Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism show. Each episode begins with a question submitted by our audience. Today, a question from Ashley Wojnarowski and Mike Mezzacapo of Pomfret:
“What invasive species has done the most damage to Vermont’s ecosystem?”
Reporter Josh Crane searches for answers and falls into the “bottomless pit” of invasive species management — and gets up close and personal with one of Vermont’s most fragile ecosystems.
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Stomp the bugs
Josh Crane: From Vermont Public, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
Benjamin Schwartz finds creative inspiration everywhere.
Benjamin Schwartz: Anytime something just grabs my attention, triggers a little hunch or something, I will write down— I have a notes app on my phone that if you looked at it, it would look like the ramblings of an insane person.
Josh Crane: He often turns these ramblings into cartoons for the New Yorker.
Benjamin Schwartz: Anything from day-to-day life, where, you know, you go, “Oh, maybe there's something there.”
Josh Crane: And there was “something there” on one particular day about a year ago. He was running errands with his kids near their home in Westchester, New York. And they were walking down the sidewalk, when, all of a sudden, they encountered a bug.
Benjamin Schwartz: You know, we saw a lanternfly, and my, one of my kids just stomped on it. There was something so off-putting about, like, the, the glee of, of killing this, this little thing.
Josh Crane: It wasn’t that Benjamin was put off by the act of his kids squishing this bug. It wasn’t even just the shameless delight his children took in splattering the guts of this tiny insect all over the sidewalk.
It was why his kids targeted this bug. This wasn’t some spontaneous act of bug-slaughter. This was premeditated.
Benjamin Schwartz: They'd been told by all the adults around them: “You see one of these things, you kill ’em.”
Josh Crane: “These things” are spotted lanternflies, an invasive pest first seen in the United States in 2014, in Pennsylvania. There have been years when the lanternfly has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to crops and hardwood trees in Pennsylvania alone. They haven’t really reached Vermont yet, but officials here are on high alert. They’ve spread to a handful of other nearby states, like New York.
News report/Nina Pineda: The State Department of Agriculture is encouraging citizens to go on search and destroy missions. If you see a spotted lanternfly, like this one here, kill it.
Josh Crane: Kill it — by stomping on it.
So, on that fateful day last year, out running errands, Benjamin the cartoonist watched as his kids executed their public service — by executing the lanternfly in their path. And he couldn’t shake it.
Benjamin Schwartz: So a day later, I was talking to someone about how something makes me a little queasy about that. “I don’t think I can kill these things. I know, I know it's apparently the moral thing to do, the socially responsible thing to do, but I don't want to kill these things.” And they said, you know, “But they're, they're an invasive species.” And just in the moment, I said, “Yeah, so are we.” And then, as I said it, I realized that actually, yeah, I think that's my angle on this.
Josh Crane: A New Yorker cartoon soon followed. It shows a spotted lanternfly on a stage, giving a presentation to an audience of other lanternflies, and it's pointing to a slide of a human. The caption is from the fly's point of view. And it says:
Benjamin Schwartz: “They're an invasive species that will destroy the environment if left unchecked.”
I'm just putting myself in the shoes of a lanternfly. And it may be damaging environments, but it's also just doing what it thinks it's supposed to be doing, or what comes naturally to it. And so there's a guilt to it, but also a sympathy.
Josh Crane: Actually doing what Benjamin did — putting ourselves in the proverbial shoes of a lanternfly or any other invasive pest, trying to see things from their point of view — admittedly, it feels kinda goofy. Like something you might laugh about in a magazine.
But it also helps us see the real culprit. It forces us to look in the mirror, instead of blaming species that are just doing what they were designed to do.
That said: looking in the mirror can be really hard.
Josh Crane: I feel overwhelmed just looking at it…
Josh Crane: Once I started going down the invasive species reporting rabbit hole, things got dark pretty quickly.
Josh Crane: It’s disturbing and also, like — woah.
Emilie Inoue: There is no winning to be had.
Matt “Beagle” Bourgault: It's just kind of a bummer.
Grace Glynn: Frustration, grief, anger.
Mike Bald: It's a mental health thing.
