(electronic music) - [Narrator] So this, believe it or not, is Silicon Valley. That's Facebook's headquarters there, like 15 hundred feet away, but a lot of the valley looks like this, marshland and empty wasteland. But there's actually this
big messy story happening right here in the middle of nowhere. It's a story about
humans messing up nature then trying to fix it then maybe making things worse then trying to fix that. And in the middle is a big fight about what nature even is. And to see this all firsthand, we're here at 5:45 AM,
in the middle of a marsh, listening for what everyone agrees is a really ugly bird call. - It's very mechanical and rattly. - [William] Our guides are
Jen McBroom and Toby Rohmer. They work for a group called
the Invasive Spartina Project, we'll get to that in a minute. And the bird we're listening for is called the California Ridgway's Rail. - It's a small, smaller than a
chicken, bigger than a robin, but a little bit heavier
and a heavy orange bill. - [William] The Ridgway's
Rail is endangered, there are maybe one or two thousand left. And they're all here, in the tidal marshes around San Francisco. Those very few birds are the focus of one
big conservation effort, and they're completely
screwing up another. - Let's try to go up
there, a little bit off it there's a pair kind of over there. - [William] The big conflict here is that Toby and Jen are
trying to save the Rails, but they're also trying
to wipe out the grass where lots of them live. The grass is called spartina, and it was a product of good intentions. The southern reach of
the San Francisco Bay is wide but shallow and it's supposed to look like this. Grassy, tidal marshes that
give way to miles of mudflats. It's a utopia for little
birds like the rail, but over the 20th century, developers began turning the marshes into what's now Silicon Valley. That meant farmland, housing,
businesses, airports, and notably, massive salt
ponds, that harvest salt by evaporating acres
and acres of bay water. The marsh habitat dwindled, pushing the Ridgway's Rail onto
the endangered species list. So fast forward to the 70's, when the Army Corps of
Engineers is hard at work returning some of this
developed land to nature, but, and this is the big mistake, they used an imported
grass from the East Coast. - [Toby] Generally over
about the next decade, that species hybridized
with our native species. And begat what is now the invasive. It grows bigger, faster, taller, than both of the parent species. - [William] The hybrid
grass took over the bay, crowding out native grass
and even eating up mudflats where the native grass doesn't even grow. That threatened countless
migrating shorebirds who rely on the mudflats, and it began to turn the
marshes into a monoculture, one big sea of invasive grass. Which is terrible news, unless you're a California Ridgway's Rail. - Hybrid Spartina provided
brand new novel habitat by converting mudflat that was previously
inaccesible to them into marsh, so it created marsh that they could use. And it also grows so much
taller than the native, that it's really good cover
for them from predators. - That right there. - [William] Also, we did finally see one. Toby and Jen's organization, The Invasive Spartina Project, is funded by state and
federal conservation agencies. And since 2005, they've
managed to knock out about 95% of the invasive spartina, poisoning it acre by
acre with an herbicide, and planting native grass in its place. But that last five percent is
filled with endangered rails, and they can't completely
wipe out the spartina, without also wiping out the rails there. - So getting to 100% eradication, is kind of daunting. I think it is feasible, though. - [William] So, they're at a standstill. Toby and Jen want to wind back the clock to before the invasive
spartina ever existed, but right now they can't. Also, not everyone is
convinced they should. (radio chatter) - [William] Their stated goal is complete eradication of the hybrid - [Man On Phone] Oh my gosh. - [William] (laughs) Thoughts on that? Mark Davis is a professor of biology at Macalester College. Back in 2011, he and some
colleagues wrote a paper in nature that questioned a
lot of the dominant wisdom of conservation. Namely, they took issue with the idea that native species are
inherently better for an ecosystem than foreign or even invasive species. - [Mark] And that an appropriate response almost an obligatory response is to try to eradicate the
non natives that have come in. - The way Mark sees it, ecosystems shift. Some species take over, some go extinct, scientifically, there's no harm. There's just change. So unless a critter is ruining
crops or spreading disease, the species we choose
to preserve or protect, that reflects our human priorities. Not some will of nature. - [Mark] The term "harm" and "damage," you know that's always in
the eye of the beholder. Once you declare something as harmful, you kind of oblige society then to step in and try to deal with the harm, which you know costs
money and uses resources. - To be clear, Mark Davis is not saying we should
definitely let spartina take over. He's just saying that
the decision to fight it isn't purely objective or scientific. It's more that we've decided that the way this habitat used to be is worth fighting for. And it's the idea that
nature isn't a fixed thing. It's whatever we decide it is. - [Mark] It really is
creating, trying to create a little ecological museum
which cannot be very big simply due to the practical measures of gardening nature, basically. - [William] None of this
is news to Toby or Jen. They're practical about their mission. They just think that the
scales are tipped way in favor of fighting spartina. - So, hybrid spartina might
be good for one species that's endangered, the rail. So it would really end
up being hybrid spartina and Ridgway's Rails at the cost of hundreds of other species. - [William] On our last stop, we see what the current
standstill looks like. 46 acres of marsh, totally
overun with invasive spartina, and with rails. Tell me how you feel
when you look at this. - Uh, I have some frustration, for sure. Yeah, this is pretty much
what we call a monoculture of the invasive spartina. But I like to call these rail farms, because this isn't really
good for anything else. This epitomizes the
difficulty of the project. Right now we're just not touching this. We don't know what to do with this. - [William] On our way back to the car, we stopped by a big expanse of mudflat. This is what all those
shorebirds desperately need and it's what the hybrid
grass is destroying. Toby peers through his binoculars, and sure enough, finds a
little sprig of hybrid spartina poking up through the mud. He makes a note to come
back and kill it next month. So this salt pond is eventually gonna be
turned back into marsh, they're gonna break down
one of the levees out there and the bay is gonna come
rushing right back in. And this will probably all
be covered in hybrid spartina unless Toby and Jen can figure that out.
It sounds a lot like those people just don't comprehend how nature works?
The hybridised grass is a temporary thing. Once it captures enough nutrients in to the soil, helping repair it in the process, other plants will be able to grow.
Maybe the "conservationists" should focus more on not destroying the planet for profit, rather than blaming the planet for showing symptoms as a result of being destroyed for profit.
This is a crux for the entire sub. I tend to line up with the let invasives find their niche. especially when human action created the empty niche in the first place. But I understand bio-diversity is important.
Submission statement? Lack of clickbait title?