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The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation Hardcover – April 7, 2015
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A provocative exploration of the “new ecology” and why most of what we think we know about alien species is wrong
For a long time, veteran environmental journalist Fred Pearce thought in stark terms about invasive species: they were the evil interlopers spoiling pristine “natural” ecosystems. Most conservationists and environmentalists share this view. But what if the traditional view of ecology is wrong—what if true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders?
In The New Wild, Pearce goes on a journey across six continents to rediscover what conservation in the twenty-first century should be about. Pearce explores ecosystems from remote Pacific islands to the United Kingdom, from San Francisco Bay to the Great Lakes, as he digs into questionable estimates of the cost of invader species and reveals the outdated intellectual sources of our ideas about the balance of nature. Pearce acknowledges that there are horror stories about alien species disrupting ecosystems, but most of the time, the tens of thousands of introduced species usually swiftly die out or settle down and become model eco-citizens. The case for keeping out alien species, he finds, looks increasingly flawed.
As Pearce argues, mainstream environmentalists are right that we need a rewilding of the earth, but they are wrong if they imagine that we can achieve that by reengineering ecosystems. Humans have changed the planet too much, and nature never goes backward. But a growing group of scientists is taking a fresh look at how species interact in the wild. According to these new ecologists, we should applaud the dynamism of alien species and the novel ecosystems they create.
In an era of climate change and widespread ecological damage, it is absolutely crucial that we find ways to help nature regenerate. Embracing the new ecology, Pearce shows us, is our best chance. To be an environmentalist in the twenty-first century means celebrating nature’s wildness and capacity for change.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBeacon Press
- Publication dateApril 7, 2015
- Dimensions6.3 x 1 x 9.3 inches
- ISBN-100807033685
- ISBN-13978-0807033685
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for The New Wild
“Pearce shows that biodiversity actually increases more frequently than it decreases when newer wildlife marches in. Must reading for environmentalists of every stripe, and an optimistic report on the resilience of nature in a world of constantly shifting ecosystems.”
—Booklist
“Pragmatic conservation has to begin with undogmatic, realistic ecology, which shows that alien-invasive plants and animals almost always increase biodiversity—and therefore nature’s general health and robustness. Fred Pearce’s ‘new wild’ suggests a matching ‘new conservation.’”
—Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline
“I wholly agree with Fred Pearce’s argument for rewilding. Life, from the smallest bacterium to the whole living planet, is dynamic. Species do not belong in a planet-sized zoo. We should let Gaia evolve.”
—James Lovelock, author of The Vanishing Face of Gaia and A Rough Ride to the Future
Praise for Fred Pearce
The Land Grabbers
“Terrific… [Pearce has] produced a work of required reading for anyone concerned about global justice in the twenty-first century.”
—Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing
When the Rivers Run Dry
“An enriching and farsighted work.”
—Jai Singh, San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Introduction: "Nature in a World of Humans"
Rogue rats, predatory jellyfish, suffocating super-weeds, wild boar, snakehead fish wriggling across the land—alien species are taking over. Nature’s vagabonds, ruffians, and carpetbaggers are headed for an ecosystem near you. These biological adventurers are traveling the world in ever greater numbers, hitchhiking in our luggage, hidden in cargo holds, stuck to the bottom of ships, and migrating to keep up with climate change. Today’s human-dominated world of globalized trade and messed-up ecosystems is giving footloose species many more chances to cruise the planet and set up home in distant lands. Some run riot, massacring local species, trashing their new habitats, and spreading diseases.
Most of us like a simple story with good guys and bad guys, and aliens always make easy enemies. So the threat of foreign species invading fragile environments and causing ecological mayhem gets our attention. Conservationists have for half a century been battling to hold back the tide of aliens. They call them the second biggest threat to nature, after habitat loss. Their concern is laudable. They want to protect native species and the ecosystems they inhabit. But do we fear these ecological outsiders too much? Most environmentalists would recoil to think this, but maybe our fear is sometimes little more than green xenophobia. Most of us are appalled when foreign humans are treated as somehow intrinsically dangerous. Yet the orthodoxy in conservation is to demonize foreign species in just that way. Native is good and alien is bad. But is this simple formula true? Or might we need the go-getter, can-do aliens? Might their success be a sign of nature’s resilience in the face of the considerable damage humans have done to the planet?
I am an environmental journalist. Even to ask such questions gets me treated in some circles as a conservation heretic. I have met incredulity and hostility in equal measure. To be clear, I am not accusing environmentalists of being closet xenophobes or misanthropes, still less racists. But I have also found that I am far from alone in my concern that we have bought into some dangerous mythology about how nature works.
