Rooting through the saturated dirt, I mutter expletives under my breath as I scrounge around for the piece of roundleaf bittersweet root that had broken off in my attempt to unearth the offending plant’s root system. I feel like a pig hunting for buried truffles, except I am excavating not to yield a reward, but to exterminate a nuisance. Around me, the young highschoolers who have been assigned to assist in this endeavor crow in victory whenever they vanquish a branch of the vine-like scourge that has befallen the forests surrounding the SLA campus. I overhear them talking about “killing plants” and how terrible it is that the bittersweet has taken over everything. I, too, imagine the scene from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty where the prince is hacking away through a thorny forest to reach the castle where the princess lies asleep. What I notice is that our language and thoughts regarding this invasive species is inadvertently couched in moral terms. We identify the enemy, the bittersweet, and we destroy it.
Thinking that we are fighting some evil organism helps us work harder–we all want to believe we are doing good. I don’t think this framing is necessarily conscious, but rather, a subliminal tactic of human behavior in which we weave mental narratives about ourselves and the world around us in order to make sense of it. In these narratives, we often divide between “us” and “them,” figuring ourselves as the heroes, the others as the villains. In the process of hacking away at the bittersweet, not only was I reminded that we are too quick to point fingers and too slow to reflect on our own inadequacies, I realized that perhaps our thoughts of frustration were misdirected. Demonizing bittersweet would be like blaming a fire for burning you. Plants don’t make decisions, at least not in the sense that humans do. Bittersweet is simply acting as the laws of evolution arbitrate. Organisms survive and reproduce, adapting to new environments and competing for limited resources; this is how life on earth goes. The ranges of many native plants continue to shift northward as their current surroundings become too warm. No one is moving them; they move themselves to where it suits them. And that’s what bittersweet is doing too, now that it’s been brought here–it’s filling up the ecological niche that it can, its natural potential if you will, a happening as intrinsic as spilled water moves across a table, spreading as the principles of physics determine. What may be truly unnatural is what brought the bittersweet out of its habitat of origin and to this foreign land in the first place. What started the fire?
Bittersweet was introduced to the U.S. from East Asia by people who wanted to decorate their gardens with it but let it escape their yard or accidentally dispersed the seeds. Now, this isn’t a call to blame individuals–the people who first brought bittersweet probably didn’t anticipate that it would become the issue that it is, and there is too much finger-pointing and not enough self-reflection to begin with. The dilemma I ponder is this: Isn’t the exchange of goods and ideas one of the most central and powerful aspects of human civilization? Diversity, one of the defining characteristics of America and arguably one of our greatest strengths, is founded in the interplay of people and thoughts. We drive innovation by taking the best parts of every idea and creating something unprecedented, enabled by globalization. But with the advent of globalization, are drawbacks incurred as well? When does exchange become invasion? Bittersweet’s proliferation seems to reflect a shadow cast by this question, a shadow originating in the human realm. As the world becomes more interconnected, invasive species will only continue to spread. Not just from Europe and Asia to the U.S., but from the U.S. to Europe and Asia. The Covid-19 pandemic may not be the last. The erosion of local cultures and languages occurs as social media propagates popular American culture to consumers across the world and as the U.S. continues to set the standard for economic and professional prestige. Is American culture the invasive species? Is this something we should or even can resist, or are globalization and American global dominance actually as natural a course of events as the bittersweet population explosion or spilled water spreading? History and science seem to show that the world can eventually self-correct when balances are tipped: empires split into smaller sovereignties, population dynamics boom and bust in cycles. But I think often about the law of entropy in thermodynamics, which says that disorder increases with time. The universe as we know inches closer to descending into chaos day by day. Like with anthropogenic climate change, is the concern that too much in one direction and the rebound may not only fail to transpire within a human timescale, it may never occur at all?
For me, the answer is to find balance between extremes. An American monoculture represents an extreme; isolationist paranoia represents another. Senseless destruction of the natural world represents another extreme; our complete removal from it yet another. Balances are often delicate and involve gradual change in the direction of that elusive sweet spot. One of the ways we can develop our own sense of where that balance is is by engaging in experiences outside the scope of what we are familiar with in order. This allows us to see what factors there are to balance and how others manage that balancing act.
To anyone who has not yet had the chance to remove bittersweet, I recommend trying it. You’ll get a firsthand sense of the issues bittersweet poses. Then, you can add that experience to your own balancing equation and become that much closer to finding the sweet spot for yourself.
Tara is a recent Northwestern University grad serving at the Squam Lakes Association. Learn more about Tara here!