The Great Replacement

A healing ceremony being performed on the catalpa tree at Omega Institute, in Rhinebeck, NY. [Photo credit Jim Conroy]

The tires of my Subaru crunch over gravel as I slow to a stop under a shady sugar maple. Stepping out into the warmth of late Sunday afternoon, I stretch my arms overhead and yawn, then shoulder a duffel bag and trudge across the lot. Inside, a friendly woman behind the desk hands me a key, daily schedule, and brochure with a map that depicts the location of guest services, the dining hall, and the cabin where I’ll be staying. Tacked to the wall is a poster for evening talks titled Healing Your Qi and The Alchemical Tarot, and another for an interpretive dance performance with a photo of women in flowy pink smocks. She flips through the rest of the pages, pointing out the amenities that are available during my stay: a café, library, daily yoga classes, a flower garden, a sanctuary for meditation, a network of woodland walking trails, and kayaks for paddling an idyllic pond spattered with lily pads and cattails. A few minutes later, I swing open the screen door to cabin 36A, drop my bag, undress, and flop onto the bed.

Omega Institute is a holistic wellness center located in the pastoral hills of the Hudson Valley, in upstate New York. It's June, and I’m attending a weeklong workshop for environmental writers. The Omega property was a summer camp until the 1970s, when the 200-acre campus changed hands and was converted to host retreats and offer programming focused on personal growth and social change. Drawing on Eastern wisdom, including the teachings of founding board member Ram Dass, Omega seeks to connect science, spirituality, and creativity in a “universe of life” and lay the groundwork for new traditions and lifestyles for an eco-centric future. Boasting LEED-certified buildings, solar panels, and vegetarian meals, it’s an example of environmental leadership and sustainability.

I’m startled by a low rumble, with chattering in Spanish. Cracking an eye, I see through the window three women wheeling a plastic cart loaded with towels and colorful bottles over the hard-packed dirt. The housekeeping staff, headed for the cabin behind mine. Too visible to be comfortable, I quickly reach to close the blinds, then sink back into the pillow.

I think of those posters near the front desk, and sense here an air of cultishness, a strain of new-age pseudospiritualism that does not distinguish genuine medical practice from crystals and horoscopes. Equanimity, I think, cannot be bought or sold as a consumer commodity—as an “experience”. What have I gotten myself into?

My mind drifts to politics, where many of these same logical gaps exist. Some on the far right, for example, have been taken in by the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that alleges that Democrats are colluding with the media and billionaire donors (usually Jewish) to further globalization and the concentration of wealth in the hands of elites. By allowing unchecked immigration and manipulating voting and elections, they say, those in power seek to dilute the culture (read: racial purity) of white Christians in America. Leaning on predictable tropes, they accuse immigrants of being dirty, poor, lazy in character, and reproductively unrestrained. But the cardinal sin, because immigrants are often willing to work cheaply, is that they take jobs from working class people. The theory, and others like it, have contributed to an atmosphere of hostile xenophobia prevalent in our public discourse.

**

Invasive species are organisms foreign in origin that have been introduced into a new geographic range where they did not evolve. Usually they are fast-growing, prolific multipliers able to tolerate disturbed habitats or otherwise difficult living or growing conditions. Lacking natural predators, they outcompete and crowd out native species, usurp their resources, can even lead to their extinction. At high enough densities, invasives can drive fundamental changes in the function of entire ecosystems, making them unrecognizable.

A recent UN report estimated the global economic toll of invasive species at $423 billion per year. It's no wonder that military metaphors and sensational warnings of impending harm are used to portray invasives as enemies. I've seen first hand the toll they can take. On the Appalachian Trail, I trained volunteers how to identify and remove thorny tangles of Japanese barberry, which leads to infestations of black-legged ticks, known to carry Lyme disease. In graduate school I surveyed the lakes and ponds of Monroe County for hydrilla, a common aquarium plant that is usually introduced when someone dumps their tank from shore. Even a fragment can explode in a matter of days into a stinky, rotting mat. From a kayak, I threw the head of a steel rake attached a rope into the water, reeling it back in and sorting through the gloopy mess caught in its teeth. My current job involves coordinating efforts to remove Russian olive from the Escalante River in southern Utah. Originally planted in the 1950s for erosion control, the tree quickly took over streamside habitats across the West, displacing the lushness of native cottonwoods and cuckoos, willows and wildflowers, with a mile after mile of velvety silver foliage.

The Omega campus, too, is loaded with invasives. Near the parking lot alone: Tatarian honeysuckle (central Asia), multiflora rose (Japan), oriental bittersweet (Korea/China/Japan), and garlic mustard (Europe). Flitting through the brush, a raucous posse of house (English) sparrows.

In each of these cases, it seems, something is lost. Some elemental vibrance robbed. Most ecologists, however, disparage invasives simply because they don’t belong. Perhaps this fear of infiltration is also at the root of white nationalist's hatred of immigrants. The troubling thing is that in both cases, the proposed remedy is the same: eradication.

