The Honeysuckle Test

10/21/21

Hello everyone:

I’d like to start by noting that this week marks the six-month mark for this Field Guide to the Anthropocene. That’s 26 essays in as many weeks, more or less. It has been a challenge, certainly, working late most nights to do the research and writing, but I’ve loved it. I’m learning so much as I work to pass on information to you. The work is really important to me, and the response has been positive. One particularly bright friend and reader recently told me that I’m changing the way she sees the world, which is the best kind of feedback I could hope for.

There are much more important things to spend your money on – like the solutions to all the subjects I write about – and there is so much good writing out there in print and online, but if anyone is motivated to make the leap from free subscriber to supporter, I’m offering – in honor of the six-month mark – a $60 membership for the first year. That’s $10 off the usual rate, and the offer is good for two weeks.

To be clear, though, there’s no obligation at all to support this newsletter. Everything I write is available for free to anyone who signs up. All are welcome. Many, if not most, newsletters that aspire to be news-you-can-use have a tiered system for free vs. paying subscribers. I have no plans to do that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not incredibly grateful to those folks who have already supported the Field Guide.

It means the world to me to receive that support as together we learn about the world as it is.

Thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter. I promise to do my best in the months ahead to keep you interested and informed and engaged with news and views of a rapidly-changing Earth.

On we go…

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Here are my three recommendations this week in curated Anthropocene news. Let’s call them the Good, the Bad, and the Bittersweet:

1. First, the good: Welcome to The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2021–2030 to be the decade in which humans prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of ecosystems across the planet. According to this editorial in Science magazine,

If achieved, this recovery would amount to the fastest reshaping of Earth’s surface by humans ever achieved – this time, in a direction of harmony with the rest of life on the planet. These actions can deliver one-third of the climate change mitigation needed by 2030 while preventing two-thirds of projected global species extinctions. It makes economic sense too, because each US dollar invested in ecosystem restoration generates $30 in economic benefits.

The announcement from the U.N. General Assembly comes in time to boost the message from the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) which ends this week.

2. Then, the bad: What’s our most damaging pollutant for the natural world? A good candidate, surprisingly, is ground-level ozone. This is news to me. Apparently, “scientists are increasingly understanding how this pollutant damages plants and trees, setting off a cascade of impacts that harms everything from soil microbes, to insects, to wildlife.” And “Ozone does more damage to plants than all other air pollutants combined, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.” It will only get worse in a warming climate. Check out the article at Yale e360.

3. Finally, the bittersweet: Also from Yale e360, a beautiful photo essay on the rapid retreat of glaciers in the Italian Alps.

Credit: Luigi Avantaggiato

Now on to this week’s essay:

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When Heather and I settled into our new rental this summer, we had several to-do lists that detailed everything from cleaning and painting the interior to unpacking boxes to getting rid of things to reclaiming the garden from the weeds. Our lists included all the usual starting-life-over-at-a-new-place stuff you might imagine. One thing you might not imagine, though, was our immediate plan to cut down the overgrown, 12-ft-tall, invasive honeysuckle bush that swarms around the corner of our glassed-in porch.

Known as Morrow’s honeysuckle, Lonicera morrowii is native to Asia but has long been widespread in the east and northeast U.S., and is considered severely invasive. It will grow just about anywhere, but does particularly well in disturbed areas. Often it takes over the edges of fields, but is just as capable of dominating a forest’s understory, preventing native plants and young trees from growing as it offers its plentiful red berries to birds and animals to spread the invasion farther. It is quite hard to kill, particularly when large and established like ours is, and may require a few years of violent attentiveness to finish off. (Another invasive, Tatarian honeysuckle, and a hybrid of it and Morrow’s, are also common and equally problematic. For my purposes here, I’ll lump them together.)

Lonicera morrowii / Wikipedia/sixflashphoto

Invasive honeysuckle is so ubiquitous in the east that Cedar Waxwings, fruit-eating songbirds who evolved to sport yellow-tipped tails, have over the last few decades been commonly seen with orange-tipped tails, the result of absorbing rhodoxanthin, a red dye, after a season of gorging on the red honeysuckle berries.

