When the biologist Charles S. Elton coined the term “invasive species” in his 1958 book The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants did he know his language would change the imagination about the dangers introduced species could bring? Right at the introduction he eagerly elucidates a nightmarish vision: “It is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us, though these rank very high on the list at the moment: there are other sorts of explosions, and this book is about ecological explosions.” And he goes on to describe the horrors of plant invasions (along with bacterial, viral, and animal). And so the fated comparison between a bomb and an overgrowth of plants was established. 

Both climate change and globalization are factors that make interchange of species inevitable and fast paced, which can lead to situations where species negotiate space with each other in sometimes fatal encounters. It can’t be denied that invasive species are a global threat to biodiversity. However, being afraid of plants is not going to help the fact that they are moving all the same. In the United States, up to 1 billion pounds of pesticides stave off unwanted or aggressive plants and pests per year, yet invasive species grow on their own in a range of soils and conditions, and usually are nutritious or have value for textiles or building. 

It seems small to think about plants when heat is rising, floods are imminent, and governments are cutting environmental and human protections. Yet the world needs diversity to thrive. Studies have shown that biodiversity is an important aspect to helping to ameliorate the effects of extreme weather. Wetlands, peatlands, forests, and sea forests are natural carbon sinks—the healthy management of these ecosystems on a large scale will affect the overall carbon emissions, not to mention the beauty and abundance a biodiverse ecosystem provides. While these plants are useful, it’s important to note that if these plants are to be profited on, the goal should not lie in the endless accumulation of invasives to gain wealth, but a directive to support that biodiversity. In Love Them to Death, editor and botanist, Wendy L. Applequist encourages “think[ing] of the [aggressive] population as a nonrenewable resource from the moment you start to harvest it, even though that’s not really true, and you’ll envision its eventual “depletion” as being only natural.” So while fear is built into the language of invasive plant behavior, these plants offer an invitation. They ask us to look at them - they are tenacious enough to grow even from city sidewalks. They pull focus toward areas that people may value, asking us to step into a choked woods or waterway tight with reeds, and managing invasive species together. In doing so, we may become closer to the land and one another. The first step to this is to give them another story.

To place a single solution to the issue of perceived natural balance begins with our understanding of balance itself. The idea that there even is a “right” way for an environment to be is flawed.

A Dance of Knotweed and Willow

Compared to the 2012 Hurricane Sandy that destroyed many parts of New York City for years to come, the 2013 Hurricane Irene that swept the East coast was not remembered as a major weather event. Yet the storm is a legend in the floodplain of Prattsville, NY, tucked away in the Catskill mountains. It changed the town irrevocably—destroying homes, businesses, and infrastructure. After the chaos, a plant that was already present in the region, Japanese knotweed, traditionally known as itadori, took full advantage of the newly open spaces. Itadori remembers Japan’s ecology and climate. It can easily root into pumice in the wake of a volcano. Its stems can be borne away and root again miles further in a flood, and it endures in cases of earthquakes. It is adapted to a land that moves. Itadori grows along stream banks and moist regions in hollow bamboo-like shrubs that can grow up to 11 feet with loping stems. 

Now knotweed in Prattsville colors the Schoharie Creek a dull red in the autumn. Here is one of the freshwater sources of New York City’s famously unfiltered drinking water, where there is opportunity for a high turbidity rate in flooding events.  This can be intensified by invasives like knotweed, as demonstrated in a 2021 report in “River Research and Applications. While it appears that biodiversity has gone down, Furstnau has found no scientific papers that conclude the banks are less biodiverse.  

“Invasives thrive on neglect.” Artist, teacher, and writer, Timothy Furstnau says. Furstnau has dedicated his time to transforming the riverbank into a space for community, education, and ecological care rather than blasting the streambed with Roundup. He is a cofounder of Tool Shed, a group that started as a tool lending library in Hudson, New York, but over time became somewhat of a tool museum with workshops and events, and Fictilis, his art collective and design studio with Andrea Steves. Fictilis works at the intersection of social and ecological issues, and together they design the workshops on the site. Through Tool Shed the project received an Ecological Restoration Grant from Hudson Valley Climate Partners in 2022, then a second through Stream Management Implementation Plan grant from Greene County Soil & Water Conservation District. With the support of  the Prattsville town board Furstnau was given access to work on this riverbed and manage the knotweed. While Furstnau is the Project Manager, he considers himself a “curator” in its etymological sense: a caretaker. 

