"Flytyer37" wrote in message
ups.com...
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs....02/1025/NEWS04
Fairly scary story.

I've been hearing a lot of references to this lately. Haven't investigated
it myself, so I don't know many details, but it's got a LOT of people very
nervous here. Interestingly though, they are not as nervous as they might
have been thirty or forty years ago. The never ending and ever accelerating
litany of new invasive exotic species, with its seeming inevitability, has
begun to have an effect exactly the opposite of what is to be
desired......people are becoming numb and indifferent.

Virtually every boat launch in Wisconsin is graced with a kiosk covered
photographs, warnings, and predictions of dire consequences (both
environmental and legal) for failure to adhere to a long list of futile
preventive measures. Last weekend my friend, Jay, and I encountered (much
to my surprise and disgust) just such a billboard in a parking lot at what
our informant assured us was an unknown, secluded and secret spot on a
stream that no one knows about, tucked in to a deep and steep valley in the
coulee country in the southwest corner of the state, a place that any
reasonable person would suppose an invasive alien couldn't find in a million
years.

Well, there are no secrets.....certainly no secret spots.....no Zerzura.
While thrashing through the streamside brush (an activity also known to the
uninitiated as "fishing"), I was bitten repeatedly by what I quite naturally
assumed was black locust scrub and thus didn't even bother to look at
closely. Turns out, on taking another look at the signage, that I had in
fact been molested by European buckthorn which, to the best of my
recollection, I had never even heard of before, let alone been attacked by.

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang