28 November 21
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In the 15 states that approved new congressional district maps as of Monday morning, the number of districts where the 2020 presidential margin was within five percentage points has fallen from 23 to just 10, according to a Post analysis. The new maps in those states have already netted a double-digit increase in solidly Republican seats compared with previous maps there. The completion of maps in more states will provide a fuller picture in the coming months.
The maps could face years of legal challenges once they are approved by state legislatures or other commissions charged with drawing the lines. The net effect of the changes in motion is that the next session of Congress will have an even more partisan makeup, and likely more rancor, than the already polarized House today.
Texas
Currently, Republicans hold a 23-to-13 advantage over Democrats in the House delegation. The new lines, which include two additional seats because of population growth, nearly double the safest Republican seats from 11 to 21 and increase the safest Democratic seats from eight to 12. One seat leans Democratic and three lean Republican, according to the analysis.
Ohio
The congressional map in Ohio is already favorable to Republicans — Joe Biden received 45 percent of the vote in 2020, but Democrats currently make up just one-fourth of the state’s congressional delegation — and the new map could intensify that difference. Republicans are expected to have seven solid seats, up from five.
The new map slightly increases the number of seats with close presidential margins, in part maintaining close districts currently held by Republicans, and eliminates a solid Democratic seat along Lake Erie.
Oregon
Though Democrats will draw fewer districts than Republicans nationwide, they are countering with their own favorable maps in states like Oregon, which will gain a new seat from reapportionment. The National Republican Congressional Committee had planned to target the state’s single competitive district and new district as possible Republican gains. But the Democratic-controlled legislature passed a map that sets both those seats up to be safely Democratic seats.
Republican votes have been packed into the state’s single right-leaning eastern district, making the seat even more solidly Republican, while Democratic votes around Portland have been split, lending the party an advantage in four separate districts.
North Carolina
Growth in Democratic-leaning cities and suburbs gave North Carolina a new seat from reapportionment as well, but the maps passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature add new solidly Republican district.
North Carolina’s 1st District, a majority minority and solidly Democratic area in the northeast corner of the state, was redrawn into a much more competitive district. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, who has represented the district since 2004, announced his retirement on Friday, citing the new map he said is “racially gerrymandered.”
“It will disadvantage African American communities all across the 1st Congressional District,” Butterfield said in a video statement. “I am disappointed, terribly disappointed with the Republican majority legislature for again gerrymandering our state’s congressional districts and putting their party politics over the best interests of North Carolinians."
Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's final White House chief of staff. (photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)
“I think we will probably make a decision this week on our course of conduct with that particular witness and maybe others,” Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and chair of the House intelligence committee, told CNN’s State of the Union.
Schiff also said he was concerned about the Department of Justice, for a perceived lack of interest in investigating Trump’s own actions, including asking officials in Georgia to “find” votes which would overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.
The 6 January committee is investigating the attack on the Capitol by supporters who Trump told to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat.
Trump was impeached with support from 10 House Republicans but acquitted when only seven senators defected. The select committee contains only two Republicans, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who broke with Trump over 6 January.
“We tried to hold the former president accountable through impeachment,” Schiff said. “That’s the remedy that we have in Congress. We are now trying to expose the full facts of the former president’s misconduct as well as those around him.”
Asked about Meadows – who is due to publish a memoir, The Chief’s Chief, on 7 December – Schiff said: “I can’t go into you know, communications that we’re having or haven’t had with particular witnesses.
“But we are moving with alacrity with anyone who obstructs the committee, and that was really the case with Mr Bannon, it would be the case with Mr Meadows and Mr Clark or any others.”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, pleaded not guilty to a charge of criminal contempt, the first pursued by Congress and the DoJ since 1982. Facing a fine and jail time, on Thursday Bannon filed a request that all documents in his case be made public.
Like Bannon and Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice official, has refused to co-operate with the House committee. Lawyers for Trump and his allies have claimed executive privilege, the doctrine which deals with the confidentiality of communications between a president and his aides. Many experts say executive privilege does not apply to former presidents. The Biden White House has waived it.
“It varies witness to witness,” Schiff said, “but we discuss as a committee and with our legal counsel what’s the appropriate step to make sure the American people get the information. We intend to hold public hearings again soon to bring the public along with us and show what we’re learning in real time. But we’re going to make these decisions very soon.”
