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This job has ruined road trips for me. I used to love staring out the window and admiring the passing scenery. Look at all that greenery, I thought, as we sped by “forests” and “wildflowers.” So pretty, so healthy. Ah, ignorance was bliss. Today all I see are eco-disasters.
Since I started covering the nature beat, I’ve learned how to ID our local invasive species like teasel, autumn olive and buckthorn, all of which lined the highways my husband and I traveled over Thanksgiving weekend, driving between Chicago and my brother’s home in Ohio. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Now, whenever I notice an abundance of a single plant species growing on the side of the road, I immediately become suspicious and start googling. That’s how I discovered Missouri’s interstates have become a stronghold for callery pear. Eastern red-cedar is a native that’s gone rogue and turned invasive in places like Nebraska. North Dakota is swathed in yellow sweet clover, which is even choking trails in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Honestly, it gets overwhelming. This is why I’m especially appreciative of the organizations and volunteers doing the hard work of removing invasives from our natural areas or keeping them from becoming established in the first place.
If the existential threat of biodiversity collapse has you down, I encourage you to join a habitat restoration workday. Plenty are scheduled in the winter, including a bunch in the coming weeks at Cook County forest preserves. I’ve chopped down buckthorn myself a time or two, and I gotta say, it’s incredibly satisfying
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