Emilie Inoue: You have that contraction suddenly, like, “Oh, god.”
Curt Lindberg: It’s kind of daunting.
Bob Popp: It's a bottomless pit.
Brave Little Babes
Josh Crane: The journey into this bottomless pit began on a steamy summer evening at a gathering of Brave Little State fans at Babe’s Bar in Bethel.
Josh Crane: Hello and welcome to “Brave Little Babes”…
Josh Crane: Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism show. And we usually ask you to submit questions and vote for the topics of future episodes, online. But for this one, we met up in person to collect questions and vote, right then and there — a Brave Little State first.
It was a high-tech operation involving index cards and a bulletin board. And we tallied final votes using a tried-and-true method of any democratic voting process — the cheer meter.
Josh Crane: And that is how we ended up here.
Josh Crane: What invasive species has done the most damage to Vermont’s ecosystem?
(loud cheering)
Josh Crane: I mean, that sounded like the winner to me.
Josh Crane: Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and proud member of the NPR Network. Welcome.
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‘A rogue’s gallery’
Josh Crane: Real quick: Invasive species are things like plants, animals, fungi that get dropped into new environments and, in scientific terms, wreak havoc.
Not all non-native species in Vermont are invasive. Plenty of them just sort of mind their own business — like, say, Vermont’s very own state flower, the red clover.
Non-native species are considered invasive when they start minding everyone else’s business too.
Without things like natural predators to keep them in check, invasive species can cause all sorts of damage. They crowd out native plants and animals. Some wipe out entire species. While Others pose a threat to human health. Meanwhile, species like the pesky spotted lanternfly are a scourge on entire industries, like farming and tourism.
But which invasive species has caused the most damage in Vermont? Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer.
The short answer?
Emilie Inoue: Humans were absolutely the most invasive species to come and alter the habitat of what we know of, you know, Vermont as today.
Josh Crane: That’s Emilie Inoue with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.
There are a lot of things we humans do as a species that disturb the environment. Among them is that we’ve actually brought a lot of other invasive species to Vermont, ourselves.
Emilie Inoue: It's a trend that's been happening for a very long time. At this point, it's kind of, it's kind of like a Pandora's Box.
Josh Crane: Turns out, we love to display exotic plants in our gardens — only, they don’t always stay in our gardens. We bring over new species that we hope will add to our ecosystems, but that end up disrupting them. And we bring over many other invasive species accidentally — like on the bottoms of boats, and even on the soles of our shoes.
Emilie and many others I spoke to who work in this field actually think that the word “invasive” is making it harder for us to understand our role in this. “Invasive” suggests that these species have intentionally invaded, that they’re somehow plotting against the environment and native species.
Emilie Inoue: In reality, it distances us and separates humans from being the ones who deserve to to be held responsible, or be, at least be held accountable.
Josh Crane: Emilie says the Agency of Agriculture and other environmental groups in Vermont are currently considering adopting words like “introduced” more officially when referring to invasive species — in large part to address this.
But of all the species we’re responsible for introducing to Vermont, there’s some debate over which one has been most damaging. And that’s where the answer to today’s question gets a little bit longer.
Mike Bald: It's impossible to answer it, because you're going to get 100 different answers.
Grace Glynn: So it really depends on the context.
Bob Popp: I feel like you're asking me to name, like, public enemy number one or something. I mean, it's kind of a rogue’s gallery.
Josh Crane: A rogue’s gallery. If we look back to the 1800s , rogue number one could be: the spongy moth, which escaped from a lab in Massachusetts in the 1860s and has long been destructive to native trees in Vermont.
Or, consider the common starling — birds brought to this continent in the late 1800s.
Emilie Inoue: A lot of people have issues with those and they were introduced.
Josh Crane: Emilie Inoue again, with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. She also identifies another possibility — a culprit of the 1900s.
Emilie Inoue: Ah let's see. Tere's Dutch Elm Disease, wiped out all the elms.
Josh Crane: In the 1900s, you could also point to a fungus known as chestnut blight, first spotted at the Bronx Zoo. It wiped out pretty much all mature American chestnut trees — formerly the dominant hardwood tree in eastern forests.
