When zebra mussels colonized Lake Erie, it began to recover

I think you raise a good point. I’d be curious to hear the reasoning on the downvotes.

You're right, the article makes too strong of a correlation between the affects that Zebra & Quagga mussels have had and Lake Erie's recovery. But I'm curious, does that totally discredit the article?

No doubt, if left alone without any government policy, Lake Erie may not have recovered from purely natural means, such as the introduction of an invasive species. I believe, like you, that government policy has helped in the restoration, at least has helped speed it up.

But I don't think that's the author's real point. The point he is ultimately making is stated in the article:

> "Our culture — meaning here the collective culture of modern Western industrial society — is obsessed by the false belief that nature can’t adapt to our actions."

and:

> "Our habitual way of dealing with Mother Nature assumes that we talk and she listens, full stop, end of sentence. [...] What we need to recognize, rather, is that we’re engaged in a conversation with the old broad. We said “pollution,” she quipped “zebra mussels;” we said “internal combustion engines,” and she smiled and said “coastal flooding.” We can listen to her responses and learn from them - or not, and find out the hard way what else she has to say."

I think the author is suggesting that nature will, in the end, restore balance and that we, as species, could possibly help by simply getting out of the way or maybe working with natural processes. Understanding nature's process rather than fighting it is likely the best way out of the messes that we've created for ourselves.

I remember seeing all of the warning signs about zebra mussels when I was growing up there.

the FTT page is hilarious. It's also something that speaks to every person who has run a website for an organization, when I was webmaster for a convention, I had a text file with canned responses, 8 of them or so, that answered 80% of the questions received, all of which were answerable by reading the website.

You can't really even talk about what's "good" for an ecosystem in this large of a context though. Any criterion you would care to come up with or name, is gonna end up being a human idea. You can't see the world except through eyes.

Example: Is clear water inherently "good" or is it just something humans like? These mussels prefer the dirty water. Maybe in the Zebra Mussel Bible, the cleaning of the lake water is called "the coming apocalypse due to our greedy exploitation of nature" and the polluted years are remembered fondly as "the good times."

Is an island populated by a larger number of species more finely-adapted to smaller niches, "better" than an island overrun with mostly generalists (cats and a couple of prey species)? In other words is biodiversity "good" or is it just something humans like? Certainly greater biodiversity is associated with longer periods of unchanging climate/geology/etc. that, to us, resemble our (maybe fitting, maybe not) concept of an "equilibrium." Not coincidentally these periods include the one we've been in for a few thousand years now, during which all writing, agriculture, cities and civilization developed. So we tend to think of them as "natural" and as a "norm," that we maybe will or maybe won't disturb. But those periods are only part of the story. There are also those dynamic, changing, cataclysmic periods. And when those are going on, biodiversity tends to be less initially, as shown by the mass extinctions visible in the fossil record.

Just to completely take it over the top, is life better than death? Cuz the natural order seems to think they both should happen in almost exactly equal measure. Plus, "An empty glass is full of opportunity." A dead tree is a great boon to the next generation of little trees that grow on the rotting trunk, not to mention all the fungi etc. that survive by doing the rotting.

I dunno, it's hard to formulate any "puny huuu-mon" judgments about anything that don't just fall apart.