Schiff said he could not “go into the evidence that we have gathered” about Trump’s role in the events of 6 January, around which five people died and on which the vice-president, Mike Pence, was hidden from a mob which chanted for his hanging.
“I think among the most important questions that we’re investigating,” Schiff said, “is the complete role of the former president.
“That is, what did he know in advance about propensity for violence that day? Was this essentially the back-up plan for the failed [election] litigation around the country? Was this something that was anticipated? How was it funded, whether the funders know about what was likely to happen that day? And what was the president’s response as the attack was going on, as his own vice-president was being threatened?
“I think among the most, the broadest category of unknowns are those surrounding the former president. And we are determined to get answers.”
Schiff was also asked about suggestions, including from Amit Mehta, a judge overseeing cases against Capitol rioters, nearly 700 of whom have been charged, that Trump might seem to be being let off the hook by the Department of Justice.
Schiff said: “I am concerned that there does not appear to be an investigation, unless it’s being done very quietly by the justice department of … the former president on the phone with the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to find, really demanding he find 11,780 votes that don’t exist, the precise number he would need to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state.
“I think if you or I were on that call and reported we’d be under investigation [or] indictment by now for a criminal effort to defraud the people in Georgia and the people in the country.
“So that specifically I’m concerned about.”
Office of Management and Budget acting director Shalanda Young answers questions during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on June 8, 2021 in Washington, DC. (photo: Greg Nash/Getty Images)
The Washington vet would be the first Black woman to hold the key job
Shalanda Young has already served since March as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget but now she’ll be nominated to officially and permanently lead the department, according to the Washington Post.
The Biden White House has been pushed by the CBC and others to make the move since it became clear that his first choice for the job, Neera Tanden, was going down in flames. If she’s confirmed by the Senate, Young will be the first Black woman to hold the post. She’ll also immediately have one of the most important gigs in Washington as OMB is ultimately in charge of evaluating and coordinating the White House’s budget priorities and ensuring they get carried out by the appropriate federal agencies.
The job is even more crucial now that Biden’s massive infrastructure bill has been passed into law and his so-called Build Back Better package of social and environment programs was passed by the House and will now be considered by the Senate.
Young has more than 20 years experience in Washington including a critical job as Democrats’ staff director on the House Appropriations Committee. Despite how important the job is, Biden took his time nominating Young for the job because of behind-the-scenes moves by members of Congress who supported other candidates.
From the Washington Post
One of the delays in elevating Young was that some Democratic lawmakers wanted the administration to promote more nominees of Asian descent. After Tanden, who is Indian American, withdrew her nomination, Asian American groups pushed for Biden to fill the role with someone of Asian descent. Many of the groups eventually coalesced behind Coloretti, pushing Biden to nominate her for the deputy role.
Coloretti is a reference to Nani Coloretti, a Filipino-American who was previously a deputy HUD secretary and whom Biden officially nominated to be Young’s deputy.
Young would be the sixth Black member of the Biden cabinet, not including Vice President Kamala Harris.
Justice Samuel Alito. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/The Hill)
Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that declared a nationwide right to abortion, is facing its most serious challenge in 30 years in front of a court with a 6-3 conservative majority that has been remade by three appointees of President Donald Trump.
“There are no half measures here,” said Sherif Girgis, a Notre Dame law professor who once served as a law clerk for Justice Samuel Alito.
A ruling that overturned Roe and the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey would lead to outright bans or severe restrictions on abortion in 26 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
The case being argued Wednesday comes from Mississippi, where a 2018 law would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability. The Supreme Court has never allowed states to ban abortion before the point at roughly 24 weeks when a fetus can survive outside the womb.
The justices are separately weighing disputes over Texas’ much earlier abortion ban, at roughly six weeks, though those cases turn on the unique structure of the law and how it can be challenged in court, not the abortion right. Still, abortion rights advocates were troubled by the court’s 5-4 vote in September to allow the Texas law, which relies on citizen lawsuits to enforce it, to take effect in the first place.