One of the major invasive species active in Vermont today is the Emerald Ash Borer — a beetle that’s currently destroying a large number of Vermont ash trees.
There’s one more answer here, and I sort of saved the best — or, depending on your perspective, worst — for last. This is the invasive species Vermont experts brought up more than any other.
Mike Bald: And if pressed on it, I would probably say knotweed is in the conversation as the one having the greatest impact in the state.
Grace Glynn: Knotweed is the plant that comes to mind when I hear that question.
Bob Popp: Knotweed along rivers and streams, that would probably be the worst.
Knotweed, examined
Josh Crane: Check, check. What a beautiful day.
Josh Crane: A beautiful day to see some knotweed. I’m at the home of Ashley Wojnarowski and Mike Mezzacapo, who asked today’s winning question.
They live in Pomfret. And they lead me past their gardens, towards a dense hedgerow on the banks of a brook. That’s because the source of their curiosity? It’s the invasive species in their backyard.
Mike Mezzacapo: This is Mill Brook that runs through our property here. And either side, because the stream bank is quite steep, um, the knotweed has sort of taken over.
Josh Crane: This is all knotweed right here?
Mike Mezzacapo: This is all knotweed, yep.
Josh Crane: It’s huge!
Mike Mezzacapo: It is. I would say, eight, nine feet tall in some places.
Josh Crane: It looks like 50 yards of it or something.
Josh Crane: Knotweed is a plant in the buckwheat family, along with things like rhubarb and sorrel. There are lots of different types of knotweed, some of which are native to Vermont, and totally benign. But the most well-known kind is the invasive kind: Reynoutria japonica, or Japanese knotweed.
It’s a major threat not only here, but all over North America and Europe. If you’re selling a home in the UK, for instance, and there’s knotweed on your property, you’re mandated to disclose it. It's been known to grow through cracks in a building’s foundation, and even burst through pavement. It’s often included on lists of the quote-unquote “worst” invasive species in the world.
When Ashley and Mike moved into their house, knotweed had already taken root in their yard. And its footprint has only grown since then.
Ashley Wojnarowski: I don't want to just talk smack about it, but it definitely has taken over our property, and we have noticed it kind of slowly over the years, encroaching more and more towards our house, away from the water. We do feel at a little bit of a loss about it.
Josh Crane: It’s not actually clear exactly how or when Japanese knotweed arrived in Vermont. We know it was more than 100 years ago. And we know that early on, Vermonters planted it intentionally, as a new form of erosion control, since it grows so well on steep culverts and streambanks.
The oldest passing reference to the plant in the Vermont newspaper archive is in a 1903 edition of the St. Johnsbury Republican. In 1943, we get this description, in a column called “The Country Woman” by Frances Stockwell Lovell.
Betty Smith: Japanese knotweed, which we call “inch-a-day,” because it grows that way!
Josh Crane: This is my colleague reading as The Country Woman.
Betty Smith: It is of no use to plan on a neat little hedge behind the wood pile! In two years it is a forest that stretches out lascivious fingers for the raspberries that were supposed to be beyond its greedy reach! Chopping it out is a year ‘round job, but now we can eat it! And the family had better like it!”
Josh Crane: The Country Woman had no idea what was coming.
Bob Popp: When I started in this position, 33 years ago — I mean, it occurred in Vermont, but nothing to the extent it did now.
Josh Crane: This is Bob Popp. He retired last year after a long stint as the Vermont state botanist. And he says there was a moment when knotweed transformed from just another annoying weed to arguably the most destructive invasive species in the entire state: Tropical Storm Irene.
Bob Popp: New populations were cropping up everywhere. You'd go out along rivers and you'd see little plants coming up, and you would dig down,and you'd see a little, you know, a little piece of rhizome. And, you know, obviously, it’d just spread downstream.
Josh Crane: Rhizomes are underground stems that grow horizontally — like, parallel to the soil’s surface. They can send new roots downward and new shoots upward. And Japanese knotweed rhizomes are really key to why this plant is so hard to deal with. If you try to mow or cut it in one place, the rhizomes will probably just send new shoots up somewhere else.
