Remember that 1970’s Chiffon margarine commercial, where a goddess sits in the forest surrounded by animals and gets angry when she’s tricked into thinking the oleo in her oatmeal is butter?

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“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she says, raising her arms, summoning thunder and lightning, and scaring a raccoon.


No, it’s not nice to fool with the Big Mama’s recipes, either, as we’ve discovered after garlic mustard, zebra mussels, emerald ash borers, starlings and hundreds of other introduced species were slipped into the northern Illinois mix. They displace native species, damaging both fragile ecosystems and the economy.

It’s expensive and difficult to rebalance nature. And there are often unintended consequences, as Australian biologists discovered when they tried to do an eco fix on a remote sub-Antarctica isle.

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