Green Nazis? - restoration ecology and invasive species

When restorationists press America to rid itself of alien, invasive species, do they foster anti-immigration isolationist paranoia? are they too purist, too authoritarian?

Kalispell, Montana (2000: Locally popular AM talk show host John Stokes rails: "Nobody elected the Fourth Reich, the green Nazis, the environmentalists." Audubon members are "extremists to the core." Stokes leads an economic boycott of any store that contributes to the Rocky Mountain Alliance.

Washington, D.C. (1994): President Clinton issues a presidential memo to give preference to native plants on federal lands and in White House gardens.

Berlin, Germany: Two academics warn that the German Green Party is echoing neo-fascist ideas by promoting native plants.

New York (1994); Michael Pollan, a gardening writer for the NY Times: "It's hard to believe that there is nothing more than scientific concern about invasive species behind the current fashion for natural gardening and native plants in America--not when our national politics are rife with anxieties about immigration and isolationist sentiment. The garden isn't the only corner of American culture where nativism is in flower now."

It is always awkward to write about Nazis. The Holocaust slammed my non-religious family back into their Jewish identity. Raised in the concentration camp aftermath, with my family looking for survivors (we only found one), I used to dream of miraculous escapes from Auschwitz and kill-the-fuckers heroism to bury my intense six-year-old fright and helplessness.

Now, what I love--intact ecosystems, restoration practices, and engaged activism--has been blasted as Nazi and Fourth Reich in scattered radio stations across the nation. Much more quietly and thoughtfully, historians have connected native plant restorationists to National Socialist "nativist" and racist ideology. John Stokes of Kalispell is typico of the outraged media sector who believe "'varmintalists" are way too powerful and totalitarian, and are out to crush the freedom of real Americans. Historians Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Groning jump-started the more sedate debate, now continuing in restoration and botanical journals, at conferences and in books (see references, page 42). Their questioning rankles: Do restoration ideals feed an anti-immigration paranoia or ethnic cleansing in the name of eco-nativism? Are those promoting pre-European landscapes too authoritarian?

These high IQ-types and simple-minded announcers may be peripheral. By giving them attention and energy. I may just puff up the importance of eerie scholarship and flamboyant rhetoric. Can we ignore it? Or is this an insane ideology about to blossom?

Himmler's Horticulture

The Nazi story in Germany was a story of biophilia gone bad. A confused and desperate people--suffering from the Versailles Treaty, the loss of World War I, and economic depression--seized, for pride and identity, the imagery of their own blood and soil. It was impossible to spice up "superiority" with architecture (the Greeks and Romans were not Germans) or literature and art (the French and Italians were not Germans). So "blood" (the Teutonic tribes of yesteryear) and "soil" (the plants within the Germanic provenance) became the hooks on which to hang nativism, racism, and self-confidence. The future Germany was to be a pure landscape inhabitated by an untainted race.

Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, a major historian of the native plant movement in Germany, claims that native plants "became the landscape architect's swastika." He quotes Alwyn Seifert (a leading German landscape architect during the Nazi period) as saying "nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left out." The ideological attention to pure bloodlines led Nazitime botanists to advocate a "war of extermination" against a foreign impatiens felt to be out-competing the "native" impatiens. With the invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler pressed Nazi policy-makers to complete the Reich's Landscape Law to force the exclusive use of native plants within its empire. Nature had been nationalized and became totalitarian and violently enforced. You are as your plants.

Wolschke-Bulmahn upped the ante from intellectual to personal when he connected Jens Jensen, the hero of American prairie restorationists, to the Nazi period. He quoted (out of context, many feel) from a 1937 article Jensen had printed in Germany:

"The gardens I created myself shall ... be in harmony with the landscape environment and the racial characteristics of its inhabitants.... The Latin and the Oriental ... creep more and more over our land, coming from the south which is settled by Latin people.... The Germanic character of our race, of our cities and settlements [has been] overgrown by foreign character. Latin spirit has spoiled a lot, and still spoils things every day."