“This is the most worried I’ve ever been,” said Shannon Brewer, who runs the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The clinic offers abortions up to 16 weeks of pregnancy and about 10% of abortions it performs take place after the 15th week, Brewer said.
She also noted that since the Texas law took effect, the clinic has seen a substantial increase in patients, operating five days or six days a week instead of two or three.
Lower courts blocked the Mississippi law, as they have other abortion bans that employ traditional enforcement methods by state and local officials.
The Supreme Court had never before even agreed to hear a case over a pre-viability abortion ban. But after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last year and her replacement by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the third of Trump’s appointees, the court said it would take up the case.
Trump had pledged to appoint “pro-life justices” and predicted they would lead the way in overturning the abortion rulings. Only one justice, Clarence Thomas, has publicly called for Roe to be overruled.
The court could uphold the Mississippi law without explicitly overruling Roe and Casey, an outcome that would satisfy neither side.
Abortion-rights advocates say that result would amount to the same thing as an outright ruling overturning the earlier cases because it would erase the rationale undergirding nearly a half-century of Supreme Court law.
“A decision upholding this ban is tantamount to overruling Roe. The ban prohibits abortion around two months before viability,” said Julie Rikelman, who will argue the case for the clinic.
On the other side, abortion opponents argue that the court essentially invented abortion law in Roe and Casey, and shouldn’t repeat that mistake in this case.
If the justices uphold Mississippi’s law, they’ll have to explain why, said Thomas Jipping, a Heritage Foundation legal fellow. They can either overrule the two big cases, Jipping said, “or they’re going to have to come up with another made-up rule.”
Conservative commentator Ed Whelan said such an outcome would be a “massive defeat” on par with the Casey decision in 1992, in which a court with eight justices appointed by Republican presidents unexpectedly reaffirmed Roe.
This court appears far more conservative than the one that decided Casey, and legal historian Mary Ziegler at Florida State University’s law school, said the court probably would “overrule Roe or set us on a path to doing so.”
Chief Justice John Roberts might find the more incremental approach appealing if he can persuade a majority of the court to go along. Since Roberts became chief justice in 2005, the court has moved in smaller steps on some issues, even when it appeared there was only a binary choice.
It took two cases for the court to rip out the heart of the federal Voting Rights Act that curbed potentially discriminatory voting laws in states with a history of discrimination.
In the area of organized labor, the court moved through a series of cases that chipped away at public sector unions’ power.
The high court also heard two rounds of arguments over restrictions on independent spending in the political arena before removing limits on how much money corporations and unions can pour into election advocacy.
If the court looks to public sentiment, it would find poll after poll that shows support for preserving Roe, though some surveys also find backing for greater restrictions on abortion.
Mississippi is one of 12 states ready to act almost immediately if Roe is overturned. Those states have enacted so-called abortion trigger laws that would take effect and ban all or nearly all abortions.
Women in those states wanting abortions could face drives of hundreds of miles to reach the nearest clinic or they might obtain abortion pills by mail. Medication abortions now account for 40% of abortions.
Some legal briefs in the case make clear that the end of Roe is not the ultimate goal of abortion opponents.
The court should recognize that “unborn children are persons” under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a conclusion that would compel an end to almost all legal abortions, Princeton professor Robert George and scholar John Finnis wrote. Finnis was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s adviser on his Oxford dissertation, an argument against assisted suicide.
A health care worker. (photo: Reuters)
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says the world has not worked well together to confront the current COVID-19 pandemic.
"Everybody has seen to what extent we were really disorganized and all have seen the failures of the global system," Tedros says.
COVID-19 pandemic shows "we don't have rules of the game"
Those failures during the current pandemic have been many, says Tedros.
The first was the slow response to containing the initial outbreak, say public health specialists. They also point to conflicts over the lack of transparency and information sharing, particularly by China. Some countries were accused of hoarding of medical supplies. Then when vaccines were finally developed, poorer nations have complained that they weren't shared equitably. A final concern, the experts say: The global response to the crisis is led by an underfunded World Health Organization that has no power to force any nation to do anything.
The idea behind this upcoming session of the World Health Assembly, Tedros says, is to start sketching out a new world order to handle future health crises.
