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Note we have some offshore islands etc where 100% kill has been achieved. We're not even close to being able to achieve that on the mainland though.
by barrydahlberg 11y ago
Note we have some offshore islands etc where 100% kill has been achieved. We're not even close to being able to achieve that on the mainland though.
- mapt 11y agoAnd that's what seems pointless. If you can't achieve a 100% kill rate over some area, and progressively expand that area, what's the goal of working against it at all? A pest invasion isn't going to get dispirited and retreat when it takes 30% losses, like a foreign military might, it's going to heal its population losses and go right back to being limited by other factors in a matter of weeks or months. I spent a term paper five years back pondering our response to bark beetles before concluding that the entire campaign to 'control' the infestation was basically a means of permitting the logging industry to log areas that we would not otherwise want logged, financed with political capital from the environmentalist movement. I see that other people are catching on to this narrative as well: http://grist.org/science/bark-beetles-are-killing-forests-but-they-might-be-saving-them-too/ http://grist.org/science/bark-beetles-are-killing-forests-bu...
- barrydahlberg 11y agoThe hope is to hold the pests back to a level at which the native species can survive.