There are a lot of words used to describe how plants look or smell — think fragrant, prickly, tall or climbing. But there are also words that describe how and where plants grow — like invasive or native. Liz Makings, collections manager for the Arizona State University Herbarium, objects to the latter category.
Makings says words like non-native or invasive tend to have negative connotations which can be unwarranted, and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Liz, we’re talking about this idea of what are often referred to as native vs. non-native plants and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that you believe plants that are not native to the Sonoran Desert tend to get a bad rap.
LIZ MAKINGS: I do, and I think there's a real issue with not just that they get a bad rap, but that. There's so much rhetoric that it's attached to these plants, and it's almost always negative and contentious.
BRODIE: Are there particular plants that, to you, seem to bear the brunt of this more than others?
MAKINGS: There are, and they're usually the, the sort of plants du jour, that that we love to hate and, I can give you a few examples of, of some sort of recent, arrivals that are labeled invasive, you know, which is, you know, a word that that gives me the heebie-jeebies, you know, and I really dislike.
So, part of what I do a lot is, is sort of redirect that and try to ask people a little bit more about how you know how they feel about that and, and why they're calling it that and but there's a thing called Oncosiphon, and it's a little yellow composite flower in this in the sunflower family and it's just sort of spread really quickly in a short period of time. And so, people have noticed and they've decided that it's bad. You know, and I guess the first thing as a scientist, rather than go to that emotional sort of label, I would rather we ask questions of, “What it's doing and how is it doing it?”
BRODIE: Like what kinds of questions specifically do you think we should be asking? Because it seems to me that there are, scientifically, plants that are not from here, right, that people have brought here or spread here other ways. So, to call them non-native doesn't seem to be much in dispute. Is it maybe sort of the connotation that goes with it?
MAKINGS: Absolutely, yeah, the, the, well, there is debate about nativity, of course, because what what does that mean, you know, is there a definition that we all agree on and it's the same thing with all of these labels, you know, we throw them around as if they're understood by everybody, including non-native. But I have questions about that, you know, and a lot of people just accept these things. But in reality it can be just pseudoscience or dogma that's been perpetuated for, you know, decades that we just sort of parrot.
BRODIE: Is there something to be said for the place in which we live, which is so different than so many other places around the country and around the world, that plants that have been here for some long number of years, that are maybe better adapted to survive and thrive here as opposed to, you know, plants that are relatively new?
MAKINGS: Well, sure, I mean, that's also sort of our natural way of thinking is that, “Well they've been here so they belong here and the stuff that hasn't been here doesn't belong,” and you know that's problematic, too, because in most cases, the things that have been introduced, it's because people have done that, right? But, it's so much easier to finger point than it is to accept, you know, sort of responsibility.
BRODIE: So, how should we maybe be thinking about some of these species differently? I mean, you talked about asking questions about maybe what they do or why they're here. Like, how should we be thinking about some of these plants differently than we do now?
MAKINGS: I think we should be thinking about our planet differently, and that includes our local situation. It's getting hotter, it's getting drier. We need to shift away from these adversarial relationships with plants and consider that something that is migrated from somewhere, isn't inherently bad, and it actually might be part of the solution.
BRODIE: Do you think that there are some types of plants that maybe shouldn't be here? You know, I think about something for example, like buffelgrass, that a lot of fire managers talk about as being a really big detriment when you're talking about providing fuel for wildfires that wasn't here some number of years ago. Like, are there some species that maybe just shouldn't be in the Sonoran Desert?
MAKINGS: Again, “shouldn't be here,” right? This is the way we frame it, and instead of why is it here and what is it doing? And buffelgrass is actually one of the things that has been studied fairly well and we're sort of labeling it as bad and changing fire regimes or or carrying fire or, you know, reducing biodiversity or, you know, all these sort of kind of overused narratives that I don't know, I think we should always be curious and questioning them because people that are coming at that research, it's typically with the sort of null hypothesis that it's bad. So when you're researching something and your hypothesis is that it's bad, you're sort of trying to prove that, right? But, in many cases it's really neutral, or in some ways positive. Like what are plants doing in general? Well, they're stabilizing soils, they're capturing carbon, they are shading the ground, you know. I mean, so they're doing a lot of good things too.
BRODIE: Well, it sounds like what you're saying is that you sort of have to look at these plants holistically, right? Like some maybe use more water than we would like, or provide fuel to wildfires more than we would like, or have other detriments to the ecosystem, but at the same time, maybe they are providing shade, or maybe they are helping with birds and bees or maybe they're doing something other that is a positive to the ecosystem. So when you look at it that way though, like, are there like, are there plants that sort of when you do sort of that cost benefit analysis that come out on the negative side?
MAKINGS: And I'm sure there are, and I'm sure there aren't. And that's what we have to do as scientists is, is to tease that out and not do it in such a biased way that we have this predetermined outcome that it's bad. One of the things that I also have a really problem with is a lot of people get introduced to plants in this framework, you know. People wanna help, they care, you know, they've seen what's happening in the Sonoran Desert and the changes and the droughts and the, you know, and the developments and so we love it and we want to protect it, right? So, they want to get involved and one of the first things that's available to them is to join these crews that go out and you know remove species that are labeled invasive, right?
And so, this is problematic because the last thing I'd want to do to introduce somebody to plants is to tell them that this is something evil and we need to get rid of it, you know. I want them to love plants like they inherently do and offer other alternatives, you know. Why can't we be doing restoration, or doing some plot data, or doing rare plant surveys, or phonologies or pollinator studies, you know, and, and I think this would get people a lot more jazzed than the, you know, “Call to arms to, you know, kill natives or invasives,” you know.
I mean, think about if you would ask somebody to round up all the pigeons and starlings in Phoenix and go poison and shoot them because they're not native because they're not native, right? That's problematic and and thankfully we don't do that because it's morally wrong, you know, but also because you're not supposed to, right? But we don't think of that when we go and do so-called invasive species removal with plants.
