Walking the Berkshires

Healthier Mosquitoes, Healthier Kids: A New Weapon in the War on Malaria

The AP reports:

"Researchers have developed a malaria-resistant mosquito, a step that might one day help block the spread of an illness that has claimed millions of lives around the world."

Malaria is a scourge that kills nearly 3 million people worldwide every year, the vast majority of them in Africa and overwhelmingly children.  My wife got the falciparum strain while we were in Namibia and it nearly killed her. 

A team of researchers lead by Assistant Professor Jason Rasgon at Johns Hopkins University's Malaria Research Institute hopes to develop a transgenic mosquito that will resist malaria infection, would be less likely to transmit disease and more likely to out compete those that are carriers. 

"Working with the mouse form of malaria - not the human type - Rasgon's team was able to genetically engineer mosquitoes that were resistant to malaria.

Malaria infection does exact a toll on mosquitoes and in laboratory work they found that the resistant insects were able to out compete nonresistant mosquitoes.

Starting with the same number of resistant and nonresistant mosquitoes, they found that after nine generations the resistant type made up 70 percent of the population - raising the possibility of replacing regular mosquitoes with resistant ones that don't spread disease.

However, Rasgon stressed that in the lab work the insects were infected with a higher amount of the parasite than occurs in nature, and a larger proportion of the mosquitoes were infected.

"This was proof of principle," Rasgon said in a telephone interview. "The next step would be to work in a system more epidemiologically relevant" but still in the lab.

"We're not anywhere near a field release," he said. Now they need to turn their attention to working with human malaria and trying to engineer a mosquito resistant to that."

You can read more here, courtesy of Glenn Reynolds, and also here.

There may yet be unanticipated consequences of releasing a transgenic mosquito into the environment, as is often the case with aggressive, invasive species, but this would appear to be a situation where the benefits for human health should far outweigh the risk of intentionally introducing a super mosquito.

Bee Gone!

Pity the poor pollinator.  The BBC reports a collapse in honey bee colonies across the United States of unprecedented proportions.  Between 30% and 70% of commercially maintained bee boxes are simply empty.  The bees have gone.

"The crisis threatens numerous crops, from avocados to kiwis and California almonds - one of the most profitable in the US.

'I have never seen anything like it,' California beekeeper David Bradshaw, 50, told the New York Times.

'Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home...'

The investigators are exploring a range of possibilities to explain the losses, which they are calling 'colony collapse disorder'. These include viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying pesticides banned in some European countries to see if they are affecting the bees' innate ability to navigate their way back to their hives.

In some cases, bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. This could have lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill them are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many workers."

It is worth recalling that Western Honey Bee species found in America is actually native to Europe, Africa and Western Asia.  Native pollen bees, which do not produce honey in commercial quantities, are actually better pollinators as both the males and females pollinate the crop.    I have not yet seen research showing the same colony collapse disorder in the more than 3,500 native North American bee species, although many pollinating insects are under threat from pesticides and other stresses known to affect honey bees.  Another wrinkle in the story is the relationship between both native and non-native bees and invasive exotic plant species, some of which (tartarian honeysuckle, purple loosestrife) are used preferentially by certain bees as forage.  Some honey producers have expressed concern about efforts to control loosestrife - not that this invasive plant is in any great danger of eradication in any but the most localized and smallest of its infestations.

The economic consequences of a honey bee collapse for the production of important cash crops could be quite severe.  One has to think, however, that the reliance on a single, introduced species to provide the bulk of commercial pollination services would appear to be asking for this kind of crisis.  Just as monocultures of Elms fell like dominoes to Dutch Elm Disease, one can easily imagine the same thing at work with honey bees in North America. 

Carnivals of Sacred Cow Tippings

The Carnival of Bad History, 10th edition, is at Archy this week.  This deconstruction of cowboy beans is among its gems.

The Tangled Bank almost failed to appear in its biweekly slot, and a quick save by Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas got edition #65 to press on short notice.  In keeping with the theme of exposing sloppy scholarship and groundless assumptions, Respectful Insolence examines a case of academic misconduct in science , and I give vent to a bit of indignant spleen over the uncritical repetition of the claim that invasive species are the second leading cause of biodiversity decline after habitat loss.  Now before you go braiding your green nooses for my neck - of kudzu, no doubt - know that I firmly believe they are significant factors - particularly invasive animals, pests and pathogens - but get sick of exaggerated versions of this statement that have gotten really out of hand as too many folks repeat it dogmatically and without attribution.  So a bit of a plant rant, but offered for your consideration.

