Bashing The Great Green Invaders

This book describes the invasion of Washington’s marine waters by introduced giant Atlantic saltmarsh grasses and the decades-long successful State effort to eradicate them. The author, a retired faculty member from The Evergreen State College, recounts his participation with his students in this contest, focusing on the East Coast Spartina alterniflora grass invading Willapa Bay

The grass grew on vast, dangerous, soft intertidal mudflats. Fighting it required special machinery, “mudluk” footwear, and strange tools. And involved risk. With his students, friends, agency and coastal colleagues and others, the author tackled the invaders with sustained ingenuity and brute force from 1993 through 2007. His account, told here, is perhaps the most seamless blend of marine ecology, science, adventure, humor, Bayshore history and resoundingly successful earth stewardship that a reader is ever likely to encounter.

No other popular or “official” account of this huge coastal episode has ever been written. The grass came on with the force of an ecological hurricane, threatening to destroy the Bay’s fishing and shellfish culture livelihoods, as well as critical migratory waterfowl and shorebird overwintering habitats. Coastal residents were swept up in it; they know it well from personal experience. Elsewhere around our state, this episode is virtually unknown. “Bashing The Great Green Invaders” reconnects our inland residents with a giant environmental success story that everyone concerned with sustaining natural ecosystems – and rural cultures — should know about.