So, I consulted far and wide, asking botanists, naturalists, academics and federal and state scientists what to do. Buy a Bush Hog? Rent a herd of goats? Move back to the city?
One consistent, counterintuitive answer came back: The best thing I can do for nature is to fight the invaders with herbicides.
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It comes down to this: Without chemical treatments, the invaders would take over much of the [Shenandoah] park in the coming decades. Herbicides might be the difference between whether or not there will even be a forest in Shenandoah National Park in the future.
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If maintaining the status quo is a struggle now, it would be impossible without herbicides. “I think of it as chemotherapy,” said Doug Tallamy, a University of Delaware entomologist and guru of the native-plant movement. “We have ecological tumors out there. If we don’t control them, we have ecological collapse. We have the collapse of the food web.”