"We don't have rules of the game," Tedros says of the current situation. "To manage shared problems, like pandemics, you need laws and rules that bring obligations to countries. That's what we miss. And I hope countries will agree to a binding pact so that pandemics can be managed better."
The nearly 200 nations and territories that are members of the World Health Organization will have a chance to weigh in on what should or shouldn't be in such a binding pact.
Many low-income countries are stressing "equity" in the talks and want wealthy nations to commit to making new vaccines, diagnostic tests, drugs and other resources universally available.
Wealthy nations want increased international access to information and the areas where outbreaks originate. But some governments, particularly China's, view this as a violation of their sovereignty.
New pandemic treaty could be a hard sell
A new set of international pandemic rules might mean the next outbreak is contained more quickly. Nonetheless, asking political leaders to commit to being good global citizens in the midst of a deadly crisis rather than looking out for their own national interests is a hard sell.
Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Center at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, says COVID has demonstrated that the world desperately needs a new international framework to deal with 21st century pandemics and the massive damage they can cause. She says the upcoming negotiations at the World Health Assembly are a litmus test for world leaders.
"After arguably the greatest shared global catastrophe since the Second World War," she asks, "are our leaders going to show even a fraction of the ambition, a fraction of the vision that we saw back in 1945?"
This special session of the World Health Assembly aims simply to start negotiations for a new pandemic treaty. The group may also decide to revamp existing international health regulations — or choose to do nothing at all.
And if a new international treaty is proposed, it could still take years to ratify if history is any guide, says Moon. Different versions of the proposal will likely be argued over and renegotiated. And each country would need to sign on and push the deal through their domestic treaty ratification process.
"We'll have to see how this plays out in the coming two, three or four years," she says. "I hope it doesn't last longer than that, but certainly it's not realistic that this would be done in a year."
The World Health Assembly runs through Wednesday.
By the end of the three-day meeting, Moon says, it should be clear whether there's the political will to craft new international rules on how to handle the next global health crisis.
Romana Didulo, left, and a photo of 'duck hunters' weapons that was posted. (photo: Telegram/Vice)
QAnon influencer Romana Didulo told her 70,000 followers that "duck-hunting season is open” and by ducks she means healthcare workers, politicians, and journalists.
Now, to be clear, we aren’t talking about hunters in hip waders going after our fine-feathered friends with a loyal hound by their side. These “duck hunters” are “soldiers” of Roman Didulo—a Canadian woman who has convinced thousands of QAnon adherents that she’s the secret ruler of Canada—targeting health care workers administering COVID-19 vaccines to children, politicians, journalists, and others who make up the cabal at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy.
In a post on Sunday to her over 70,000 followers on Telegram, Didulo issued an order to the soldiers of her “Kingdom of Canada’s Military.” She demanded the mass arrests of those they consider opposition, and wanted her soldiers to take control of newspapers and seize the border.
“Shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject Children under the age of 19 years old with Coronavirus19 vaccines/ bioweapons or any other Vaccines,” she wrote. “This order is effective immediately.”
A follow-up post on Tuesday changed the wording from “shoot to kill” to “arrest.”
“Please, use airports, hospitals, schools, stadiums, and other public venues to hold and detain all traitors,” the post said. “They will stay there until Military Tribunal is held for each one of them until the day they are executed via firing squad or hanging.”
Didulo doesn’t have a passive audience; over the summer, the British Columbian woman mobilized her audience into sending out thousands of cease-and- desist letters across North America (some have recently popped up in Europe) demanding businesses, governments, and police forces stop all activities related to combating the pandemic.
Didulo implies that her duck hunters are secretive military veterans she’s bringing in from the U.S. But on Telegram (a chat app known for their lax rules), over 6,000 of her online supporters have signed up to be a part of “Canada Military 2.0”—a separate, but inactive, Telegram page where followers pledge to be part of Didulo’s fighting force. “I have offered my life for humanity and joined our Canadian duck hunters,” one of her followers wrote.
Didulo has made separate pages to vet prospective members of her Canadian and U.S. duck-hunting teams to help with her mission. The Canadian group currently has just over 100 members, including the man who posted the images of the firearms. Inside the chatroom one of the duck hunters shared information about a specific vaccine popup in an Ontario mall “specifically targeting young children.”