This is a sisyphean task but he is determined to be methodical and inclusive in his approach with the knotweed. Furstnau and a small group of rotating volunteers work among the large leaning plants that snake along the river for miles. Their growth marks the length and breadth of the flood, a memorial for what it tore up, and where the knotweed’s broken pieces landed once the waters subsided. Knotweed can grow quickly and expands its territory each year, but this doesn’t stop Furstnau from cutting them - one at a time. He takes out a traditional Japanese hand sickle and cuts the base of the stems to show how to remove them. “This is a race between social knowledge of the plant and the plant’s own spread, or human aided spread” he says. Along the river embankments in places where the knotweed was removed he hammers stems of willow into the ground for them to root. Salix, or a number of the native willows of the region, move in the same fashion that Japanese knotweed does - on stream banks, and through cuttings. They bind soil and bring local pollinators. 

“Biocultural restoration” is a term Furstnau uses to define a framework of his approach to cultivate human relationships with the land as a way to restore ecosystems. As individuals interact with the knotweed they become more familiar with it, the land, and the people with whom they are working. Fursnau explains why he and his team are invested in teaching the community members how to remove and use knotweed to build structures. “People come and they get to know the plant and it’s less of a boogeyman now, because you’ve dealt with it, and you’re also connecting to a place… invested in the other people and the place, and you can pass down that connection to people and the place…And then all of a sudden the whole ecosystem, including the humans are resilient.” Invasive species are not a “problem to be solved,” but an invitation to look differently. 

Some view a scene of a single plant takeover with disgust: a monoculture of “weeds” is an out of control threat to the economic viability of space. Furstnau sees it a different way and uses ancient practices and philosophies to guide him. He removes the plant, along with the small, hooked traditional Japanese sickle, one that was made for bamboo, and plants like these. Set around the main worksite are stooks, gathered plants that have been turned upside down so that they don’t grow roots or rot. This is a traditional practice from the Black Forest region of what is now Germany. These plants will dry and be split to use for community workshops and mulch, which nightshades like tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant love. Hundreds of plants have been taken down. More shoots will require cutting in seasons to come, but for now portions of the land are bare. Furstnau traces a line with his hand to show a section of land that has been treated with herbicide. The two sides look nearly the same, cleared out. The difference will show over time. This invisible line delineates a large part of the project’s hypothesis Furstnau explains: how long term “nonchemical methods can be as effective as chemicals, and that use of wasted plant biomass can help support ongoing removal and restoration.” Furstnau expounds. He is adamant that education is a main avenue to work with invasives. The knotweed dye can yield a deep orange, while the fibers can make fencing and baskets, the young shoots taste a bit like rhubarb. Among the community workshops Furstnau has worked with, Kite’s Nest, a nonprofit working with grade school students based in Hudson, NY, and provided material to Parsons The New School for Design where he teaches, for students and faculty to work with the material. 

This year the knotweed project has received an exemption to transport it for purposes of education and research. The ability to transport an aggressive species is rare and requires care so that it doesn’t spread. Furstnau is connecting with scientific communities to provide information about his research. While answers aren’t going to come tomorrow, the benefit will extend beyond “weeding”. The final outcome lives somewhere in the future in a dance between knotweed and willow, but more importantly, in the hands of the people who decide to work with it. The approach requires work, but it also encourages community participation and environmental learning that surpass knowledge and appreciation of knotweed itself, but the entire ecosystem of the riverbank. 

A Home for Bees

While Furstnau reaches out to the human community to manage Japanese knotweed, a business in Washington, in a search of lost bee communities, has discovered that Phragmites australis might create the perfect setting to find the insects. Phragmites australis look like storm troopers amassing in a swamp. Standing 15 feet, they grow so close to one another turtles have become lost and died in their midst. Formidable root systems mirror their mass below ground and measure their main form of reproduction - through rhizomes: they’re clones. But their feathery seed heads provide for longer distance aerial travel. Since it came to the Americas in the 1800s Phragmites australis has spread through wetlands from the United States to Canada.  

David Hunter is the founder and CEO of Crown Bees in Washington State and is on a mission to find nesting bees that are native to the United States. He creates homes that mimic the dead logs in a forest the bees naturally seek on their own. Hunter achieves this by constructing what looks like a honeycomb, but the openings are six inch reed stalks that are changed out each year “I am giving the bees new sheets” Hunter explains of the replaceable stalks. The main material Hunter has found works is the impressive and ubiquitous wetland reed, Phragmites australis. Hunter is not so interested in phragmites as food or fiber. He is looking for the empty space: how easily it cracks, how it forms a fine hole for an opportunistic nesting bee to settle. To summon the nesting bee, he creates the right conditions to bring them forth and study them by collaborating with scientists throughout the United States. With Phragmites australis throughout North America, Hunter is now accepting the reed for money. 

"My biggest competition is ignorance," says Hunter. Despite the fact that 80% of crops are pollinated by native bees, 10% of the 4,000 native bees in the United States are not described. Traces of them exist in the environment, but little is known about them. To boot, between 30% and 50% of all bees are specialized species, meaning that some of these bees are looking for plants that may be vulnerable to extinction, or vice versa. 