And to make matters even worse, these rhizomes don’t bind well to the soil. So instead of helping with erosion control, like people thought it might, it actually does the opposite.
Bob Popp: So when a flood comes through, it rips up the plant, you know, the, scours the soils, tears up the roots and these rhizomes. So you get all these new populations showing up everywhere.
Josh Crane: And here’s the coup de grâce: Any tiny piece of rhizome that gets caught up in fill or gravel during road work, or swept away and deposited downstream during a storm — it can ultimately grow sideways out to 50 or 60 feet. That’s plenty of distance for knotweed to suddenly pop up on the opposite side of a four-lane highway, or quickly overtake an entire watershed.
None of this was lost on Bob in the aftermath of Irene. In a local newspaper article at the time, he described “the catastrophic potential of knotweed being everywhere.” He also referenced “a window of opportunity to try to eradicate new infestations” before the knotweed became too established.
He got some funding for this, and also tried to rally volunteers. But it wasn’t enough.
Bob Popp: Well, maybe I was being overly optimistic, I guess. (laughter) I tend to be optimistic.
Josh Crane: Vermont missed its window of opportunity. And now, knotweed is a permanent Vermont resident. One with a lot of real estate. And, with every major flooding event, a growing riverfront empire.
Mad River Knotweed
Josh Crane: And this is all knotweed, right?
Curt Lindberg: That's all knotweed.
Josh Crane: I mean…
Curt Lindberg: I know. (laughter) It’s kind of daunting…
Josh Crane: I’m in one of the knotweed-iest places in Vermont: the Mad River Valley, home of The Mad River Valley Knotweed Project. It’s one of the longest-running efforts to try and control knotweed in the state.
Curt Lindberg: Ah, the initial work, I think, started about seven years ago.
Josh Crane: Curt Lindberg is the chair of the Waitsfield Conservation Commission. He collaborates with his counterparts in Warren and Fayston to lead this project. And he says their goal is not to completely remove knotweed.
Curt Lindberg: That's not possible.
Josh Crane: Rather, it’s to rein it in in high priority sites: like at the headwaters of the Mad River, to minimize downstream spread.
Over the past seven years, Curt and his team have tested a bunch of different organic methods for managing knotweed, like cutting it and then smothering it with a tarp. Or digging up the roots followed by regular mowing.
Curt Lindberg: We're not really sure yet which of these methods work best.
Josh Crane: The newest experiment started this past summer:
Marybeth Herbert: Hi goats. Hi goats!
Josh Crane: Goats.
Marybeth Herbert: Where are we? I see one.
(goat bleating)
Josh Crane: The goats have been grazing the same few fields of knotweed all summer long. When I arrive, there’s definitely still knotweed around, but it’s really patchy.
Josh Crane: So I'm, I'm watching them actively eating knotweed. They're just, they seem thrilled.
Josh Crane: The goatherder is Marybeth Herbert. She says this is a first-of-its-kind experiment in the state.
Josh Crane: These goats are kind of blazing the trail for other goats.
Marybeth Herbert: Yeah. I don't know what that makes me, but …
Josh Crane: Blazing the trail for other goatherders.
Josh Crane: There’s a refrain I heard a lot while reporting for this episode: When you’re trying to control invasive species, it’s important to define what success looks like. At first, I thought this was just a polite way to say that we’ll never be able to get rid of knotweed in Vermont — so, lower your expectations.
But then I learned I’d been thinking about success all backwards. My moment of clarity was when Emilie Inoue with the Agency of Ag pointed me towards, of all things:
Emilie Inoue: The, Star Wars The Last Jedi.
Josh Crane: Not exactly a seminal biology text. But it is memorable.
Emilie Inoue: And it’s when Rose is, is dying.
Josh Crane: Rose, a mechanic for The Resistance who says this right before she dies:
Rose Tico: That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.
Josh Crane: Saving what we love. That’s after the break.
‘It would be an extinction event’
Josh Crane: Does your job frequently require you to scramble down sketchy embankments?