I am not questioning the motives—to strengthen nature—but the means. Many ecologists who actually study nature have told me that they feel conservationists are, with the best of intentions, getting the aliens wrong. And worse, that their efforts to keep out all foreign invaders of ecosystems might often be counterproductive, weakening nature rather than strengthening it. I have discovered that there is a scientific backlash against the simple formula that natives are good and aliens bad. The purpose of this book is to explore that new thinking and to ask what it should mean for conservation.
My conclusion is that mainstream conservationists are right that we need a rewilding of the Earth, but they are wrong if they imagine that we can achieve that by going backward. We need a new wild—hence the title of this book. But the new wild will be very different from the old wild. We have changed our planet too much, and nature never goes backward. Nature’s resilience is increasingly expressed in the strength and colonizing abilities of alien species. They are often the new natives. And in the new wild, we need to stand back and applaud.
There are horror stories about alien takeovers, of course. Most of those stories are set on small remote islands with only a few native species, where carnivorous rats, cats, and others hop off ships and cause mayhem. But elsewhere, most of the time, the tens of thousands of introduced species usually either swiftly die out or settle down and become model eco-citizens, pollinating crops, spreading seeds, controlling predators, and providing food and habitat for native species. They rarely eliminate natives. Rather than reducing biodiversity, the novel new worlds that result are usually richer in species than what went before. Even the “terrorists” of the conservation world, such as zebra mussels and tamarisk, Japanese knotweed and water hyacinth, often have a good side we rarely hear about.
After going on the trail of alien species across six continents, my conclusion is that their demonization says more about us and our fears of change than about them and their behavior. Some ardent wildlife lovers show a dark side when it comes to aliens. I sometimes think the more ardent they are, the more likely they are to be rabid about alien species. Understandable love of the local, the native, and the familiar—of an imagined pristine environment before humans showed up—too often becomes fear and hatred of the foreign and the unfamiliar.
This hostility is generally justified by outdated and ill-founded ideas about how nature works. We often think of life on Earth as made up of complex and tightly knit ecosystems like rainforests, wetlands, and coral reefs that are perfected and stable, with every species evolved to have a unique role. With that vision of nature, alien species are at best disruptive and at worst plain bad. But where did this idea come from? Darwin certainly never expressed it. He wrote that natural selection allowed species to adapt and survive, but he said nothing about ecosystems evolving to some sort of perfect state. They were just a jumble of species making their way in the world.
Today, fewer and fewer ecologists believe nature is either stable or perfectible. Real nature, they say, is often random, temporary, and constantly being remade by fire, flood, and disease—with species coming and going, fitting in, adapting, or losing out. Change is the norm, they say. In this vision of nature, alien species are just like any others. Whether brought by humans or in more traditional ways, they are not an intrinsic threat to ecosystems. They are part of nature doing its thing, constantly reordering itself, constantly submitting to random events. Aliens may or may not cause change, but if change is the norm, then there is no harm in that. In any case, when invaded by foreign species, ecosystems don’t collapse. Often they prosper better than before. The success of aliens becomes a sign of nature’s dynamism, not its enfeeblement.
This new ecological thinking is critical for how we understand the meaning of conservation and for what actions we take in the name of protecting nature. If nature is perfected and vulnerable to outsiders, then conservationists have to line the barricades to keep out the interlopers and restore the balance of nature. That’s what most conservationists think, and for a long time I shared that view. But if it is wrong, then keeping out aliens serves no obvious purpose. More than that, it may be counterproductive. Nature’s desperados are proven colonists and exploiters of the ecological mess that humans leave behind them. So surely that makes them nature’s best chance of healing the damage done by chain saws and plows, by pollution and climate change. Far from being nature’s destroyers, aliens may be its reinvigorators, its salvation. They may be a sign that nature is not done. That it can bounce back. If that thinking is right, then simple conservation is shortsighted, and true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders.
I do not want to suggest that we should always welcome every alien species. We humans may sometimes want to protect the species we know and love—in the habitats that we are familiar with. There is nothing wrong with that. And where alien species cause us inconvenience—whether zebra mussels in American waterways, rats on oceanic islands, or rabbits in Australia— we may want to try to halt their spread. Again, that is fair enough. We have a legitimate need to curb some of those excesses and a legitimate desire to protect what we like best. But we should be clear that when we do this, it is for ourselves and not for nature, whose needs are usually rather different.
While we seek to protect what we like in nature, we should remember something else. There is very little that is truly natural in nature anymore. There are very few, if any, pristine ecosystems to be preserved. Thanks to the activities of humans over thousands of years, no forests are virgin. They are all regenerating from past human invasions. We live in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which nothing is undisturbed and most ecosystems are a hodgepodge of native and alien species, often getting on in unexpected and productive ways.
