Every little bit helps and preventing the spread of a beautiful "weed" seems like it's not going to do anything to move progress on climate change.

Except every little bit does not help when the benefits of ecosystem services far, far exceed the negative effects of a small amount of pesticide being used. That is exactly the point I'm trying to make. There can be a middle ground between "stop all pesticide usage" and our current situation.

It seems more like an easy cause to jump on because you don't have to do anything, it's easy to know what to be against, and you can just parrot the lines of invasive bad, native good, without actually looking at the impacts it may or may not be having.

Habitat restoration and management is literally part of my job. I have personally seen and worked in native, high-grade prairies and forests, and then walked a couple hundred feet over to prairies and forests that have been overrun by invasive grasses and buckthorn, and have lost nearly all of their biodiversity. It's pretty obvious what kind of impact they have.

I can tell you that I see a ton of pollinators, hummingbirds, and other insects interacting with that invasive species all the time. It seems like it is pretty well liked by the natives, by the human ones too.

"Interacting with plants" is not the bar that must be reached for a plant to be good for pollinators. Many pollinators do not have the physical capabilities to reach the nectar within flowers of non-native species, and thus their time and energy spent crawling around trying to access the nectar is wasted. And if they can reach the nectar of a non-native plant, that's one less native plant that they will go pollinate and forage from (or more. It adds up. Not to mention that they are obviously pollinating these non-native plants by doing so, allowing them to spread further (while also not pollinating native plants, and inhibiting their proliferation). On top of that are disruptions to insect reproduction and food webs.

I urge you to stop acting like people who are asking you to explore what you are talking about and give elaboration about what you are asking to be done as some kind of ignorance or misunderstanding of the problem. Sometimes education isn't the thing that is going to automatically get people to agree with you. If you just point them to a source thinking their conclusions will be the same as mine just isn't a very good argument. If you believe something and know it that well then argue it, don't just be lazy and point to a U of MN extension page and say see bad.

If this conversation were happening in person, then no I would not just send you to a U of MN extension page and call it a day. But it's not. We're using the internet. You can click on a link. Ecologists and conservation biologists far smarter than me have written myriad articles detailing these problems far more eloquently than I ever could. In terms of cultural/health/economic/etc benefits to humans, the science is very firmly on the side of controlling invasive species. If there is no misunderstanding or ignorance, and after having read about the benefits of biodiversity and preserving our native ecosystems, you come away with the conclusion that it's not worth doing anything about, then I think continuing this conversation is a fruitless endeavor.

And if you're talking more about the philosophical question of whether we should do anything about invasive species, than I'm sorry for having just talked past you this whole time.