Grace Glynn: Yeah. A lot of embankments. I like roadside botany too. So I end up pulling over in precarious places a lot.
Josh Crane: I’m in the car with Grace Glynn, the current Vermont state botanist.
Josh Crane: You need one of those bumper stickers that says, like, “Stops frequently,” or something.
Grace Glynn: Yeah. Brakes for—
Josh Crane: Brakes for —-
Grace Glynn: Rare plants.
Josh Crane: Rare plants (laughter)
Josh Crane: Grace is going to help me gain more of an appreciation for the “why.” Why do people try to manage invasive species at all? For her, it’s all about what we lose if we don’t.
She’s taking me to one of the region’s most fragile ecosystems. So fragile that I’m not allowed to tell you its exact location.
Grace Glynn: I’m trying to be pretty secretive about this one.
Josh Crane: What I can say is that it’s on the Connecticut River, right on the Vermont-New Hampshire border. There is no path to get there. It’s so unmarked that Grace actually drove right by it, and we had to circle back about 100 yards to find it.
Grace Glynn: OK, we're finally here. Let's find a good spot.
Josh Crane: OK. Just for people who can't see where we are, we are on the side of a highway with no discernible landmark. (laughter) So we are just hopping—
Grace Glynn: That's why I drove by it. I can never remember.
Josh Crane: We’re just hopping a guardrail right now.
Grace Glynn: Yeah, and there’s a good spot to jump.
You’d think there’d be a path from how often we’ve come down here. (bushwhacking sounds)
Josh Crane: I know.
Josh Crane: After stumbling through some really dense brush, we emerge in the sunshine, on a rocky ledge on the shore of Connecticut River.
Josh Crane: Can you see milk-vetch from here?
Grace Glynn: No, we need to go a little closer.
Josh Crane: Jesup’s milk-vetch.
Grace Glynn: The scientific name is Astragalus robbinsii. Variety jesupii.
Josh Crane: Not an invasive species. It’s a native pea plant. And there are only three sites in the entire world where it occurs naturally: this one, and two others nearby, also on the Connecticut.
Grace Glynn: And that's why we put so much energy into conservation of this.
Josh Crane: Grace says they’ve been monitoring milk-vetch at this site for over 100 years.
Grace Glynn: Oh! Is that one? Yeah, here’s one.
Josh Crane: It’s tiny!
Grace Glynn: (laughter) Oh, I was gonna say it’s pretty big.
Josh Crane: Visually, there’s nothing special about the milk-vetch. At least, not to my untrained eye. It’s a tiny, weed-looking thing. And, just being honest, the name “milk-vetch” isn’t doing it any favors.
Josh Crane: It's not the most flattering name. (laughter) Kind of sounds like someone with a dairy allergy just ate a milkshake or something.
Grace Glynn: (laughter) Oh, that's unfortunate. I'll never think of it the same way.
Josh Crane: So— And you said it's a pea?
Grace Glynn: Yeah, it’s in the pea family.
Josh Crane: Have you eaten the pea?
Grace Glynn: No that would be a violation of federal law. (laughter)
Josh Crane: OK. I had to ask.
Josh Crane: Jesup’s milk-vetch is one of just three federally endangered plant species in Vermont. And one of the biggest threats to this little pea plant?
Grace Glynn: Knotweed.
Josh Crane: That’s knotweed?
Grace Glynn: Yeah.
Josh Crane: It’s tiny.
Grace Glynn: Yeah.
Josh Crane: It doesn’t look anything like the imposing stands I saw at Ashley and Mike’s house, or in the Mad River Valley. This is a baby.
Grace Glynn: And it — look — only needs a tiny little bit of soil, this pocket in the ledge to get going.
Josh Crane: Jeez.
Grave Glynn: Look at those rhizomes.
Josh Crane: Grace says that finding knotweed and other invasives here can feel kind of demoralizing. And they’re not the only danger on this riverbank.
Grace Glynn: It is frustrating to see the populations get knocked back so much. Two years of successive extreme flood events. All we can do is take it year by year.