Colored Judgments: The World Through Multiflora Rose-Tinted Glasses.

Ah, the colors of Fall.  The brilliant scarlets and bright oranges of sugar maples.  The ambers and honey golds of hickory and ash. The warm matte colors of oaks in their ox-blood and russet array.  The quivering tamaracks with their needles of golden straw.

So much for the aesthetic of the native over story.  What lurks beneath I find repellent in equal measure. The lurid, brazen pink of burning bush.  The bilious yellow of shrub honeysuckle and the bloodshot, crusty eyes of bittersweet berries.  The rusty blood of barberry that sprawls through our woodlands.  The bleached mats of reed canary grass clogging our fens. The glossy green leaves and inky black berries of buckthorn.  The dead wings of Norway Maple seeds and their tar-spotted leaves.

Yes, it is all about values.  Learn to distinguish the invasive from the native and they become all your eyes can see.  On my morning drive to work at 45 miles per hour on a twisting rural road I easily spotted and identified all of the invasive plants named above, as well as Phragmites reed, the dry husks of purple loosestrife in the wetlands, and rosa multiflora overwhelming abandoned pastureland.  This late in the season, many invasive shrubs are the only splashes of color in the forest understory.  There are dramatic drifts of Euonymus alata var. compacta, the burning bush from which the voice of God has yet to speak, throughout the natural areas of the Housatonic Valley.  Yet in Connecticut, this invasive plant is not on the list of species prohibited for sale despite being listed by the CT Invasive Plants Council as one of the invasive plant species in the state.

Our neighbors in Massachusetts evaluated each species for invasiveness based on its documented behavior and biological attributes in the Commonwealth and made no exception for varieties, forms and cultivars of those plants deemed to be invasive unless they themselves had been through scientific evaluation that conclusively showed otherwise.  Politics and the economic clout of the Nursery and Landscaping lobby intervened on the way to legislation in CT, however, with Public Act 04-203 exempting those invasive species of importance to the horticultural industry from any ban on sale, importation or distribution.  There are barberry, glossy buckthorn and winged euonymus, readily available for your purchase and as uninterrupted vectors for the spread of seeds from your backyard to minimally managed habitats.  There is Norway maple, that malformed, allelopathic alien monstrosity, and reed canary grass.   Somehow Morrow's and tartarian honeysuckle made the ban, but these are hardly mainstays of landscaping anymore.  Meanwhile, the invasions we are already contending with dwarf the resources that have been brought to bear for prevention and control.  I have gathered gallon bucketfulls of burning bush seeds sprouting from the soil around the stumps of the parent plants in my backyard for 4 straight seasons.

In Massachusetts, the Nursery and Landscaping Industry leadership took a very different approach and was heavily committed to the collaborative and transparent assessment process developed for invasive plants in the Commonwealth.  They acknowledged the need for a meaningful response to those plants in their inventories that were determined to be invasive and worked for a three year phase out of banned plants that were economically significant while they and Massachusetts growers transitioned to a more diversified, non-invasive palette.  In stepping up on this issue, they have maintained both their integrity and their much-deserved status as green industry leaders.  Would that their counterparts in the Nutmeg State, the land of oh-so-steady-habits, had followed suit.

Stamps of Approval

I was recently honored to be selected by the Invasive Species Weblog as the winner of its monthly "Your Punny Title Here" contest.  True, there was an unusually limited candidate pool this month, the challenge put before us being fiendishly resistant to all attempts at linguistic levity.  My entry, "Seedy Soldiers", was the best I could muster to headline a post about an internal Canadian Armed Forces memo highly critical of what it deemed inadequate measures currently in place to prevent unintentional introduction of invasive plant material on tank treads and ammo pallets returning from overseas deployment, and I challenge you to do better. 

