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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

Seems counter-intuitive and definitely warrants research to understand the mechanism. The most unintuitive part being local plants not returning.

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The article mentions rice paddies, which tend to be almost entirely artificial constructs. It makes sense that if they aren't being maintained anymore, the species that relied on that maintenance would struggle.

Likewise, I don't know if Japan has to deal with wildly aggressive invasive species like I am right now with buckthorn, but there's lots of plants that will simply choke out most others and aren't very beneficial. If nobody's around anymore and they were actively grooming the pastures and such, that will also put a ton of pressure on previously flourishing species.

I believe the Japanese Knotweed fulfills that function.

there is a phrase that reasonates with me and it goes something like this- all symbiotic relationships were once parasitic. There are plenty of caveats but i think the time regime is something we don’t really respect given that some of these processes are always happening at almost always on a timeframe that we don’t appreciate- naturally, being so briefly here.

What was the primeval state of these places, and how long has it been since it looked like that?

Nobody knows. I'm serious - nobody knows. Japan has been populated by humans since prehistoric times; plenty of time for people and wildlife to adapt and coevolve. Hard to imagine there's a way to extrapolate that far back in time.

I highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She reckons academia and science with indigenous knowledge.

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