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Purple loosestrife and MA legislation



At 03:48 AM 7/22/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 23:27:50 -0400
>From: krandall at world_std.com
>Subject: Purple loosestrife and MA legislation
>
>Someone wrote:
>
>>>Richard, have you noticed those sheets of beautiful purple flowers that
>>>cover just about every damp sunny surface in late summer?  
>>>
>>>I used to live not too far from where you do now, and I remember seeing
>>>the first small patches of purple loosestrife in roadside ditches and 
>>>edges of swamps.  The spread of this plant over the past 20 years has been
>>>explosive and appalling.
>
>Richard Sexton wrote:
>
>>Yeah, there's bloody great fields of it here now. It's stunninly beautiful.
>>
>>I guess I should be upset that it's displacing native plants and allegedly
>>animals, but I gotta tell ya, you can only take so many green fields.
>
>I was going to sit down to write a long and well documented response to
>Richard's post of yestday when I read this.  It's obviously not worth my
>effort.  All I can say is pity Canada if this is representative of the
>level of environmental awareness north of the border.  Because we in MA
>live in an area that has been heavily populated (and mis-managed) for
>longer than almost any other area of the new world, we can no longer afford
>the luxury of playing ostrich in the face of man's stupidity.  

Oh don't get all bent Karen. Most of the pollution coming into Canadaian
water and air comes from the US, something like 80% of it. 

Non native plants are a fact of life. Orange day lillies, white "ceder"
and so forth. Corn is non native, potatoes, hostas, you name it.

Have a look at a map. Canada is an immesnly huge country, much larger
then the us, and with about a tenth of the population.

Fix your pollution problems and the rest will fall in line. Until that
happens, which plants grow here are the least of our worries.




--
Richard J. Sexton
richard at aquaria_net
Bannockburn, Ontario, Canada                       +1 (613) 473 1719