This kind of history is juicy. It makes academic and radio announcer careers by elevating their public profile and stirring the citizenry's pot. I'm not qualified to argue the history but, as a former elected official and a maniacal naturalist, I'll jump here into the fracas.

Stormtrooper Plants

The historical interpretation of the native plant movement in Nazi Germany does not imply a repeat by American restorationists. In logic lingo, an analogy is not a homology. Neil Diboll, president of Prairie Nursery in Wisconsin, argues that native plants are more like the Jews and Gypsies of the Nazi period. The American restorationist movement is more analogous to those trying to save the minorities and the weak, instituting a multiculturalism in the face of homogenized landscapes. Select invasive nonnatives are, he says, "stormtrooper plants that are blitzkrieging across the landscape and literally displacing native plants, forcing them I wouldn't say to extinction, but, in many cases, to extirpation, at least locally." There is nothing tall, blond and blue-eyed in the US, British, or Costa Rican restorationist image. Protecting niches for the rare and bohemian is paramount. Though natives are the focus of both periods of history, now the intention is, more or less, diversity. Then, it was a rationalization for superiority (uber mensch).

The whole debate is muddled. The history of the German garden and Nazi obsession with cemeteries and memorials to the slain, for instance, cannot be extrapolated to today's restorationst vision. In fact, many landscapes considered for restoration and conservation cross borders and span thousands of miles. Migration habitats for Monarch butterflies, for instance, require maintaing and restoring milkweeds from Canada to Mexico. As far as I know, the Nazis never got to thinking about restoring migratory eagles, warblers, cross-border wolves, or wild oxen. They never confessed to the dependence of German birds on African wintering grounds. In stark contrast, enviro-restorationists have promoted natural areas in both North and Latin America to create sanctuaries for birds who are explicitly and proudly held as multinational "natives." There is exquisite attention to detail. Some birds, bats, butterflies, and whales now appear to citizenry as "native" to two continents. Lebensraum (living space) is now about partnerships on varied ecological scales (from gardens to continents), not territorial control by violence.

This is not to minimize the accomplishments of the nature-garden historians. They have productively questioned the poetic and political implications of "alien," "invasive" and "exotic" as words for disruptive species. If we call kudzu, eucalyptus, buckthorns, and Mexican nationals "aliens" and "invasive" extralopers into US territory, then we are configuring how we speak, think, and discriminate reality with identical words for different events. Perhaps, reflecting on the malfunctions of Nazi propaganda, it is time for a more exacting vocabulary.

Restoration wishes to limit irruptive, aggressive, and disruptive species. These species or races can be native, nonnative or bio-engineered. A native like the mesquite tree was once limited to groves in riparian areas but -- because of cattle, changed fire regimes, and prairie dog extirpation--irrupted into the grasslands of the Southwest, to the frustration of pronghorn and ranchers. Tamarisk, a nonnative Asian tree, promoted and planted by federal agents for erosion control, has thoroughly disrupted Southwestern riparian communities.

Filtering species for their potential to disrupt pollination, seasonal food supply for others, seed dispersal, and sheltering capacities requires no reference to their alien status.

The green Nazi debate leads us to ask: What's native? and how far should we go to keep local races and species in place? For instance, must redbud be excluded in southwestern Wisconsin (it is exotic to the state) even though it grows a dozen miles away in northwestern Illinois? Must Wisconsin contain the Illinois redbud invasion? In Indiana, the American yellowwood has been seen in only a few counties. Should it only be allowed as a plant in the restorationist pallette in those counties?

In direct contrast to Nazis whose ideology and conquest centered on national boundaries, today's restorationists prefer to think dynamically and bioregionally. To most restorationists, national, state, and county lines are arbitrary. With habitat conversion and climate change, a restorationist could easily decide that redbud is a good choice in Wisconsin or that yellowwood should be allowed to expand into a new county.

