More on invasive weeds

Spraying weeds in Zion for a week I learned a few of the most noxious weeds in Utah.  Tamarisk and Russian olive are replacing cottonwoods and willows along riverbanks.  Dyer's woad, white top and various thistles are taking over fields while native grasses are being replaced with cheat grass.  Some of these renegades, such as russian olive, are pleasant to look at.  That is, until you know they are invasive.  Now I drive down the highway and see nothing but invasives.  However, you can't mess up an area much worse than putting a highway through it; the ugly foliage along highways is usually there because the highway messed up the land in the first place.  In more pristine areas, like the Mt. Naomi Wilderness in the Bear River Range, you see almost exclusively the native plants to the area, and the tendency of humans to make ugliness out of natural beauty doesn't seem so automatic.

On another note, I still haven't figured out what exactly is the problem with all of these invasives necessarily.  Although tamarisks (unruly trees in America that are small bushes in their native China because of various checks and balances) have mostly replaced willows in the streambeds in the Arizona Strip, they don't remove them in Pipe Springs National Monument because the local Kaibab Paiutes use them in place of the willow for traditional uses.  Birds too have switched over to using the tamarisk for nests.  Willows and preservationists it seems are the only ones concerned by the presence of this new water-loving plant.  Sometimes it seems, that the problem species are the ones that are uglier than the ones they replace.  In most cases, these invasive species were brought here for some commercial purpose before being abandoned and allowed to colonize large areas.  I guess they are like secondary conquistadors and now we have to get used to the brave new wilderness.  (A great example is the Ogden Nature Center and Preserve, which is about 80:20 invasive:native plants right now)