Featured April 26, 2008

If you read last Friday’s News-Times, You probably saw a story about Julie Life’s marine biology class at Newport High School. The class has started a campaign to stop aquatic invasive species. “Huh?” you say. “Why should I care?”
 
We live in a place with a natural beauty that rivals almost anywhere on earth. Lincoln County has dozens of rivers, hundreds of named and unnamed creeks, and several deep-water harbors.
 
For centuries, these resources have sustained a rich, varied, and integrated ecosystem. That ecosystem is now under attack from a variety of invasive species that threaten to permanently alter it.
 
Tonight’s featured writer is Cieridwen Terrill, author, among other writings, of the book Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species.
 
Terrill is an assistant professor at Concordia University in Portland. But she seems the antithesis of the ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds academic.
 
Terrill is an enthusiastic outdoorswoman. In her trips backpacking, kayaking, and sailing, she’s seen plenty of evidence that non-native species are spreading around the world at an alarming rate.
 
Plants and animals have always migrated. But our system of modern global transportation offers them unprecedented opportunities to go places they’ve never lived before. Without the natural enemies and predators that contain them in their local habitat, they can spread incredibly fast, overtaking and killing off species endemic to their adopted regions.
 
It’s a topic we all need to be smarter about.

http://www.faculty.cu-portland.edu/cterrill/index.html

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz
Photo by Carla Perry