Along with the obvious accolades and bragging rights that accrue to me as this month's champion, my winnings included my choice of a range of weed-geek items and so I was pleased to find an envelope with my VT invasive aquatic plant prevention and Darwin's Posse bumper stickers in yesterday's mail.  However, Jennifer Foreman Orth, the proprietor of the ISW and a friend of Walking the Berkshires, thoughtfully included a bonus.  Having noted my recent post entitled "How I Came to Love Birds" and illustrated with ornithological stamps from my collection, she kindly sent on a wonderful selection of bird stamps from Africa, Latin America, The Caribbean, and Europe.  I am deeply touched, and it affords the opportunity for an encore of sorts of feathered friends and philately.

I was particularly glad to have several of my old Namibian acquaintances on that country's stamps.  The lilac-breasted roller (Coracias caudata) with its gorgeous hues and looping flight, so often darted down from the trees by our little house on the edge of the Grootberg to catch insects near the ground.  An older stamp, bearing the colonial name of Namibia in Afrikaans, displayed that splended strider of the savannah with thesix foot wingspan, the incomparable kori bustard (Arteotis kori).

And here was the red-buffalo weaver (Bubalornis niger), whose untidy nest of heavy sticks looks more like a squirrel's dray than the work of a weever high in the branches of the camelthorn trees, and also carmine bee-eaters (Merops nubicoides) as I so vividly remember them with their nesting holes in the clay. 

It seemed fitting that Jenn included a stamp depicting cattle egrets (Bubulcus ibis), as these are one of the very few birds with rapidly expanding populations to have naturalized in North America all on their own without human assistance.  They were actually blown by Atlantic storms across the sea from Africa to the Caribean in sufficient numbers to prosper and multiply, although I am not aware that they have displaced native species to the degree that they would be considered truly invasive.

Then there is this marvelous tom turkey, shown of a stamp from Romania, of all places.  I have a freind who raises heritage breeds of poultry, and he actually imports domesticated "wild" American turkeys from Europe, where they have been raised from stock originally procured during colonial times.  The artist has depicted this specimen with a noble brow and imposing manner, so that one almost can see what Ben Franklin must have seen in this bird to motivate him to nominate it as our national symbol instead of the carrion-gorging bald eagle we ultimately adopted.

If Franklin had been born a Namibian patriot instead of an American one, he might well have championed the helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris) as its national bird.  The bird has seldom looked better than in this Christmas stamp issued late in 1997 when we were last in Namibia and it would have been far more appropriate for this arid land that the African Fish Eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer) that was incongruously chosened as an emblem of Namibia.  Fish eagles are restricted to the few perrenial rivers in the extreme eastern tip of the country, whereas guineafowl are as thick as thieves along the roadways of the country, and if you should happen to whack a couple of them inadvertantly while driving through the bush, I can attest from personal experience that they can be field dressed and spit roasted to a turn on the handle of your car jack, a practical consideration nonetheless lost on the architects of Namibian nationalism.

My thanks once again to Jenn for her kindness.

Second Leading Cause: How a Runaway Idea became Invasive Species Dogma

One of the most commonly repeated assertions about introduced invasive/exotic species is that they are the second leading cause of biodiversity decline worldwide after habitat destruction.  It is clearly an idea that has captured the imaginations of those who strive to raise awareness of the invasives issue and build support for actions and policies which will help address its consequences. What disturbs me is not that invasives aren't a real problem worthy of attention - from my perspective they assuredly are - but instead that the claim itself has become canonical, an invasives cataclysm recited as dogma by believers in the true faith who willingly repeat it, often without attribution.  Its acceptance as fact simply because it has been said many times by various groups and authorities, rather than based on the measurable scientific data that should inform such a conclusion, is startling to say the least, and worrisome. 

Consider this random sample, plucked straight from the prevailing electronic media stream, of declarative derivations on this "second leading cause" theme:

"The second biggest threat to Connecticut's natural habitats is invasion by alien plants and animals (behind loss of habitat to sprawling land development.)" - Eastern Connecticut Forest Landowners Association

"the second greatest threat to the 500+ endangered & threatened plant species in Florida is adverse effects from invasive exotic plants (the greatest threat is direct habitat destruction via population growth, urban sprawl, etc.). " Florida Invasive Pest Plant Council

"Ecologists believe that biological invasions are second only to habitat destruction as a threat to biodiversity."  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia

"In the past 25 years, exotic invasive species has risen from the 6th to the 2nd threat to biodiversity, second only to habitat destruction." -Great Lakes United