“It’s time to react now,” replied one person. “Hurry up and wait is no longer the thing to say.”
Her followers are pledging their support to their Queen’s initiative. “A few duck hunters coming in can stay with me… I’m ready… all my hunting gear is ready… let’s roll,” wrote one in the public chat and posted a picture of firearms strewn across a table.
“I myself can’t contribute much, other than myself and my Duck hunting gear,” wrote another. “I am ready and willing to help our Allies in cleaning up the Bad Actors in my small town of Lamont Alberta.”
Threats and violence against health care workers have been constant since COVID-19 vaccinations started rolling out earlier this year, and have ramped up after jurisdictions greenlit the vaccine for children (Canada just approved the Pfizer vaccine for 5-11-year-olds last week). For many of Didulo’s followers, the vaccine is a death sentence so vaccinating children is akin to murder.
It’s unknown how many followers take Didulo and her tactics seriously, or just consider them a part of the LARP (live action role-playing) and gamification that makes the QAnon conspiracy community so appealing, but experts say there’s cause for concern. Many QAnon adherents have been involved in violent acts like murders or kidnappings and the FBI has warned the violence may only increase with time.
In an already confounding ecosystem where people will make their way en masse to Texas in anticipation of JFK coming back from the dead, Didulo and her followers somehow manage to be more bizarre than their contemporaries. To her followers, Queen Romana is the true leader of Canada who, alongside Donald Trump, is waging a war against a pedophilic cabal that runs the world. In a few short weeks this spring, Didulo went from a relatively unknown online conspiracy theorist to having a large following after she was “confirmed” by some large QAnon accounts. In some sense, she fills the void left by the titular Q, who has not posted in almost a year.
Didulo administers her decrees on her large Telegram page, a confusing collection of militarist statements, modern-day spirituality, and postings about intergalactic beings. She typically addresses her followers through either simple messages (littered with emojis) or videos featuring her sitting on a brown couch in front of a nondescript wall.
“I call her the ‘hardest LARP in the movement.’ Probably even greater than Q themself,” Alex Mendela, a researcher who works on The Q Origins Project, told VICE World News. “She’s unique in the sense that she’s sort of filled the role of an absent Q, but has taken on an independently authoritative role all her own.”
Mandela added that while Didulo has yet to order her audience to violence directly, and mostly skirts around it, he’s concerned about “one of her followers actually taking it seriously, getting riled-up by all the urgent rhetoric and frustrated that he/she/they are not receiving clear directives, and taking matters into their own hands with self-directed violence.”
Peter Smith, a journalist with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network who recently penned a story on Didulo, told VICE World News that her “real power has always been the ability to mobilize (her) following into types of real-world action.”
“In the time we have spent monitoring her numerous channels, that following has more than tripled and the rhetoric from Didulo has only grown more severe, culminating in calls for armed action to be taken by people from both the U.S. and Canada,” said Smith. “We do not know how many, if any, of her audience have decided to heed the call to go ‘duck hunting’ in Canada, but with such a large and engaged base of supporters, it is extremely worrying.”
The duck hunters are a massive hit with her audience. Some of her fans have requested the duck hunters attend specific events such as local school board meetings, or target specific people like Sarnia city councillors, environmentalist David Suzuki, or even one follower’s ex-girlfriend. Other fans, upon Didulo’s request, are offering their homes to the “duck hunters” as lodging.
“I am more than happy to be able to house a couple of duck hunters!” wrote one. “I only have a one-bedroom apartment but would happily give up my bedroom.”
If they can’t find lodging with her followers, Didulo instructs her duck hunters to stay at a motel and “file the invoice to the Department of Finance/Treasury Department of Canada.”
Not all her followers are celebrating the future deaths of health care workers and members of the cabal. One follower, seemingly convinced these extrajudicial killings were taking place, begged Didulo to spare the life of her son, a teacher.
“Please don’t hurt the innocent in this,” they pleaded. “People here are brainwashed. It’s not their fault. My whole family took the shot believing it was the right thing to do but were falsely led. They are good people. Please.”
A dark unicorn snail in Dana Point, California, in September 2021. (photo: Eric Johnson/iNaturalist/Vox)
Climate change is forcing some animals to move. Don’t call them “invasives.”