Cedar Waxwing with orange-tipped tail / Diane Porter/Birdwatching.com

Cedar Waxwing tails / Hilton Pond Center

To a lesser extent, this has occurred in Northern Flickers and Baltimore Orioles as well, but the honeysuckle problem for birds is far more serious than coloration. The invasive honeysuckles have thicker branches than the native plants that songbirds evolved to nest in, and those thicker branches allow heavy predators like skunks and raccoons easier access to the nest. The berries, too, are like junk food. They’re abundant and loaded with carbohydrates, but lacking in the fat and nutrients birds need to generate energy for long migration flights.

There are native honeysuckles here in Maine and New England: Fly-honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis), Mountain honeysuckle (Lonicera villosa), and Bush-honeysuckle (Diervilla lonicera). They’re smaller, modest shrubs that have played an important role in regional ecosystems for millions of years. (For those of you interested in identifying whether the honeysuckles around your house or neighborhood are native or not – my money is on not – one key test is to clip a mature branch to see if it’s hollow inside. Natives have solid pith, while the invasives are hollow.) The problem is that the natives simply can’t compete with the invasives.

After several weeks at the new rental, I had a problem with the honeysuckle too. I was starting to like it. Certainly not for its invasive qualities, and not for its appearance, but because it provided us really great opportunities to observe the birds. The previous tenants here hadn’t used the porch as a living area, but we knew immediately that we would clean it up, paint it, and make it our favorite part of the house. We placed our bird feeding station nearby so we could sit on the porch and watch the action. I trimmed the honeysuckle branches that were pressed up against the house, and eyed its large trunk for an eventual chainsaw murder, but slowly came to love how we could stand next to the glass and watch chickadees, titmice, white- and red-breasted nuthatches, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches and purple finches, a hairy woodpecker, and the occasional warbler from just a foot or two away. We watched them eating caterpillars, sunflower seeds (from our feeder), and even the terrible red berries.

The honeysuckle aviary aquarium. (The wasp nest is unoccupied/decorative.)

Tufted titmouse with sunflower seed

Red-breasted nuthatch thinking about a sunflower seed

It’s an aquarium of birds, or like a cutaway window into the secret life of ants or bees. Often there are four or five birds in the bush at once. Heather and I have had plenty of close encounters with birds, from years of hand-feeding chickadees and cradling window-stunned warblers to crawling slowly to within several feet of a dancing woodcock, but this has been different. From the comfort of our porch we could peer inside the bush to watch not just how they eat but how they interact and chatter and move through the vegetation. It’s a joy to have proximity to wildlife that isn’t focused on us. It’s about observing up close without disturbing (if you don’t count the bird feeders as a disturbance), even while eating our breakfast.

My resolve to cut down the bush faltered. Heather’s has held, but because of the birds she’s willing to wait out the winter. The berries are all gone, the seeds spread by the birds around the neighborhood. We can’t plant a replacement until the spring, and whatever we plant will take many years to reach a similar stature. The bush also provides more visual privacy from the road than whatever would take its place, since these highly competitive invasive honeysuckles leaf out earlier in the spring and drop their leaves later in the fall. I’ve been speculating that maybe we could keep it over the long term if every summer we stripped it of the berries and put them in the trash.

It has been interesting to watch my selfish, short-term interests beat back my ethics. I’ve felt strongly about controlling invasive plants for years. I’ve fought with black swallow-wort and Canada thistle, and know that so much of what we plant as ornamentals has done extraordinary damage to ecosystems. The whole debate around invasives deserves an essay or two, but in general I’m confident that it makes sense to push back against the worst offenders and support the native species that evolved together in this place for millennia before we threw the entire landscape into a blender. If we remember that the blender is still in its infancy but the landscapes are as old as the hills, then we can keep perspective on what’s important in the Anthropocene.

And yet our honeysuckle still stands. The birds don’t need it. They like it, because it’s close to the feeder and so shortens the trips back and forth, seed after seed. But they’d be fine fluttering up to the overhanging oak or across the yard to the massive forsythia (another, less problematic invasive).

