I have been thinking a lot recently about the way we are taught to think about things.
As a practitioner of Chinese Medicine I was taught to think about things holistically we see a person as a collection of interacting systems not as a mechanical device.
However I find that in many other areas I still tend to think in a more Western linear mechanistic way and recognition of this has lead me to question the way weeds are looked at.
In western science almost everything is learned by separating and isolating things.
In theory we do this to provide proof by controlling the variables. In reality it is much more likely to be related to the way the brain functions.
Our brain has a very limited capacity to look at a sequence of facts, we rapidly become overwhelmed by raw and often conflicting data.
To deal with this overload, we make up narratives, stories we hold in our mind to explain and remember the data.
The moment we do this the data that does not fit into the narrative is dropped and soon forgotten.
Overtime the narrative becomes indispensable, it becomes excepted as what we know (to be true), at this point we tend to be unable to look at conflicting data. Our mind filters out that which does not fit our story.
This biological process occurs naturally and is unavoidable unless we set in place deliberate processes to loosen its grip on us.
Many years ago I was given the simplest of devices to loosen this grip, when I have used it it has never failed to be of benefit. The advice was to be a walking question mark.
So I now have some questions, as I understand it giant parramatta grass is a grass. What characteristics does it have that differ from other (preferred) grasses?
Duane mentioned that it is: unpalatable to animals and it is trying to repair the degraded soil.
I believe many grasses are stimulated to growth by grazing, if it is unpalatable this may not be the case as it would less frequently be grazed. It would probably crushed trampled and mulched by large herds of grazing animals.
With the idea that it is trying to repair the degraded soil, how? Does it have intelligence? Most plants can grow in fertile soils however the efficiency varies, does this grass have deeper roots to bring up nutrients?
If parramatta grass was cut and mulched and if the soil conditions were suitable would other pasture, that is stimulated by grazing, gain an advantage over the parramatta grass?
Lets assume for a moment that it is more efficient at selecting certain nutrients/minerals than preferred grasses, as it grows it concentrates these nutrients in the surface soil. If you kill it before it has concentrated these elements would you have improved the conditions for the preferred grasses? If seed is in the soil which plants will be more viable?
The problem as I see it with the standard story about weeds, is that they are invasive and hardy, that they push other plants out and must be destroyed. This is very much a mechanistic paradigm it pays no attention to the contrary data that we see all around us, that weeds are not capable of overtaking all the land, not to mention no thought given to what relationships it has to micro or macro flora and fauna. Nor to the energy, water and mineral cycles of the land.
Of course if we look at the holistic picture we may still decide the benefit of destroying the weed out ways the risks - we might