The animal is native to the Mexican state of Baja California, Wallingford later learned, and it’s been migrating up the coast over the last few decades in search of new habitat, eating into local mussel populations along the way. It’s also one of countless species around the world — from white-tailed deer to lobsters to armadillos to maple trees — that are moving with the climate.
Ecologists expect climate change to create mass alterations in the habitats of these “range-shifting” or “climate-tracking” species, as they’re sometimes called, which will reshuffle ecosystems in ways that are hard to predict. The migrations are critical to species’ ability to survive hotter temperatures.
The scientific community largely views this kind of habitat shift as a good thing, Wallingford and other ecologists told Vox. But the primary lens available to the general public and to policymakers is less forgiving. “Invasive species” is a concept so ingrained in American consciousness that it’s taken on a life of its own, coloring the way we judge the health of ecosystems and neatly dividing life on Earth into native and invasive.
A 2018 Orange County Register story on Wallingford’s work, for example, called the dark unicorn snails “climate invaders.” “I think any time you introduce this idea of a new species, there’s sort of this inherent reaction of, ‘Oh, that’s bad, right?’” Wallingford says. But she encouraged local stakeholders not to try to remove them.
For decades, invasion has been a defining paradigm in environmental policy, determining what gets done with limited conservation budgets. Species deemed invasive have often been killed in gruesome ways. Even though invasion biologists readily point out that many non-native species never become problematic, the invasion concept almost by definition makes scientists skeptical of species moving around. But a growing community of scientists and environmental philosophers now question whether a concept defined by a species’ geographic origin can capture the ethical and ecological complexities of life on a rapidly changing planet. In the 21st century, there’s no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem, and this will only become truer as climate change and habitat loss accelerate. It’s crucial that we get this right.
Range shifts have “been a real problem for the hardcore invasion biologists to deal with,” says Mark Davis, a biology professor at Macalester College and a critic of the invasion framework.
In a controversial recent paper published in Nature Climate Change, Wallingford and a team of co-authors argued that the tools of invasion biology — for example, looking at a species’ impact on local food or water sources, or figuring out if it’s encountering prey that aren’t used to predators — could be adjusted to understand the impacts of range-shifters.
The proposal got “a lot of pushback,” says Wallingford, who doesn’t necessarily oppose the “invasion” lens. Detractors said that merely linking climate-tracking species with invaders taints them by association. Range-shifters ought to be seen “not as invasive species to keep out, but rather as the refugees of climate change that need our assistance,” University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban argued in a comment published in the same journal issue.
Climate change and the range shifts it’s causing are extraordinary circumstances. If a species flees a habitat that is burning or melting, is it ever fair to call it invasive? Even outside of a climate context, this tension reflects a more fundamental problem within the invasive species paradigm. If the label is so stigmatizing that the only appropriate response feels like extermination, perhaps something else needs to take its place.
The origins of “invasive” species
“Invasive species” might feel like a firmly established scientific category, but invasion biology, which studies the impacts of non-native species, is a relatively young field.
British ecologist Charles Elton drew attention to non-native species in his 1958 book The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants, arguing that there is a place, or niche, for every species on the planet where they’ve evolved to survive. Those that move, he believed, should be removed.
Even before that, “There were people who recognized invasions and remarked in great detail on them,” including Charles Darwin, says University of Tennessee ecologist Daniel Simberloff, one of the originators of invasion biology. It wasn’t until the 1980s, Simberloff says, that it cohered into a subfield of scientists talking to each other and looking at invasions as a general phenomenon.
Invasion biologists aren’t opposed to the presence of all non-native species — many of them are innocuous, some are even beneficial. A widely accepted rule of thumb says that about 10 percent of species introduced into new ecosystems will survive, and about 10 percent of those (so, just 1 percent of all non-natives) will cause problems that lead them to become “invasive.” Some can do real harm, such as threatening vulnerable endemic species. Feral cats in Australia, for example, are thought to be a major driver of extinctions of small mammals.
Invasion biology became entangled with politics as its influence grew. In 1999, then-US President Bill Clinton signed an executive order establishing the National Invasive Species Council. It defined an invasive species as a non-native species “whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” Simberloff, who advised in drafting the order, says the White House added the “economic” component to that definition — which often amounts to harming agribusiness. “There are introduced species that have some substantial impact on some agricultural crops that don’t really have much of an impact on anything else,” he says. “Many scientists wouldn’t worry about them.”