"The World Conservation Union has identified invasive alien species as the second most significant threat to biodiversity, after habitat loss."  Alberta Invasive Plant Council

"The renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has claimed that the introduction of alien species is second only to habitat destruction as the leading cause of extinctions worldwide." Discover Magazine

There is remarkable consensus in the environmental community that these unsubstantiated statements should be accepted as fact, but startling vagueness as to their source material and originators.  Those versions that are actually attributed to someone, not simply repeated as mantra, are often themselves mere repetitions, reinforced with the added weight and authority of those who repeat them.  Thus the USDA or The Nature Conservancy declares invasive species to be the second greatest threat and becomes the cited authority by a local Exotic Pest Council or waterhsed group in its publications and pronouncements on the subject. There is no objective basis for evaluating such claims taken at face value or their implications if substantiated.  At issue is the misrepresentation and exaggeration of scientific data though careless repetition and popular imagination.  This is very shaky ground on an issue where we cannot afford sloppy science. 

So where did this idea originate, and what is the basis for its conclusions?  Apparently it was first proposed in The Diversity of Life (1992) by no less authority than biologist and Harvard Professor E O Wilson, who has compellingly addressed issues of biodiversity and the anthropogenic factors accelerating global extinctions.  According to a 2003 letter by two Arizona State Professors, published in Science Magazine, the basis of Wilson's reasoning on the biodiversity impacts of invasive species is "a vast intuitive extrapolation from unpublished data about North American fishes."  The authors contend that the idea's emotional appeal allowed it to proliferate "without rigorous quantitative support."

Wilson is concerned with biodiversity decline, and places invasive species after habitat destruction as the leading cause worldwide.  So far, so good, assuming you have read his work and accept the evidence Wilson marshalls in support of his argument.  Most of us do not read all the primary source material that informs what we accept as true, but scientists should be concerned with documentation and the assumptions behind hypotheses.   

With that admonition and taken at the surface level, this is still a compelling idea.  The second leading cause of anything must be, by implication, highly significant.  Yet according to Daniel Simberloff, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee who writes in the March-April, 2002 edition of  The American Scientist, "habitat destruction contributes to the threat to 85 percent of all imperiled and federally listed species in the United States, and contributes similarly to the threat to imperiled birds alone."  If true, then at least in the United States invasive species are a far distant second leading cause of rare species decline.   

There is also a tendency for those who repeat Wilson's statement to substitute "plants" for "species" when speaking of leading causes of biodiversity decline.  In fact, I am unaware that there is strong evidence of even a single rare species that has gone extinct from causes attributed primarily to invasive plants: invasive animals and pests and pathogens have caused extinctions, certainly, but not plants so far as I know.  Invasive plants are a legitimate concern with extensive environmental, economic and cultural impacts that are worth developing strategies to address, but declaring them the second leading threat to rare species is just not supported by the available evidence.

E O Wilson has written since then that "Extinction by habitat destruction is like death in an automobile accident: easy to see and assess. Extinction by the invasion of exotic species is like death by disease: gradual, insidious, requiring scientific methods to diagnose."  I am in complete accord with this conclusion. We do need better measures and better data informing our understanding of the behavior and impacts of invasive species.  We also need better standards for declarations of scientific fact.  No matter how compelling it may be to repeat and how it fires the imagination, "the second leading cause" theme is just a meaningless mantra without them.

Drops in the Bucket: USDA Funds Announced for Invasives Research

The Program of Research on the Economics of Invasive Species Management (PREISM), administered by USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) has awarded $1.1 million in research grants to seven universities to study the economic implications of preventing, controlling, or eradicating invasive pests and diseases. Research priorities tend toward threats from introduced pests and pathogens to the agricultural and forestry sectors where economic impacts are more readily quantified than quantifying impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity. 

Compared to the economic impacts of invasive organisms like avian bird flue and hoof and mouth disease, the costs associated with these very modest grants are small indeed, but the twin grails of invasive species control are effective mechanisms for early-detection/rapid response and the development of selective forms of biocontrol.  Several of the grants focus on cost/benefit studies and evaluation of support systems for ER/RD, which are about the only hope for holding the line against rapidly expanding invasive pests like emerald ash borer or pathogens like sudden oak death.  Some invasive species experts acknowledge that for the next decade at least, containment is the only option for some pathogens until research and development produces effective biocontrols.  There is an exponential rise in cost of control the more time elapses between a new invasion and its detection and between detection and response. Given the scale and scope of the problem - it is a matter of homeland security, after all - the level of investment by the Federal government in these grants is well below what the problem requires. Then again, any level of federal investment is worth encouraging.