To find the elusive bee species that have not yet been identified, “no one’s thinking like a bee” Hunter says. Phragmites has proven so perfect for this specialization he stated a farm would only need to cut the seed heads off and build a barrier down to contain the rhizomes - he would like so much of the plant. This may sound ill-considered, but ultimately it illustrates where the responsibility lies. If managed and used, a population will be regulated with less danger of it spreading. Phragmites might as well be in massive farms already. As long as the reed is sent, “we don’t need farms” Hunter continues. The phragmites are growing on their own.

Weeds for Sovereignty 

Down on the road and the fields, tucked along the edges of cropland is a plant that is currently on the move. Hemp has been an agricultural crop since around 2800BC. Its long uninterrupted fibers allow for it to be a strong textile and building material. While all Cannabis plants have many cannabinoids, hemp generally has a very low THC content and has been traditionally used for textiles and as a food source in the form of oils and powders, but this didn’t stop the crops from being burned and seeds to be destroyed around the 1930s when it became illegal in the United States. Over decades of illegality, hemp became weedy in the midwest - known as ditchweed. During this time it has fortified its seeds in non-cultivated settings by growing in inhospitable soil and dealing with drought and pests. 

The scientists at the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit—a hemp repository— in Geneva, NY,  are collecting and preserving hemp seeds, in part to save the wide range of genes in each seed and researching the many varieties of hemp globally. Their data suggests that feral hemp has the potential to thrive in the changing climate. From the midwest where the feral varieties are largely amassed, the plants are unlikely to shrink, and may expand out as climate change worsens according to geneticist, horticulturalist and curator, at the repository, Zachary Stansell. Hemp is a fast growing plant that remains a source for a range of building materials from a plastic substitute to a canvas textile.

After the 2018 Farm Bill passed, tribes in the United States were provided the authority to develop hemp production. Since then tribal community organizing to support indigenous farmers has been robust. The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe based mainly in South Dakota have been cultivating hemp since 2019. The team, including members from the University of Minnesota, found that feral hemp was profitable for hemp production, allowing for the tribe to plant, and manufacture their own fibers, and form “hempcrete”, a plastic-like material. The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Natural Resource Division is working with the University of Minnesota to produce “Dakota Hemp” out of these varieties. Charlene Miller Program Manager for Fish and Wildlife with the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate mentioned how the animals, in turn, responded positively to the presence of the feral hemp plants. Hemp needs less water to grow and these feral genetics mean that the plant is resilient against pests, drought, and poor soil quality. It is a bioremediator, meaning it takes heavy metals out of the soil. Importantly, it is offering tribes a profitable crop that encourages the sovereignty and sustainable connection with the land for indigenous peoples throughout the midwest where hemp is prevalent. 

As the climate changes, timing is in the background of all ecological questions. A communal approach to invasive species management will take time. But bees that rely on vulnerable native pollinators, climatic influences like droughts, floods, fires, pollution, and environmental disruption, and the outgrowth of invasive species are not going to wait for perfect community organization. 

To place a single solution to the issue of perceived natural balance begins with our understanding of balance itself. The idea that there even is a “right” way for an environment to be is flawed. Elton himself speculated that there is no equilibrium in the natural world which is problematic in and of itself because we know that ecosystems change all the time. 

Clearly, there is no “back” to go to when everything has always changed. But there might be an inherently human advantage we hold. Biophilia is a hypothesis of evolution explaining the feeling of being surrounded by greenery. It’s the calm of a meadow, the sense of comradery with a forest. It’s the reason why we have pets and houseplants. It’s the science behind forest bathing. We literally love plants. So, if we surrender to this love, a love that bravely doesn’t slip into economic greed: we will not look to fill the northeast with endless fields of knotweed for our profit. We may use these aggressive species with an eye towards planting native plants and encouraging pollinators, viewing the place we live with an analytical and compassionate eye. We may make space for vulnerable species. Studies show that one person picking garlic mustard is not going to make garlic mustard less of the pest it usually is, but we can make impacts on a small scale, in individual ways. Knowledge and stories about plants can impact the way we - and even our grandchildren - think about land, and here is where true impact lies. 

We only have our two hands. Katie Kamelamela, a botanist and ethnobotanist who worked on the paper, “Contribution of Indigenous Peoples' understandings and relational frameworks to invasive alien species management,” published by People and Nature, mentions the necessity to pay attention to, and yield to Indigenous land management processes to drive these approaches. “Imagination, creativity, curiosity, and research of previous known uses where species are originally from or used,” says Kamelamela of how to view aggressive plant movement. If we change what little we can, listen to those who have ancestral, and scientific knowledge of land, and teach people along the way, we might be able to move all together.