As we walk through the woods, we have to keep a vigilant eye out for this stuff, so every time I see some of it, I get a little bit of a rush - the same feeling a gambling addict might get when a few coins clang into the payout trough. In my case, the thrill comes, not from greed, but from the opportunity to help; of course, this means I'm subconsciously hoping for more of the forest to be blighted. I guess that makes me one of those selfish altruists, maybe like a doctor at a free clinic who does a fist pump every time he finds a cancer. Its a perversion of charity, but I'm not alone in it: when one of the other volunteers found a big patch of the weeds, he yelled "Jackpot!"
The motherlode.
Our motives might be selfish, but at least we're still helping the environment, right? I'm not sure about that anymore, either. I'm starting to think this "Conservation Team" is just a community outreach program, designed not so the volunteers can nurture the preserve, but so the preserve can nurture us as environmentalists. Here's part of their mission statement: "Outreach informs citizens so that they will have the skills, ecological literacy, knowledge, and motivation to participate in a positive relationship with nature." It kind of sounds like they're trying to help me become a better person or something, like I'm some sort of charity case.
The preserve in general seems to exist more for the sake of the humans than for the sake of the ecosystem itself. Many of the plant communities are unnatural to both the climate and the surroundings, and are sustainable only by relentless maintenance. Temperatures have changed due to global warming, and the preserve is in the middle of the city, so half a billion gallons of urban runoff each year distort the ecosystem. As Arboretum research director Joy Zedler says, "It’s takes all of our field staff and volunteers just to hold the line.” So we aren't really working towards progress, or restoring the ecosystem to its natural state; its more like we're maintaining a freakish white-elephant curiosity to be gawked at by local nature lovers.
Yahara Country Club golf course is in the Southwest corner, in the Northwest is Henry Vilas Zoo. The Arboretum is halfway between the two; its an assiduously maintained green-space for people to walk around in, pretending they're communing with nature when in fact they're just amusing themselves.
Maybe all we're doing is making the forest prettier for the humans, but at least that's something. The thing is, the part of the forest we're working on is way off the trails, and hikers aren't allowed in it, so the only people who'll enjoy the handiwork are the weeders themselves. If this were a Zen koan about the felling of plant-life in an empty forest, the enlightened answer would be that we might as well bury a cache of nudie magazines in these woods, because our activities are purely masturbatory.
OK, so maybe our motives are selfish, and we're only gratifying ourselves instead of helping others, but at least we're not doing any harm, right? Some of us have been noticing that when pulling the weeds, a lot of them are breaking off just above the root, and that's bad because if you don't get the roots out, the plant can resurrect itself. I'm starting to wonder if the conservation team is causing these plants to evolve so that they have this quick-release root system.
Each year that the team goes through and pulls mustard, the only plants that survive are the ones that snap and leave remnants behind. Those are the plants that will come back the next year and reproduce, so each successive year, the plants could become more and more likely to have this geckos-tail survival mechanism.
Some of the team members are really haphazard about their pulling techniques, basically just clawing away at the plants with no regard for whether they get the roots; maybe they're driven by the desire to accomplish more, to fill their trash bags with the most weeds and be the man with the biggest sack, but all they're accomplishing is helping to breed a virulent, ineradicable super-strain of garlic mustard. I asked the leader of the team, an ecologist who works for the arboretum named Mike, if he thought we might be evolving the plants; he almost immediately said "yeah...its like we're selecting for it..." It seemed as though he'd had this same worry on the tip of his tongue the whole time, yet he continues to lead the team, because that's what he's paid to do.
So my motives are subconsciously selfish, I'm not really helping, and might actually be hurting the environment - not exactly the positive impact I was hoping for, but does this mean I'm going to quit volunteering? No - I might need this as a job reference.
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