Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Lord's indulgent gift to Georgians,” Cope declared. It would “heal” the soils. “If we will feed the land, it
will feed us.” Cope, the king of kudzu, was declared Georgia Conservation Man of the Year. Americans
may shudder now at how kudzu creeps across the land. But back then it was seen as capable of restoring
both the environment and the economy of the South. From 1935 to the early 1950s, government nurser-
ies grew one hundred million seedlings. Roadsides and railway embankments were seeded, and farmers
were paid to plant the Japanese vine on their land. Altogether more than two million acres were covered.
Its abilities seemed endless. When botanists tried to find something that would grow on land around
Copperhill in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, which had been poisoned by acid emissions
from copper smelters, the only thing that would do the job was kudzu. Where it grew, it sucked the
poison from the soils. At the height of Cold War paranoia in the 1960s, radiation ecologists from the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory recommended that kudzu be part of the military arsenal, ready to be de-
ployed to detoxify the land should a war with the Russians result in “nuclear devastation.”
3
Times changed, however. As early as 1953, kudzu's potential to grow where it wasn't wanted had
been noted. In the 1970s, Bennett's successors at the Soil Conservation Service quietly removed it from
a list of plants approved for erosion control. By 1997 kudzu had officially become part of the problem
rather than a solution, when it was put on the Federal Noxious Weeds list. It was from then on regarded
as a malign and alien competitor to native shrubs, trees, and crops. A current government fact sheet says
that the former miracle vine “kills or degrades other plants by smothering them under a solid blanket
of leaves, by girding woody stems and tree trunks and by breaking branches or uprooting entire trees
and shrubs through the sheer force of its weight.” Kudzu will grow almost any place where sunlight is
abundant to drive its rapid photosynthesis. It climbs telegraph poles, strangles trees, buries hedgerows,
and takes over abandoned buildings. Its fecundity and vigor are now officially a burden.
4
It covers some
seven million acres across the South and extends its grip by about 120,000 acres annually.
The vine hasn't changed. It is still revered in Japan. What has changed in America is the land and
people's expectations of the land. Kudzu's foliage is no longer needed to feed grazing farm animals,
which now often live in feedlots. Many southern pastures are abandoned. No longer kept in check by
grazing, kudzu now grows where it is not wanted, spreading almost anywhere south of the Mason-Dix-
on Line. It is the enemy. The pastures are being turned into woodland, where kudzu is a problem.
There seems to me, as an outsider, to be something cultural at work here. Kudzu's incontinent
growth, extending roots underground to form new vines on the end, seems to fit an American image
of the Deep South as somehow depraved and unruly. In 1999,
Time
magazine listed the introduction of
kudzu to the United States as among the hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century, alongside asbes-
tos, DDT, telemarketing, Prohibition, and
The Jerry Springer Show
.
Kudzu has become inconvenient for farmers and landowners, for sure. But is it bad for nature? The
claim is often made, but when I searched for information about how much ecological harm it does, I
found that nobody seemed to know. The science has not been done, says Irwin Forseth of the University
of Maryland. “Despite widespread anecdotal statements, little quantitative information is available re-
garding the ecological effects of kudzu.” He did not deny that there were effects. But amid all the hys-
teria, nobody has done the research. The idea that it is bad seems to have become so entrenched among
Americans that nobody saw the need to test the claim.
5
Could there be redemption for kudzu? Derek Alderman of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville
thinks so. The vine may no longer be needed for fodder, but it has other economic values. There are
niche markets as an herbal medicine, including a possible treatment for alcoholism and for making up-
scale paper, baskets, jewelry, jams, and even soap. Such uses are widespread in Japan and China.
6
But
for now, all that is drowned out. The mythology is spreading faster than the weed. Kudzu is a symbol
Search WWH ::
Custom Search