Over my years as a journalist, I have written plenty of articles about how much harm alien species appear to do—about killer algae, marauding water hyacinth, and many more. There was truth in them all, but they missed the bigger picture. This book is my journey to discover what conservation should really be about in the twenty-first century. It should not be about trying to preserve nature in aspic, still less about trying to recreate the past. That is both impossible and an affront to nature, like trying to turn the world into a giant zoo. In the twenty-first century, rather than fighting a losing battle to protect what we imagine to be pristine nature, we should be encouraging nature’s rebirth, often through the dynamism and invasive instincts of its alien species.
Nature does not exist to do our bidding. While alien species may sometimes be a pain in the neck for human society, they are often exactly the shot in the arm that real nature needs. Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting. It is foolish to fear nature at its most dynamic—red in tooth and claw, rhizome and spore, root and branch. As true environmentalists, we should rejoice when species burst through the paving stones of our cities or wash up on foreign shores. We should celebrate nature’s powers of recovery. We should let it run wild. How else are species to thrive and respond to the disruption of our activities, including climate change, if not by invading new territories, by becoming aliens? True nature lovers should see that.
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the guru of biodiversity and rainforests, said that the twenty-first century will be “the era of restoration in ecology.” I hope so. But we will not be going back to a supposedly pristine world. We cannot. We should be restoring nature’s wildness, not trying to turn one moment in its past into an ossified museum relic. The new wild will be different but no less dramatic and wonderful than the old wild. Alien species, and the novel ecosystems they inhabit, will be at the heart of it. We should bring them on.
Product details
- Publisher : Beacon Press (April 7, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0807033685
- ISBN-13 : 978-0807033685
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1 x 9.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,737,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #491 in Endangered Species (Books)
- #3,683 in Ecology (Books)
- #5,160 in Environmentalism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Fred Pearce, author of The New Wild, is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environmental, science, and development issues from eighty-five countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and The Land Grabbers.
Photo Copyright Photographer Name: Fred Pearce, 2012.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2015
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This is the country where you only ever see a possum depicted as snarling over a helpless bird chick or as funny roadkill fridge magnet. Where predators are always 'nasty' and where we are now apparently calling the Australian Diamond Skink 'Plague Skink', because it will make it less liked, while Sirrocco the Kakapo has his own Facebook page. And if you want to be taken at all seriously, do not dare to even question the liberal use of 1080. It's the imagery, language and manipulation of racism- for lack of a better word-more than the actions that sit so uncomfortably with me.
This is also the country where rare domestic breeds that survived in the wild, like the Arapawa goat and Kaimanawa horse only hung on against eradication by the skin of their teeth. It's the country where we battle against wilding pines taking over tussock country, that was largely only created after early Maori burned down much of the original forest cover, while at the same time running an ambitious government project to plant a billion trees (not all native) to help off-set climate change. Let me quote from the DOC website, because it could be an example straight from the book: " As wilding conifers overwhelm our native landscapes, they kill our native plants, and evict our native animals. They also have a huge impact on our economy. They suck valuable water out of catchments, they add big costs to farming and they impact on tourism and recreational activities"
We depend on dairy, tourism, fishing and logging for much of our national income and it's amazing how blind we can be to their impact, if we really try. Much easier to blame the wilding conifer and the plague skink...
No, I'm not suggesting giving up on Sirrocco and neither is this book, it just advocates for some balance and for once in a while to stop and question our attitudes. The way to hell is paved with good intentions. The 19th century acclimatisation societies thought they did the right thing too when they introduced everything from sparrows to chamoix to the place. The goal has changed since then, but not the idea that humans have the right and wisdom to determine what nature should look like.
I highly recommend this book, even - and especially - if you think you will hate it.
Much of the supposed knowledge of how invasive species interact in a new environment is based on a few studies done decades ago and cited over and over. Some of those studies were small and flawed scientifically, yet we continue to use them to sup[port the idea that invasive species are always bad. Pearce provides some studies and recent findings that seem to suggest that we are getting it wrong-invasive species usually are benign or even helpful in the new environment. A forest is a forest for example whether it is of trees that grew in the area long ago or of species new to the area. Other species generally adapt after a short period to a new species in the environment and adding new species only rarely cause the extinction of species already in an environment.