Combining commercial and environmental concerns in the “invasive” category can make it sound as though threats to the bottom line of a business are tantamount to an ecological problem. This is particularly troublesome considering some businesses — industrial monocropping or cattle farming, for example — that are protected against invasive species by federal and state management programs are themselves hugely harmful to biodiversity. Scientists on both sides of the invasive species debate agree this conflation is problematic.
Common starlings, for example, a species of bird native to Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, have become wildly successful as an introduced species in North America. They’re blamed for hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural damage annually in the US, often eating grains in cattle feedlots, says Natalie Hofmeister, a PhD candidate in ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “That’s like a treasure for the starlings,” she says. The USDA Wildlife Services poisoned 790,000 of the birds in fiscal year 2020. While starlings have long been thought to harm native bird species, which might sound like a more scientific rationale for killing them, Hofmeister says the literature isn’t settled on whether that is true.
The invasion model has a nativist bias
Some conceptions of invasive species’ harms are questionable.
For example, invasives can be considered a threat not only by killing or outcompeting native species but also by mating with them. To protect the “genetic integrity” of species, conservationists often go to extraordinary lengths to prevent animals from hybridizing, environmental writer Emma Marris points out in her book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. Consider the effort in North Carolina to prevent coyotes from breeding with endangered red wolves, which bears uncomfortable parallels to Western preoccupations with racial purity that only recently went out of fashion.
That’s why some scientists look askance at the influence of invasion biology and argue that the field has a baked-in, nativist bias on documenting negative consequences of introduced species and preserving nature as it is. Invasion biology is like epidemiology, the study of disease spread, biologists Matthew Chew and Scott Carroll wrote in a widely read opinion piece a decade ago, in that it is “a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies.”
Historically, the term has erroneously expanded to the idea of, “‘If you’re not from here, then you are most likely going to be invasive,’” Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, said on a June 2021 episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science-mysteries podcast. Conservation policies have been crafted around the idea that if something is not from “here” — however we define that — “then it is likely to become invasive, and therefore we should repel it even before it causes any actual damage,” as Shah says, which is part of the nativist bent that pervades ecological management.
What’s more, the very notion of “invasion” draws on a war metaphor, and media narratives about non-native species are remarkably similar to those describing enemy armies or immigrants. For example, a recent news story in the Guardian about armadillos “besieging” North Carolina described them as “pests” and “freakish.” It also gawked at the animal’s “booming reproduction rate,” an allegation that, not coincidentally, is leveled against human migrants.
Many scholars have explored how anxieties about humans and nonhumans crossing borders, or going places where they don’t “belong,” map onto one another. “The fear of immigration is never isolated to humans,” writes science studies scholar Banu Subramaniam in The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology. “It includes nonhuman migrants in the form of unwanted germs, insects, plants, and animals.”
A “curse word” that harms entire species
One important set of interests isn’t considered in invasive species management at all: those of the “invasives” themselves. Arian Wallach, an ecologist at the University of Technology Sydney who is well known for her criticism of invasion biology, calls invasive species “nothing less and nothing more than a curse word” used to demonize species and exclude them from moral consideration. She first began to question invasion biology after she moved for her PhD to Australia, which has some of the most militant invasive species management programs in the world, aimed at protecting the country’s own unique species.
“I started seeing conservationists blowing up animals with bombs, shooting them from helicopters, poisoning them, spreading diseases through them,” she says. Australia has shot feral goats, camels, deer, pigs, and other animals from the sky (a method also used in the US), and the country kills many small mammals with 1080, a poison that is widely regarded as causing an extremely painful death. Invasion biology, Wallach believes, is “a bad idea that’s had its run.”
Wallach’s own research looks at how dingoes, dog-like animals that are thought to have been brought to the continent thousands of years ago, can control the populations of more recently introduced cats and foxes that eat some of Australia’s iconic marsupial species, such as the eastern barred bandicoot. Her work serves as a proof of concept for “compassionate conservation,” a movement that opposes the mass killing of some animals in an attempt to save others. A core tenet of this framework is to value animals as individuals with their own moral value, rather than just a member of a species.