Lately I’ve been thinking about my honeysuckle quandary in the context of other Anthropocene decisions necessitated by our move to this house. We have a huge lawn we can’t revert to field or meadow, so we had to buy a lawnmower. We found a used gas-powered mower because as much as we’d prefer an electric mower (as one of the essential responses to climate change is to electrify everything and power it with renewables), we couldn’t find an affordable one. Also, for the first time in decades, we’re living in a house heated with oil rather than wood. Putting in an order for a tank of oil feels bizarre and backward. Burning trees isn’t ideal, and for the last fifteen years we bought a modest amount of propane each year for the kitchen stove, water heater, and a back-up heater, so it’s not like we arrived here from an eco-friendly utopia, but oil is if nothing else the symbol of so much that’s gone wrong.

I’m aware that individual actions won’t turn the tide on the rapidly warming climate, and that systemic change – which can turn the tide – is about changing the civilizational systems of energy, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture, rather than changing a lightbulb. And I’m aware that a lot of insidious propaganda from energy companies has led us to believe that individual actions should be our focus, because they don’t want us focusing on their actions. And yet, individual actions do matter, at least philosophically. It’s neither rational nor ethical to agitate for systemic change while living irresponsibly. Rational environmentalism is not “freezing in the dark,” as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, but it’s not about fretting over the little toe of your carbon footprint, either.

Everything in our house requires electricity, including the stove. Without a renewable power source, we’ve had to double-down on fossil fuels with a gas-powered generator for when the power goes out, because in a Maine winter at some point the power will go out. Being without power in a house dependent on electricity in the winter means we risk freezing the pipes and thawing the freezer.

It’s a classic Anthropocene scenario – not unlike the internet – in that so much depends on a set of fragile, large-scale, abstract systems. Our heat source and power arrive from great distances to sustain our cooking and food storage and water supply and general well-being. But this box we call a home is as useless as a web page when the plug gets pulled.

And all this happened, ironically enough, as I was in the early months of writing this Field Guide to the Anthropocene. It’s been humbling, certainly, and a daily reminder of how difficult the transition is for everyone, from nations to neighbors. We’d love to put solar panels on the roof and replace the furnace with mini-split heat pumps, but it’s not our house.

All of which is to say that so much of the Anthropocene is difficult, if not impossible, to simply resolve. So much civilizational change is absolutely necessary – reinventing energy and transportation systems, protecting and revitalizing the natural world, reducing population and its litany of ecological impacts, and creating equity for billions of poor and poorly served people, to name a few – but as dynamic as global human culture seems to be, there’s more inertia than momentum. We want to keep doing what we’re doing, more or less.

Broad and rapid change does occur, of course. A coronavirus can shut down the global economy, an artificial nitrogen-fixing process can transform global agriculture, and a small portable phone/computer can ruin our species’ posture. But none of these changes were episodes of ethical choice, much less pre-emptive ethical choice.

The global quandaries are also quandaries at the national, state, city, town, village, family, and personal levels. The U.N. General Assembly’s declaration that we are, by necessity, right now embarking on The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (see link above) is beautiful news, but only if the good work is done at all levels. Protecting, connecting, and restoring habitat is critical to reduce warming and prevent the flood of expected extinctions, and it’s critical for human health and well-being. There’s a planet’s worth of work to do.

Which brings me back to my honeysuckle test. Reducing the pressure on native species from severe invasives is good and necessary work, and replacing invasives and other nonnatives with native plants is one of the best actions we can take in regenerating the habitat that surrounds us. To whatever extent we can provide habitat that resembles what’s been here (wherever “here” is for you) for thousands or millions of years, we would be restoring ecosystems. We would be taking what was, and still is, savaged by the blender of modern civilization and carefully, lovingly, putting some of it back together. We would be treating the Earth as if we belong to it rather than it belongs to us.

But did I mention how cool it is to see a cardinal up close…? Well, we have the winter to enjoy the birds in the honeysuckle, at least, and then we’ll have to muster up the discipline to get rid of it and replace it with one or two of several good native options: elderberry, nannyberry, alternate-leaved dogwood, silky dogwood, spicebush, serviceberry, or winterberry. Each of these options is a great reminder that a good native flowering plant or tree is our first and best bird feeder.

Cedar Waxwings eating elderberries (note they yellow-tipped tails) Credit: Tina Marie / Project Feeder Watch

In the meantime, we’ll fire up the furnace and keep the generator ready for action. I need those fossil fuels to keep me writing about the need to get rid of fossil fuels.