Are we too biased against "invasive species" ??

Here are some thought-provoking excerpts from a post last summer at Wired Science:

“People like to have an enemy, and vilifying non-native species makes the world very simple,” said ecologist Mark Davis of Macalester College. “The public got sold this nativist paradigm: Native species are the good ones, and non-native species are bad. It’s a 20th century concept, like wilderness, that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century.” Davis is one of 18 ecologists to sign a June 9 Nature essay entitled, “Don’t judge species on their origins.” They argue that while some non-natives are indeed destructive, such as Guam’s brown tree snakes and Great Lakes zebra mussels, they’re the exception. Most are actually benign, relegated to a lower-class status that reflects prejudice rather than solid science, write the authors. Non-natives are assumed to be undesirable, and their benefits go ignored and unstudied...

“Classifying biota according to their adherence to cultural standards of belonging, citizenship, fair play and morality does not advance our understanding of ecology,” wrote the essay’s authors. They also consider ecological nativism to be hypocritical — nobody’s complaining about lilacs or ring-necked pheasants — and a form of denialism: In a globalized, human-dominated world, plants and animals will get around...

Davis said that non-native species need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. “We’re not saying, ‘Everything is okay, let’s open the doors,’” he said. “What’s frustrated us is that the actual data has often been misrepresented. People have heard that non-native species represent the second-greatest extinction threat in the world, and it’s just not true.” Davis noted that in many places, non-native species actually increase total biodiversity.

You can read the rest at the Wired Science link - and perhaps ponder the ultimate argument that the most invasive species on this planet is homo sapiens - "native" to Africa but invading (and altering) other ecosystems for millennia.

Addendum:  The article has been roundly criticized by other science bloggers, as for example here.  Other relevant criticism has been posted in the comments to this post.

With a hat tip to Dan Noland for alerting me to this link in a comment on another post.