The Dry Garden: Empathy for the underground
Posted on | November 4, 2011 | 1 Comment
To learn more about why poisoning gophers is to kill indiscriminately, click on this graphic by UCLA Environmental Studies student Christine Danner to be taken to the site Urban Carnivores.
Plant ecologist Paula Schiffman came to praise gophers when she packed a lecture last spring hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the California Native Plant Society. It was awkward for the Cal State Northridge professor, given that most of the audience filling a cold, no-frills Santa Monica meeting room had come to learn how to kill the animals.
The atmosphere only got colder as Schiffman’s live-and-let-live message began to sink in: Gophers were here before us, they are integral to our local ecology, and one of the most common ways that we kill them also can accidentally poison a whole host of other animals.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden’s “Detente with the gopher” in the Los Angeles Times.
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North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
November 9th, 2011 @ 9:16 am
So the gophers fill a similar ecological niche to the prairie dogs on the great plains? Only we no longer have the wolves to control their population or the buffalo to fertilize the soil. It was a brilliant system, when intact.
Sorry, I tried to leave this comment at LAT but they switched to FB comments. It made me log in, then wanted me to post it to .my. FB page, then it wanted to track all the articles I read… I just didn’t want to do that.