Invasive Species and the Seed Trade

On February 3, 1999, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13112, creating the National Invasive Species Council and ordering federal agencies not to authorize actions likely to spread invasive species. For most industries this was background noise. For the seed trade it was existential: seed companies sell living propagules by the ton, ornamental and forage catalogs were full of species that had jumped fences, and any regulatory definition of “invasive” written broadly enough would sweep in commercial crops.

The industry’s formal response, dated October 28, 1999 and preserved in our archive from its original home on this domain, is more interesting than a lobbying document has any right to be. It conceded the core scientific point: some commercially traded plants do significant environmental and economic damage, and the industry had an obligation to participate in identifying and controlling them. What it contested was scope. It argued for risk assessment species by species and region by region, against blanket lists that treat a plant invasive in Florida as invasive in Montana, and for keeping the working definition tied to demonstrated harm rather than non-native origin.

The document earned a scientific afterlife its authors could not have planned. Reichard and White’s 2001 BioScience analysis of horticulture as the dominant pathway of plant invasions in the United States, a foundational paper of invasion biology, cites the industry’s position from this domain, and the copy hosted with the paper on UNC’s biology department servers still carries that link today. Botanical reference sites and ibiblio’s agricultural archives have kept their links live as well, which is how a 25-year-old policy statement became one of the most durably cited pages this domain ever served.

The framework the statement argued for is broadly the one that emerged: federal noxious weed listings under the Plant Protection Act of 2000 name specific taxa, state programs handle regional differences, and the horticultural trade operates voluntary codes of conduct on introductions. The tension it identified never resolved, though. The most damaging invasives of the American landscape were not smuggled in; they were sold, in seed catalogs, as improvements.