CWCID: Environmental Valuation

A Blast of Hot Air

Former director of the US National Park Service Roger Kennedy had a provocative Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on Tuesday about building in areas prone to wildfires.  Kennedy advocates withholding subsidies for new home construction and infrastructure in fire prone locales and the creation of a National Flame Zone Atlas detailing relative exposure to fire.

"The mere existence of a National Flame Zone Atlas would drive home two truths: that wildfire is a fact of life and that the moral and political imperative before us is not just adapting to wildfire, but reducing the number of people going uninformed into danger. Fire, like flood, teaches political lessons about costly taxpayer subsidies that encourage building in danger zones. We need to stop encouraging people to build houses where houses don’t belong."

The primary charge of our nation's firefighting infrastructure is to protect human life and property.  Kennedy asserts that we waste more than $1 billion in fire suppression in fire prone areas where our lending practices and zoning regulations have enabled new development.  While at pains to place the blame on a system that provides little incentive “to mitigate fire risks, such as requiring homeowners to use fire-resistant materials and landscaping”, and on "the federal government, which endorses indiscriminate acceptance of fire risk by subsidizing it indiscriminately", Roger Kennedy's libertarian solution comes across as an insensitive and incomplete response to a complex problem with both ecological and social dimensions. 

Roger Kennedy is a member of the board of directors of The Forest Guild, a progressive organization of conservation-minded foresters and allied professionals -myself included - about which I have written here and here.  I've been out on the woods with him and respect his scholarship on many levels.  Nonetheless, I have to say this Op-Ed piece is more a blast of hot air than a breath of fresh wind.

Should those of us living in coastal communities be denied subsidized mortgages because we are more vulnerable to tropical storms and sea-level rise caused by global warming?  How about those farming in frost-prone areas? Since the majority of Americans - including Kennedy - live in coastal counties and we are rapidly losing our agricultural land base in many parts of the country, there is unlikely to be political support for such tactics.  Yet Kennedy endorses just such measures for those living in fire-prone areas in western states with rapidly expanding populations. 

These lands burn not only because their native vegetation is often fire dependent but also because of factors including past fire suppression that has allowed a massive build up of available fuel, invasive species like cheat grass that are altering natural fire regimes and spreading hot fires faster and more frequently in affected systems, and introduced pests and pathogens like bark beetle that have decimated certain forest species and increased the risk of massive wildfires.  The severity and scope of wildfire today is far different from only a few decades ago, and while more people now live in affected areas, they are facing a very different level of threat under these altered conditions. 

It is not only those who build new homes in fire-prone areas who are at risk.  Ranchers and farmers who have been on the land for generations have seen devastating wildfires destroy their herds and threaten their livelihoods from Texas to Montana.  This link shows large wildfires across much of the eastern half of Texas. Is Kennedy suggesting that folks affected by these blazes also be denied assistance and told they were better off moving out of the area?

It "burns" some ecologists that people are building new residences in areas that have natural fire regimes, and there are very legitimate concerns about the wisdom of this practice.  People certainly need to make informed choices about where and how they build.  What about those without a choice, like the poorer residents of flood prone New Orleans?  People live in marginal areas for more reasons than privacy and privilege.  Unless we wish to depopulate large areas of the west and southeast, we will need a suite of equitable and effective strategies to address these problems, not just the rather draconian response that Kennedy proposes.

"Barberrians" at Gettysburg: An Invasive Species Postscript

Last week I posted here on the impacts of invasive species on our cultural landscapes, and in particular of how Japanese barberry managed to find its way into acclaimed artist and historian Don Troiani's depiction of a pivotal moment at the Battle of Gettysburg - 12 years before its actual introduction into the US!  To say that I have been astonished and humbled by the amount of traffic this post has generated at Walking the Berkshires would be a severe understatement.

For those of you who wanted a clearer, larger image of the offending plants, I offer a detail of the lower right corner of Troiani's "Retreat by Recoil" where barberry's distinctive shrubby form and ovate leaves are readily recognizable.  You might also notice the Common mullein depicted just below and to the left of the horse with the "white sock" in the upper left of this detail image.  Mullein, while considered by some to be invasive,  was naturalized in this country long before Gettysburg and is therefore no anachronism. 