**

The next morning, I meet my writing group and instructor, an accomplished author, outside the dining hall. We sit in the sun on picnic tables overlooking the grounds, which slope gently toward the pond and woods. A magnificent tree, a northern catalpa, towers above us, its branches drooping heavily with viridescent, heart-shaped leaves the size of dinner plates and bundles of flamboyantly ruffled white blossoms, their cheeks blushing with crimson veins and two golden dimples each.

We're given a prompt: Use something from nature as an analogy or metaphor for something in your life, such as a relationship or experience. For inspiration, we read an essay by Aimee Nezhukumatathil called "Catalpa Tree".

"A catalpa can give two brown girls in western Kansas a green umbrella from the sun," Nezhukumatathil writes. "Don't get too dark, too dark, our mother would remind us as we ambled into the relentless midwestern light."

In the essay, Nezhukumatathil recounts the memory of her mother as she struggled to make a living for her and her sister. After school, the bus would drop the two of them off at the mental hospital where their mother worked. After long days in the office, she still found the time to fix the girls hot meals from scratch, to sit with them and hear the latest gossip. Aimee eventually learned of her mother's solitary struggles.

"I only pieced it together later," she writes, "how her day was spent trying to help patients who often hurled racist taunts and violent threats against her, like Get out of here, Chink, or I'll choke you with my own hands! I can't believe how she managed the microaggressions of families who told her that they couldn't understand her accent, who spoke loud and slow at her, like she—the valedictorian of her class, the first doctora of her tiny village in northern Philippines—was a child who couldn't understand."

Despite its name, the catalpa is a southern tree, native to the fertile floodplains of the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys and lower Appalachia, where it grows in the open along streams, riverbanks, and lakes. Often regarded as a weed tree, the catalpa won’t disperse far on its own but if planted under the right conditions, thrives in the north.

**

Without fail, invasive species exploit edges—where woods have been cleared, where power lines have been cut, where ecological gaps exist. They colonize places that are too hot, too dry, too wet, too rocky, or too polluted for others. They are creatures of fields and roadsides, of construction and destruction, of turnover. Creatures of the margins.

As much as ecologists complain about the disruptions they cause, as much as we cut, spray, mow, shade, tarp, or burn, invasive species will never go away, at least not for long. Always some small remnant—a seed or pupa or nestling—will be waiting to assert itself. The frustration of managing invasive species stems (or suckers) from the fact that the work seems futile. It's never done.

An influential article published in the journal Nature titled "Don't judge species on their origins" argues that it's time for a new approach. The authors suggest that rather than vilifying non-native species for "polluting" natural environments, we should instead assess them on their function, that is, the effects they have on their new environment. "[M]any of the claims driving people's perception that introduced species pose an apocalyptic threat to biodiversity are not backed by data," they write. Since the rise of "invasion biology" in the 1990s, conservationists and restoration ecologists have relied on the native/non-native dichotomy as a guiding principle. Policy makers in the twenty-first century, however, should embrace a more "dynamic and pragmatic" approach and recognize that classifying species as one or the other is becoming increasingly counterproductive.

“[C]limate change and habitat loss are turning the planet into a giant mixing bowl as invasive species spread across the globe,” writes Bryan Walsh in TIME. Unmixing is impossible. Human activity "has simply altered the planet too much," he writes. A study published in Science suggests that some non-native species have become so embedded in their environment that removing them might cause an ecosystem to collapse "in the same way that pulling a single thread can cause an entire tapestry to unravel.” Ecologists now speak of “novel ecosystems”, or communities that have never before existed on Earth. Unique combinations of species that never would have commingled are now living side by side.

Consider:

- The Omega campus sits on the traditional homelands of the Mohawk and Mohican peoples. It was trade and travel—the business of white Europeans—that was responsible for the introduction of invasive species to the Americas in the first place;

- Census data indicates that by 2044, ethnic and racial minorities will outnumber white Americans;

- The conversion of a summer camp for young Jewish boys into a gathering place for privileged and pretentious spiritual seekers. Who is invasive, really?

The answer is bad ideas. Ideologies that take root in disturbed minds, where they inhibit proper function and can alter the trajectory of entire populations. Once established, they are nearly impossible to get rid of.

**

That week, the catalpa becomes a gathering place, the focal point of my Omega experience. Each morning I eat breakfast under its sun-dappled limbs. In the afternoons I lie in the grass and compose poetry in its fragrant shade. I meet people who, walking by, all stop to gaze at its beauty, which enriches everything in its vicinity.

Nezhukumatathil is now a professor at the University of Mississippi, where that campus's famous tree walk features a "champion" catalpa that stands seventy-six feet tall with a trunk more than twenty-two feet around. Its brittle branches, extending the length of a bus, are reinforced by metal supports so they don't fall on a student.

"As I pass the enormous tree,” she writes, “I make note of which leaves could cover my face entire if I ever needed them again. If I ever needed to be anonymous and shield myself from questions of What are you? and Where are you from?"

She's never had to. As the tree's Latin name Catalpa speciosa ("showy" catalpa) suggests, it’s not afraid to be seen. Neither is she.