When I posted on Mabon, 
I suggested we need to get in better touch with the energies and denizens of
the places where we live.  Only
then could we really honor the spirits of the earth.  I mentioned salmon, grapes, and apples as examples from
Sonoma County.  Pitch, the source
of many wise comments both there and elsewhere,  suggested that while salmon were certainly appropriate,
grapes and apples, as interlopers from abroad, magickally less effective, and
so were not. 

The cheap and easy response is to
mention that we are not natives either. 
Grapes and apples have been with us for a long time.  They go where we go.

I think a better response would be
to say that a great many forms of life did not originate where they are now
abundant, even though they preceded us in their arrival.  Environmentalists, and I am certainly
one, want to save the grizzly bear, but the grizzly arrived from Eurasia.  Is the grizzly native just because we
didn’t bring it over?

Those are mostly rhetorical
responses.  Here is one I think
goes more deeply into the issue.

I think it is vitally important for
us to honor and respect the forms of life that had made this country their home
before we arrived.  And that means
enabling them to flourish as a species. 
We should be good neighbors and plain citizens of the community of life.
I think this is a Pagan ethic, and anything that violates it is not. If we
cannot learn to treat other beings with respect we will truly be a pox on this
planet.

On the other hand, life is
continually moving about.  Coyotes
are abundant far to the east of their range when Europeans first arrived.  Armadillos have moved north and
opossums have moved west. None are ‘native’ in vast portions of their present
range and all are having an impact in the new regions they enter.  Animal and plant communities are no
more stable than human ones, although they usually change more slowly.

So to my mind, the issue is not
whether some life form is native, but whether it is a good member of the
community into which it has inserted itself..

We are part of two earthly
communities. First is the more than human community of the wild ecologies of
which we are only a small and dependent part.  But we are also a part of the human community, and that
includes other-than-human life forms that help directly support it. The
difference between these two communities is that the wild community exists and
changes by means of biological reproduction and the human community exists and
changes by means of human thought.

Things get sticky, very sticky,
because human thought changes faster than most biological reproduction, but the
human community depends on the wild community for its existence.  So we need to harmonize the human with
the wild, and I suspect only a Pagan ethic, or one similar to it, can do the
job.

Grapes and apples, wheat and corn,
and much else are vital parts of our human community.  They change not because of wild adaptation, but primarily
through human choice.   They also
merit our respect and our honor and can be considered gifts of the wild
community to the flourishing of the human.  Just as salmon, with the key difference that they have
joined our community.  Corn, for
example, can no longer reproduce without our help. The point is to honor all
life and seek to enable all species to flourish.

Part 2 will discuss how this all relates to ritual and magick.