I have seen the future, and it lives in Miami.
The suburbs of Miami, to be exact: in the ever-expanding netherworld between the potted plants and subtropical nightlife of South Beach to the east and the tropical plants and deep-rooted wildlife of Everglades National Park to the west.
The future lives in Homestead. So does Todd Hardwick, owner and primary employee of Pesky Critters Nuisance Wildlife Control. Noisome possums and trash-can raccoons are his standard fare, and the money is in alligators, which crawl out of the swamps and into backyards, the two environments being ever more synonymous. But the real fun, and Hardwick's specialty, is catching exotic species. Miami is the through point of the nation's imported animal and plant trade, and virtually everyone in South Florida, including Hardwick, has a neighbor with a backyard menagerie of lucrative critters on hold for resale. With so many unofficial zoos so close together and so little expertise at maintaining them, animals are constantly escaping into the streets and flower beds, and when someone spots, say, a pesky cougar on the lawn, Hardwick gets the call.
Hardwick has caught mountain lions, ostriches, rheas, emus, macaque monkeys—even, once, a bison on the freeway. Mostly the animals are lone escapees, but a number of species—especially reptiles—have gone loose often enough that they've formed free-roaming populations that reproduce amid the imported mango groves and ornamental hedgerows. The naturalized aliens include Cuban tree frogs, various South American anoles, and South Asian pythons and boa constrictors. Hardwick's business card shows a photograph of an Indonesian python he once extracted from a burrow beneath someone's home; it was 22 feet long.
In short, if all the biogeographic barriers in the world were suddenly eliminated—all the impassable gulfs, oceans, and mountain ranges that have historically kept the planet's local native species from moving around and mixing together—the jumbled result would look something like Homestead. Minus the lions and pythons, it's the sort of neighborhood into which we're all slowly moving—or is slowly moving into ours. Colonies of stinging South American fire ants have settled in Texas; the zebra mussel, a pistachio-size mollusk from Europe, carpets the bottom of the Great Lakes. Feral pigs, native to Eurasia and North Africa, now root in the lawns of San Jose, California. Giant Asian carp, introduced in the 1970s to control aquatic weeds, leap unsolicited into fishing boats along the Mississippi River. Escaped pets, sport fish and garden plants run amok, insects that come hidden in the foliage of imported plants, pests that are introduced to control other pests—the invaders are legion, from anywhere, going everywhere.