Kudos to Fred Pearce for bucking the trend and presenting real information instead of going along with the "accepted" body of knowledge. I can hear the howling of the native species preservationists now. Its amazing how fanatic some of those crusaders against "invasive" species can be. I hope they read the book and re-think some of their positions. The book is an easy and entertaining read yet presents some great ideas and a new perspective on saving the wilderness.
Top reviews from other countries

Waving the white flag for ecosystems all over the world is Fred Pearce as he carefully hand selects his examples that best back up his argument for invasion and the retreat of environmentalist there allowing an influx of foreign invaders into some very vulnerable habitat.
His overall argument sounds very convincing as he describes such places as the once unadorned landscape of Ascension Island and then the introduction of hundreds of new species. This has resulted in greater diversity and the ‘Green Mountain’ but the cost of the green mountain for all its richness is the extinction of at least four plant species and other species now marginalized, as well as the quick proliferation of the Mexican thorn which is encroaching on the sandy beaches the Green turtle uses for breeding. Almost all the species introduced are thriving fine in their home regions as well as other introduced parts of the world but the Ascension Island has suffered the lost of species that the world will never see again. If Ascension Island had been left to nature, species richness would have arrived through the course of time.
Fred Pearce also fails to address ‘lag time’, the time from the introduction of a species into a new ecosystem and its gradual rise from rarity to an abundant plague. The introduction of rabbits into Australia is an exam that occurred in one human generation that can easy be documented and seen by all to have a short lag time from an original few to millions. Other species with greater longevity, slower maturity and limited distribution only start to pose a threat to the new ecosystem once their numbers have proliferated over many generations, such as tree species or medium to large herbivores. They could be hundreds of these examples going unnoticed whilst their numbers grow over long periods of time.
Fred Pearce sugar coats the arrival of new invaders to western Europe, such arrivals as Japanese knotweed, Rhododendrons and Himalayan balsam, rather than enrich ecosystems they have upset the balance creating vast monocultures along European waterways, railway and high way networks. It is true that these species are making the most of landscape already disrupted by humans and hitching a ride along our infrastructure but these three species are able to displace many more native flora and in turn the species that depend on them.
Once the floor of a wooded river bank would be covered in wood anemones, primroses and violets just as the bank of my local stream in England once was, before Himalayan balsam begin to encroached at an ever increasing rate, now almost all the flora is this monoculture, to me is not enriching the ecosystem but de-riching biodiversity. I agree that some Eco systems are lost and will never return to the pristine state, what a place New Zealand must have been before the settlement of people, but that will be impossible, still let's save what's left. A world of just domestic cat, dogs, Japanese knotweed and rats doesn't sound that appealing.
The extinction of many species and especially those endemic island species is not the preferred outcome, this catastrophe is about because of people and its our responsibility to protect and save every species, all life is precious and once a species is gone, IT IS GONE.

There are several conventional wisdoms that this book tackles. Invaders reduce biodiversity. Invaders displace native species. Invading species are bad and native ones good. Ecosystems are delicately co-evolved networks and subtracting one native or adding one interloper harms the entire system. That there is – or was – such a thing as pristine nature and that the invaders upset this balance that, once upset, will either take ages to recover or never recover at all.
What Pearce shows is that none of these contentions is true - in all instances. In some cases at least, invaders increase biodiversity. Invaders boost native species. The dichotomy between invader bad and native good is false. Eco-systems are not akin to the collaborative model of co-evolution but a collection of opportunists. Even in in such places that we consider pristine – the rainforests of the equator, the savannahs of Sub-Sahara Africa – bear the fingerprints of human creation.
For Pearce, the conventional wisdoms have held sway for so long because invasion biologists have, like an invading species, driven competing views from the field. But that is changing and there is science to back it up. Pearce champions those researchers who trying to level this academic playing field. In doing this, he can be partisan and partial. But so have the upholders of the established orthodoxy, passing themselves of as detached objectivity that is not wholly justified.
In summary, I for one welcome this book. Despite its sometime sweeping and polemical tone, I think it is much-needed corrective to the doom merchants who have held the microphone for too long. He does not deny that sometimes the conventional wisdom could be right (rats on South Georgia are bad news for the ground-nesting birds of that island) but he introduces shades of grey in an academic field dominated by black-and-white – and the active suppression of alternative points of view. Anyone interested in conservation issues should read it.


His arguments centre around fresh ways of looking at ecology and diversity enabling a more pragmatic approach that contrasts with the usual idealist and purist approaches established in the field of nature conservation.
I found many of his arguments compelling and feel there is definitely a place for his common sense approaches in modern countryside management.
I wouldn't say that all nature conservation aims should accept invasive species. However, despite some disagreements I feel this is an entertaining and thought provoking read for those interested in the subject.
