Emily D'Souza- Outside reading 5: "Neutral terminology to define invasive species"

 This piece is a journal article that was published in 2004, and it discusses invasive species and the problems with defining it. Everyone has heard of an invasive species, but just because a species is invasive in one ecosystem, doesn’t mean they are invasive in another. This is an important distinction to make, because people hear the term invasive or “alien”, and automatically assume that that species is bad. Granted, they do have environmental effects on their alien ecosystem, but they don’t have those same issues in another. They refer to these species in invasive stages rather than the species itself, and state that it “should refer to individual populations and not entire species.” They claim that it might be better to refer to them as “non-indigenous” so that the species don’t get a bad reputation as a whole. We have talked about invasive species and what they could do to the environment, and I also wrote my paper on the detrimental effects of these species, but I think that these authors concept relates to perspective. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but this semester I feel like perspectives play an important role, we discussed different perspectives like ecocentric or anthropogenic, and I think this also correlates. An invasive species isn’t necessarily a bad species, it just overtakes another environment and causes harm there, but they don’t cause that same harm in their native environments.