Josh Crane: Grace counts fewer than 20 total milk-vetch plants at this site. It’s a precarious situation. But it’s better off, thanks to Grace and her team. The invasive species aren't crowding out the milk-vetch. And there are other native species around, too.
Grace Glynn: Our actions here could be the difference between having this plant in Vermont and not having it.
Josh Crane: I mean, and this would be losing it potentially from the world, right?
Grace Glynn: Yeah. It would be an extinction event. And that's what's at stake.
Grace Glynn: I love the feeling of seeing things that a lot of people walk by. There's just something really satisfying about paying close attention to tiny things.
A lot of people see what we call the “green blur” when they look out at the landscape, where it's sort of like, “Oh, there's the scenery.” And when you start to learn plants, you realize that scenery is a myth. It's made up of all of these tiny little things, this amazing diversity of plants that, when you start to see them — you see them once, then you start seeing them everywhere — you refine your vision, and it completely changes the way you see the world. And there's something addicting about that. Just opens your eyes again and again.
_
‘Closer, closer, closer’
Josh Crane: There’s a flipside to this. Once you open your eyes, you start to notice everything we’ve lost.
Aaron Marcus: I think one thing you're talking about, also, is grief.
Josh Crane: Aaron Marcus is a botanist and wetland scientist who used to work for Fish & Wildlife. And grief — for all the flora and fauna we’ve already lost here in Vermont — it was not on my emotional bingo card for this episode.
But I think Aaron has a point. I mean, while reporting this story, I found myself getting emotional about all the knotweed I was noticing — on my road, in my neighbor’s yard.
Aaron Marcus: Let's all feel our collective grief, that's really real. And I think it's hard for a lot of us, myself definitely included, to accept change. It’s hard for us to let change in that’s happening.
Josh Crane: Aaron says the trick is to feel our grief — but also, to not get stuck in the past.
Aaron Marcus: If we're funneling our grief into catastrophizing, I'm actually not sure that it's all that effective. I feel like sometimes we get in this loop of looking back at changes that have already happened, when most of the changes with invasive species that we're going to see in our lifetimes haven't happened yet.
Josh Crane: Catch that? Most of the invasive species that will impact Vermont haven’t even arrived yet. And while that’s kind of a terrifying prospect, Aaron says it also presents an opportunity. It’s much easier to prevent invasive species from arriving, or to remove those that arrived recently, rather than ones that have been here for a long time.
There was a success story here just last fall. A Charlotte resident found a weird-looking plant behind his house and after doing some digging, realized it’s mile-a-minute plant — the name sort of says it all. It’s an invasive species in the same family as knotweed. This was the first time it had ever been seen in Vermont. The finding reached our state botanist, Grace Glynn.
Grace Glynn: And it was so great because they had caught it so early that we were able to just bag everything up in two stuffed contractor bags, left the bags out in the sun for a while and then just put them in the landfill.
Josh Crane: Invasive species — or introduced species — are an endlessly complicated topic. It can feel overwhelming, kind of like a bottomless pit. There’s just so much we can’t undo. But Grace says the best way into the future is actually quite simple: Be present on the land. And notice things.
Grace Glynn: You know, we all know that we are part of the world and we've sort of left behind this binary where humans are separate. We know that now. It's 2024. But how do you actually practice that? I think one way is to learn the names of plants that are around you and start to notice them and touch them. I'm always telling my students: “Touch it, touch it, go.” I'm just pushing them towards things like, “Coser, closer, closer!”
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Credits
This episode was reported by Josh Crane. It was produced and edited by Sabine Poux and Burgess Brown. Angela Evancie is Brave Little State’s Executive Producer. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Mike Bald, Matt "Beagle" Bourgault, Betty Smith, Lexi Krupp, Abagael Giles, Corey Dockser, Charlie Nardozzi, Tim Parsons, Mary Walz, Mike Kiernan, Elise Schadler, Kim Jensen, Noah Hoffman, Evan Horne, David Moroney, Jay Herbert, Jack Lentz, Don Wenner, Virginia Barlow, Tony D’Amato, Markus Bradley, Mariano Rodriguez-Cabal, Noelia Barrios-Garcia, and Mary Holland.
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Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.