Troiani's depiction of the flora at the Trostle farm is faithful to what was growing there at the time he visited and researched his painting and one of the reasons I find his military art so compelling.  It is like those natural history exhibits at museums where the large, taxidermy specimens may have center stage but there is always a chipmunk somewhere in the scene or a chickadee perched on a twig to add context and depth.

Can You Spot the Anachronism?

The air is thick with power smoke and the heat of mid-afternoon.  McLaws' confederate division surges across into the Wheat Field, into the Peach Orchard, and drives the Union III Corps back into...dense thickets of Japanese barberry, where the charge collapses in a tangle of thorns.  Until a few years ago, if you stood at this historic part of the Gettysburg battlefield, you would have been hard pressed to imagine the landscape as it was on that day, because invasive species had dramatically altered its former farm fields and fence rows beyond recognition.

Invasive plants have many acknowledged environmental and economic impacts, but in historic places like Gettysburg they can also threaten our cultural heritage.

Consider this image, a painting by acclaimed Civil War historian and artist Don Troiani who is one of the great masters of military art and nearly fanatic about historic accuracy.  He does not dress his models in reproduction uniforms but in items from his vast collection of original clothing, weapons and accouterments.  He demands that his models have 19th century physiques and facial features (no reenactors with waists over 32 inches need apply).  He pores over historic photographs and visits the sites of the events he depicts to ensure that the perspectives and terrain are as close to what was there at the time as possible.

Yet for all this extraordinary attention to detail, Troiani has painted an anachronism in this marvelous scene entitled "Retreat by Recoil", which shows Bigelow's 9th Massachusetts Battery on the verge of being overrun by a brigade of howling Georgians.  There in the lower right corner, in among the field stone, is a spiky shrubby form that can only be Barberry.  Now Berberis vulgaris or common barberry was certainly introduced to North America prior to the Civil War, but because it harbored a wheat rust it was aggressively rooted out and fines were imposed in some states for those who allowed it to remain on their properties.  This scene is at the Trostle farm, not far from Gettysburg's bloody Wheat Field, and so it is safe to assume that Troiani painted what he saw at the site - Berberis thungbergii, or Japanese barberry.

The problem is, Japanese barberry was first introduced at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston in the mid- 1870s from seeds collected in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Gettysburg, you will recall, was fought on three days in July in 1863.  Troiani has painted an extremely realistic and accurate study of the men and uniforms of the period, but unwittingly, an invasive species has been introduced to the historic flora of the site before its time.

Only a Civil War buff and invasive species expert could have made this connection, perhaps, but that is what is so insidious about the cultural impacts of invasive species.  Without our being aware, they so insinuate themselves into our landscapes and waterways that we become accustomed to their presence, even forget that they are naturalized and not part of our native ecology.  The green crabs I hunted for under rocks at my grandparents' home in Buzzard's Bay are invasive, as are the meadows of Loosestrife in the Millbrook Marsh where I spent many a delightful childhood hour mucking about in swamps.  Gettysburg with barberry is not the historic landscape it seeks to preserve and robs us of our shared heritage.

It is very hard to remove vegetation and kill animals within National parks.  The mandate for historic preservation also encompasses protecting the entire flora and fauna of these places as well, and until the threat of invasive species was widely recognized it was difficult for land managers to get authority to control these plants on National park lands.  The current leadership at Gettysburg Military Park is committed to both ecological and historic reclamation and has done a tremendous job removing barberry and other invasive plants, as well as restoring the slopes of Little Round Top to their open condition at the time of the battlefield.  Now as one stands where the 140th and 146th NY (my gr-gr-step grandfather among them) pushed back the confederates from the summit, it is an open slope rather than the deep forest to which it had succeeded that lies in view. 

I believe these steps are tremendously important at a site that is meant to convey a static moment in time, and commend the park Service and leadership for following this policy.  Now, as Wofford and Barksdale and Kershaw and the rest press on against the wavering blue lines of memory, they are met as of old with bayonets of steel rather than the thorns of barberry.

update (7/7/226):  You can see a close up of the offending plant in a follow up post here.