Dave Jacke made the following amusing observation: if Russian olive is
rampant in your area, what possible harm could there be in planting one more
of this soil-restoring, wildlife-feeding, edible (etc., etc.) plant? The
seed burden will be dwarfed by what is already there.
I agree that goumi and E. x ebbingei are better choices for small-scale
projects.
Russian and autumn olive were distributed widely in the eastern US by
highway departments in enormous roadside planting projects; they are pretty
well naturalized now. They tend not to move into intact ecosystems, with the
possibility of remnant prairie, which is endangered by just about every tree
and shrub species, native or not, since we don't burn prairie any more. They
do like pasture and other artificially maintained grassland or disturbed
ground, but that's an economic and land use choice, not an ecosystem
preservation issue. Pasture (and unburned prairie) generally wants to become
forest if there's more than 20 inches of rain a year; the shrubs are just
doing their job.
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