plant advocates 100% believe this or that, and then you say, "how can they believe that"? Well, most of them don't believe that in the first place. Most native plant advocates I know humbly accept that their actions might not reverse the situation, but they also take responsibility by making plant choices that can make a difference, even if small. Further, you are recognizing in your argument that working with native plants is an incremental and substantial step in that direction. Second flaw in you argument: you state that we don't know for sure what was native to certain regions over the course of thousands of years. Of course not. But to the best of our knowledge, certain plants have been native to certain regions, and that is a knowledge that native plants advocates are acting upon, even is knowledge is never final. Third, you can't compare the scale and rate of change of geological or climate events to the scale and rate of change of human influenced events. The fact that our landscapes and the plants in them have evolved over millennia is not what native plants advocates are questioning. We argue that our ecosystems and native plant communities are being disturbed at a rate where they can't adapt to so much change, and that this rate of change is contributing to the extinction of thousands of species of insects and all the life they support. Finally, I also wanted to note that bringing a few biological agents ("exotic plants") from different continents and regions might have fine a few years ago. It's still an experiment that would require an IRB board if we were introducing vertebrates or experimenting on people. But the scale at which we are doing those "experiments" is so out of control, that we are bringing ecological havoc to our lands, here in North America, in Europe and in almost every continent. A well behaved plant might turn into an ecological disaster under the right context and conditions. It's not the plant's fault, it the result of the action of humans who decided to inadvertently conduct experiments and who did not seem to appreciate the horticultural potential and possibilities of the plant diversity that evolved in there.
Excellent presentation. Thanks for sharing. It will certainly be a guideline to understand beautiful landscapes as well as creating them in accordance to sustainability and ecology.
Thanks for sharing!
Although glad I wasn't trying to listen on only my right ear bud 😅
Great lecture about planting design in a new way!
This is a great lecture. Thank you. I'm learning a lot and Rainer and West's book is one of my favorites. But I wanted to challenge your counterargument against native plants. You are trying to deconstruct the concept of native plants. You are trying to have native plant enthusiasts to be thoughtful and I get it. However, there's a number of problems in your argument in my opinion. First of all, nobody assumes that just bringing native plants will "restore" habitats all of the sudden. You say that "it will not solve the problem entirely..." Of course... Who does? This is a straw man argument. You build the case assuming that native plant advocates 100% believe this or that, and then you say, "how can they believe that"? Well, most of them don't believe that in the first place. Most native plant advocates I know humbly accept that their actions might not reverse the situation, but they also take responsibility by making plant choices that can make a difference, even if small. Further, you are recognizing in your argument that working with native plants is an incremental and substantial step in that direction. Second flaw in you argument: you state that we don't know for sure what was native to certain regions over the course of thousands of years. Of course not. But to the best of our knowledge, certain plants have been native to certain regions, and that is a knowledge that native plants advocates are acting upon, even is knowledge is never final. Third, you can't compare the scale and rate of change of geological or climate events to the scale and rate of change of human influenced events. The fact that our landscapes and the plants in them have evolved over millennia is not what native plants advocates are questioning. We argue that our ecosystems and native plant communities are being disturbed at a rate where they can't adapt to so much change, and that this rate of change is contributing to the extinction of thousands of species of insects and all the life they support. Finally, I also wanted to note that bringing a few biological agents ("exotic plants") from different continents and regions might have fine a few years ago. It's still an experiment that would require an IRB board if we were introducing vertebrates or experimenting on people. But the scale at which we are doing those "experiments" is so out of control, that we are bringing ecological havoc to our lands, here in North America, in Europe and in almost every continent. A well behaved plant might turn into an ecological disaster under the right context and conditions. It's not the plant's fault, it the result of the action of humans who decided to inadvertently conduct experiments and who did not seem to appreciate the horticultural potential and possibilities of the plant diversity that evolved in there.