Most governments, including ours, aren't. We're not alone in that.
Just to elaborate on what I proposed, a colleague of mine, Norm Yan, a professor at York University, suggests that we should treat invasive species with the same kind of serious attitude that we treat natural disasters. Most invasive species probably will not have undesirable negative impacts.
Most natural disasters, or at least the phenomena that generate them, most of the time are negligible. We prepare for extreme hazards that may never happen, because if they did happen it would be unacceptable. So we have building codes. We have safety regulations. Various countries in the world have detection and monitoring and infrastructure in place to prevent something that may never happen, because it would be unacceptable if it did.
We don't do that with invasive species, even though the country is under siege, as I indicated, with billions of animals moving into North America, tens of thousands of species, mostly unregulated. Once they are here, when they become established they are very difficult to eradicate. So we're talking about a cumulative problem.
When I speak to policy-makers, I often liken invasive species to hidden taxes—that usually gets their attention—because they appear out of nowhere, like a hidden tax. Once they're established, they don't go away, like a hidden tax. Usually the cost increases over time, like a hidden tax. And yet this is happening all the time.
I think the reason we don't treat it with the same kind of seriousness and coordinated effort that we do for natural disasters is that they're usually reported in the media as isolated monster stories. You might hear about a mussel over there, a sea squirt or tunicate over here, a fish over there. Yet they're all symptomatic of the same phenomenon: a form of global change that I call, because it's catchy, “global swarming”.
Every country on the planet is susceptible to it. There is no doubt that this form of global change, which interacts with all other forms of global change, is a stress on regional economies, on our natural resources. It poses a threat to human health. It affects all aspects of society. Those nations best able, best equipped, best capable of dealing with it will have a huge advantage as globalization proceeds.
Now, we're far behind in that, in my opinion. We don't have to be. We have great scientific expertise here.