It might seem, then, that there’s a trade-off between caring about animals as individuals and caring about them in the context of species and ecosystems, but Wallach argues it’s more complicated. Bias against non-natives doesn’t just harm individuals; it can harm entire species.
In a 2019 study, Wallach and a team of researchers pointed out that non-native species are excluded from world conservation goals. This creates situations where, for example, a species like the hog deer, a small deer native to South Asia, is endangered in its home range but hunted and treated as feral in Australia. Using a sample of 134 animals introduced into and out of Australia, the team found that formal conservation counts significantly underestimated their ranges, and that 15 of them could be downgraded from “threatened” or “near threatened” status if their non-native ranges were counted. For many endangered species, non-native habitats can be part of the solution, providing refuge to wildlife that can no longer survive in their native ranges.
A broader movement wants to see beyond the invasion lens
If we try to think outside the invasive species framework, what else can we look to?
Indigenous knowledge is increasingly being recognized as essential to conservation, write Nicholas Reo and Laura Ogden — Dartmouth University professors of Indigenous environmental studies and anthropology, respectively — in an ethnographic study of Anishinaabe perspectives on invasive species. (The Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related First Nations peoples in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the US.) Anishinaabe ideas, Reo and Ogden found, reflect a worldview that sees animals and plants as belonging to nations with their own purposes and believes people have the responsibility to find the reason for a species’ migration. The authors’ sources recognized parallels between the extermination of species deemed invasive and the dark history of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. The interviews “helped me recognize the ways in which different philosophies of the world shape our ethical response to change,” Ogden says.
Life is “extremely adaptable and regenerative and dynamic,” Wallach says. “Go back 10,000 years, and it’s a completely different world. Twenty thousand years, it’s different. A million, 2 million, 500 million … There is no point that things aren’t shifting and moving.”
Another scientific idea that captures this notion is “novel ecosystems,” or, as environmental journalist Fred Pearce has termed it, “the new wild”: ecosystems that have arisen, intentionally or not, via human introduction.
In Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Chile and Argentina, a particularly dramatic novel ecosystem is taking shape. In 1946, beavers were introduced there in a futile attempt to create a fur industry. Instead, the animals proliferated and munched down the region’s Nothofagus — southern beech — forests, creating dams and ponds. “They are these miraculous world builders,” says Ogden, who wrote an essay imagining the beavers not as invaders, but as a diaspora. (Beavers have also been a boon for ducks and other marine species.) The invasive species paradigm, Ogden adds, is devoid of nuance, history, and politics; she prefers a concept that gives expression to the moral complexity of the beavers’ presence in South America, as well as the fact that they had no choice in being moved there.
The beavers should ultimately be removed from the forested areas, Ogden believes, though she doesn’t think we can do so with a clear conscience, and says eradication “seems very unlikely.” But the idea of a diaspora opens up a way of thinking about what we owe the beavers, as opposed to how to expel them. After 75 years in South America, don’t the animals have a claim to living there? What right do we have to exterminate them?
I posed this question to Daniel Simberloff, the prominent invasion biologist. “I don’t believe they’re endangering any of the Nothofagus species,” he acknowledged, noting that there hasn’t been enough study to know what impact the beavers are having on species that require the southern beech forest habitat. Still, “I think it’s a disaster that this native ecosystem is being destroyed and replaced by pastures of introduced plants,” Simberloff says. “Other people may not agree with me.”
Even when it’s packaged as objective science, conservation always entails value judgments. One might say that the deaths of 100,000 beavers should count as a “disaster” just as much as the demise of an old-growth forest. Conservationists will have to choose whether to meet ecosystem disruptions like this one with the “war machine” of invasion biology, as Ogden calls it, or to come to terms with a changing world.
For now, the dark unicorn, the thumbnail-sized snail that caught marine ecologist Piper Wallingford’s eye, continues inching up the coast of California. “The question of how they’re getting from one site to another is still one that we can’t answer,” Wallingford says.
There is something humbling in seeing other species’ will to survive in an interconnected world undone by climate change. Though the dark unicorns’ movements elude our understanding, they already know where they need to go.
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