The multicultural Chestnut

Prof. Harrison Flint has further pushed the native/nonnative issue. The American elm has been decimated by the imported Dutch elm disease. Saving the American elm probably requires mixing its genes with those of Asian elms. No reason to glue oneself to American purity when it means a species demise. A little impure hybridization can be a good restorationist tool. In fact, restorationists have already adopted this strategy with the American chestnut and the Florida panther. Nearly wiped out, the American chestnut has been saved by the Chinese chestnut and its hybrids. It is now a multicultural chestnut. A few panthers of the Texas race have been introduced into Florida to prevent genetic inbreeding. American pragmatism and understanding of race or insect/pathogen/tree webbing makes "now" totally different from the racist Nazi "then."

Finally, the analogy of Nazis to restorationists or environmentalists is rhetoric based on a kind of witchcraft in which one creates and exploits paranoia by taking one similarity and extrapolating it to prove a big picture. ("Have you ever known a Communist?" "Yes." "Then you must be one.") Montana has been twisted by logger and miner job losses, and limits placed on snowmobilers. Understanding the big picture--global shifts, resource and natural-area losses--has become irrelevant to loggers and snowmobilers in the wake of their anger and loss of historical power. I feel the same muted misplaced fears reading the historians of the German native plant movement. Both worldviews yearn for greater unbridled "freedoms," be it freedom to log to the last tree or snowmobile wherever or, as Wolschke-Bulmahn has indicated, freedom to move plants anywhere around the world for the sake of horticulture and experimentation.

As Neil Diboll has pointed out, the green Nazi controversies sprout from a deeper layer of soil: How much freedom and what responsibility accompany freedoms? How much of what you do is your own right, and how much belongs to the commons? Bio-irruptors and snowmobile compaction/disturbances cost taxpayers, and so enter the commons. Bio-irruptors cost over $138 billion a year just in the US. So fiscal conservatives and restorationists tend to advocate strict regulations of both imported plants and bioengineered plants, in order to minimize disruption. Similarly, environmentalists advocate limited snowmobile freedoms.

The balance of freedom and responsibility says: You can freely plant anything you want in your garden, as long as it doesn't jump the fence and cause your neighbor or the whole nation grief. My neighbors in Tucson, for instance, planted South African sweet gum that irrupted into the Sonoran desert and covered cactus and other indigenous shrubs. After protests by many, the horticultural industry developed a sterile hybrid with the same luscious cadmium blossoms but no ability to irrupt.

In contrast to many, I relish Americans without facilitators, blaring their hearts with witty mudslinging and Abe Lincoln wisdoms, in town meetings and media, as long as the debate remains physically nonviolent, free of vigilantes, stormtroopers, and forced removals. So I thank Mr. Stokes, the historians and the back-and-forth letter/essay writers for stirring the pot.

But, mostly I thank them for warning me that "they" are out there and, if I don't pay attention, all the good works of the conservators and restorers could vanish in a wave of bad-mouthing or cerebral jesuitry. It's happened before. The need for an enemy overwhelms even the accuser's self-interest.

My most conspiracy-haunted friends ask: Are restorationists being maligned as Nazis so that the globalists can spread bioengineered invasives all over the planet without control? Are there aliens in your backyard? Sigmund Freud has been quoted as saying that, at times, paranoia is the healthy attitude. Now back to uprooting French broom that smothers the Miner's Lettuce trying to find sunlight on the hillslope outside our door.

References

"Native Plants: Another View." Harrison Flint, Arnoldia 58(3), Fall 1998.

Stalking the Wild Amaranth: Gardening in the Age of Extinction. Janet Marinelli. 1998; 256 pp. $25. Henry Holt & Company.

Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century: Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, ed. 1997; 278 pp. $50. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Downloadable at www.doaks.org/WONAC.html.

In Nature and Ideology: "The Nationalization of Nature and the Naturalization of the German Nation: 'Teutonic' Trends in Early Twentieth-Century Landscape Design." Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn; "Ideological Aspects of Nature Garden Concepts in Late Twentieth-Century Germany." Gert Groning.

"Jens Jensen, Native Plants, and the Concept of Nordic Superiority." Dave Egan and William H. Tishler. Landscape Journal 18(2), 1999.

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