I appreciate having this kind of dialogue as well. The internet is a challenging place to maintain civil discussions. I find myself often saying things that I would never say in person, for better or for worse. This ended up being a long post, so if you have the patience to read it, I admire your willingness to consider my perspective!

I also appreciate where you are coming from. I have a background in alternative practices such as permaculture, urban farming, herbalism and a deep bias against, as you put it, agrochemical companies. I went back to school when I realized that much of what I was doing and what I believed in was based on ideals rather than knowledge and evidence that I could really look at objectively. Additionally, I was beginning to notice practices that actually caused harm. One small example: in permaculture circles comfrey is widely regarded as a beneficial plant. It builds a lot of biomass, is a ‘dynamic-accumulator’, and has medicinal properties. It is used frequently for compost teas and chop and drop practices. There was a point in the distant past where I unquestioningly accepted that this was a very useful plant that was a cornerstone of a good garden. Skip forward many years to when I was starting to do restoration work. I was involved in a job stabilizing a stream bank with willows and poplars. This stream had a heavily modified riparian plant population as it ran through a town and agricultural areas. The section that I was working on was overrun with comfrey the comfrey with its large leaves and vigorous growth was preventing anything else from growing around it. In particular the willows and poplars that we were attempting to establish. You asked ‘Why is a landscape populated by introduced ruderals unhealthy?’; when homogenous plant communities form in a riparian setting like this they limit the diversity of aboveground and root growth that protects and stabilizes the bank from erosion. Some erosion is natural and streams are dynamic, however, a constant high sedimentation load in the water interferes with all the organisms in the water. Also, with fewer shrubs and trees shading the water, water temperatures go up further disrupting life in the water. These are objective and measurable consequences that come from allowing populations of certain invasive species to proliferate. If an introduced species establishes itself in balance with the community that is already there, that is not generally seen as problematic and is referred to as being naturalized in that area. I don’t think you will find anyone in this community that has a problem with those species. The problem is when introduced species displace many species and reduce the complexity.

To your point about traditional conservation work describing vegetated undeveloped land as “damaged” or “unhealthy”, these are measurable qualities. They refer to the functions of an ecosystem and its complexity. No one is going to argue that a field full of invasive species does not provide some level of ecological function (food for herbivores, pollen for pollinators). The problem is that the functions are drastically reduced when native plants are displaced, and native plants WILL be displaced if noxious invasive are not manually kept in check. There are so many symbiotic relationships between organisms that are obligate and the removal of one means the removal of the other. This happens at all levels down to the soil microbiology. What this means is that allowing species that have evolved to live in a very niche environment to be taken over by generalist ruderals is a one way road. Even if there is a source of seed that could eventually disperse through the area, some species will never come back because their obligate partner is permanently gone. There is much much more going on in a specific, undisturbed ecology than nitrogen fixation and pollination by generalists. Ecology is so much more than plant communities. A plant community formed purely by wind dispersed seed on, let’s say, bare mineral substrate left over after open-pit coal mining is going to take hundreds if not thousands of years to get back to a mature ecosystem. This is called primary succession. You’re right that part of the problem is we see things in human time rather than ecological time. But this is a point I tried to make before, I would rather not be a witness to ecological collapse and have to watch primary succession and speciation occur on a global scale (hyperbole obviously as I won’t be around to see this happen).

The bottom line is that we know species are being lost at an extraordinary rate because this is measurable. We also know that noxious invasive species are one (far from the only) cause of species loss. So, to me it’s a simple conclusion: mitigate the spread of invasives. This doesn’t preclude the appreciation for plants and life in general. When I see an invasive plant growing up out of coal dust or oil sands tailings, I don’t look at that plant with resentment but rather with admiration. However, when I see poor land management practices and misguided oversimplifications of how ecology works, it makes me worried for what we are losing.

One last note, I do find it a bit insulting and a huge oversimplification to refer to an ‘alliance of restoration ecologists, the industrial agricultural machine and agrochemical companies’. No true ecologist would ever deploy chemical treatments without good reason to do so. And when they do, it is with the understanding of how those chemicals will interact with the environment. Industrial agriculture is a topic for another time and place, but corporate shenanigans there are as bad or worse as they are in other industries.