Given the volume of invasive species and how quickly they’re encroaching by both land and sea, at some point you throw up your hands and cease keeping score …

The Little Stinking just started its third dunking in raw herbicide for some 250 known outbreaks of intrusive grass. Its banks still covered with faux bamboo they attempted to eradicate last year, and the sprayed green outlines of the erosion preventing brush CalTrans introduced to protect overpasses that wound up enveloping the native fauna instead.

Reminiscent of some of the disarray shown in some conservation organization’s trout plants, wherein they wad rainbows or browns where Cutthroats and Brookies live … only to Rotenone everything year’s later in an attempt to restore native stocks.

So many self inflicted wounds and botched attempts at eradication that you can’t help but wonder, “… if you persist on doing this why am I supposed to drop everything and express outrage over something else that’s entered the country unbidden? …”

The herbicide sprayed around the creek to control plants is done so with no regard for water quality, and the green silhouettes of invasives left on the ground by overspray is testimony to what’ll be on the large sign telling me  – were I pregnant I shouldn’t even be walking below the high water mark, let alone eat something from there.

It’s tough to imagine not doing anything about all of this, but as each government appointed czar tells me they’ve declared war on something smaller than me, I have to ask, “…is this to be a stand up fight or another bud hunt?”

Given the War on Drugs has been going for a couple of decades, and the effects are noticeable in most California neighborhoods. Before we had to walk to the street corner to score reefer – now the vendor is mid block, and a subsidiary of Wal-Mart.

… and with global warming in full swing and the Pristine slowly baking in slightly higher temperatures year after year, it really is no surprise that the Jewel of California, Lake Tahoe – issued yet another horrific finding, how they’ve discovered Smallmouth Bass in the lake.

That on the heels of finding almost everything else swimming in the slowly clouding SOB, including largemouth bass, invasive mussels, and Jimmy Hoffa.

Despite the Republican candidates insistence on clamping down on illegal aliens, I’m thinking most of the federal funding that’s aiding states in combating foreign biologics will be drying up soon. Victim of the trillions of dollars in cuts we’ll mandate as part of a balanced budget amendment or something similar.

Oddly enough a piece of me is beginning to think that may not be such a bad idea. We called ourselves “Native Sons” if we can trace our roots to the Revolutionary War, which at last count was only four or five generations from our current coddled flavor …

We may want to rethink all this costly suppression and just admit that anything we can’t eat to extinction is granted native status, making us and our declining environment all the hardier. All we’ll have to do is come to grips with Lahontan trout having ate all the Coelacanth, and what a shame that was.

We were always fighting symptoms rather than the problem anyways. The lack of a mid-Atlantic or mid-Pacific ballast purge ensures everything can get here quickly and with no ill effects, and with airline travel and pressurized cabins absent a placental barrier, it’s only a matter of time before each continent enjoys the same complement of “native” flora and fauna, thanks to the efficiency of the jet engine.