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Chapter 5 The Nature of Alien Nation When you’ve Wnished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet. . . . You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very Wrst moment that they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. . . . I do not much like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood . . . . “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943 A traveller in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no strangers; his is every person’s country. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782 151 THE NATURE OF FEAR AND THE GREENING OF HATE He did not refer to the storm raging over the eucalyptus in northern California. The Universal Australian’s champions there were precisely the sort of people Michael Pollan had in mind, though, when he criticized the growing emphasis on native plants in 1994. In his New York Times article, the prominent gardening writer coined the term “multihorticulturalist” to describe someone with a cosmopolitan, pluralistic vision of the plant world.1 Likewise, the gum tree’s critics in northern California were a prime example of those Pollan refers to as ecologically correct native plant purists. Emerging from beneath the broad canopy of California’s eucalyptus to contemplate the bigger national landscape, in this Wnal chapter I examine the sociocultural ramiWcations of the controversy over the ecological impact of nonnative species. This debate owes its wide reach, not least, to the habitual use of terminology heavily saturated with human connotations, which constitutes a distinctive manifestation of that hardy perennial known as anthropocentrism . By studying the language we use to convey our attitudes to nonnative species, I confront the charge of nativism that today’s defenders of nonnatives routinely level at those who bemoan the impact of certain species of foreign flora and fauna on their native counterparts. I also return, once again, to the question of the relationship between efforts to combat nonnative plants and attempts to restrict human immigration . The multihorticulturalist constituency, the most recent manifestaUC_Coates .qxd 9/25/2006 2:58 PM Page 151 tion of the green cosmopolitanism of David Fairchild’s generation, feels empowered by the trends of contemporary history. Fairchild believed that his internationalist stance made particular sense within a world that was fast becoming a global community. The processes of economic, cultural, and botanical integration he had praised at the beginning of the century were so far advanced by the 1990s that even he would have been taken aback. Despite the indifference of these globalizing tendencies to national borders and other fences, however, the wind seems to be in the sails of those who want to shore up those vanishing boundaries and reassert corroded traditional identities in order to recover a speciWc sense of place. I conclude with some reflections on the current debate about the role and status of nonnative species and the contribution the historian can make. As the eucalyptus removal project on Angel Island underlines, the cause of native nature gathered unprecedented momentum in the early 1990s. Across the nation, local ordinances stipulated that landscape architects include a certain proportion of native species in their projects. In Minnesota, the nursery industry’s lobbying narrowly defeated a 1991 bill that would have prohibited the sale of any plant not present in the state before 1800.2 Pollan (the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia) strongly objected to what he saw as the wilderness ethic’s intrusion into the garden by stealth under the guise of “natural garden” ideology, to which the native plant ethos was integral. Like members of Preserve Our Eucalyptus Trees, Pollan railed against the “ecologically correct” “obsession with nativeplant purity” that dismissed immigrant plants as “‘flora non grata,’ with ‘invasive aliens’ subject to deportation.” In his view, this conflation of the wild, the natural, the native, and the national betrayed a profound antihumanism and stifling authoritarianism.3 Pollan’s immediate target was Ken Druse’s recent book, The Natural Habitat Garden, which articulated a new mission for gardeners: to “expand the realm” of indigenous flora and fauna “forced out” of their native range by nonnatives.4 Having accused Druse of wanting to “close...

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