The vine that ate the South
Unintended consequences ... and how we might be doing it again
The first time I visited Atlanta in the early 1990s, I was curious about all the green vines covering power lines and trees. “Kudzu” I was told … a vine that can grow up to 60 feet per growing season, hogging all the sunlight and strangling life beneath it.
Introduced in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, kudzu is a hardy, almost indestructible vine that attracted attention, especially in those days prior to air-conditioning. It was a perfect choice for the hot, humid South as it provided cooling shade for front porches and sweetened the air with its grape-like fragrant flowers.
What could be better than sitting in a rocking chair on a shaded porch sipping sweet-tea?
Kudzu stepped into the spotlight during the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, when people were scrambling to find ways to prevent soil erosion. The government jumped on the kudzu bandwagon, distributing 85 million seedlings and offering incentives to farmers who planted kudzu to prevent soil erosion and provide fodder for farm animals.
The vine’s popularity soared with kudzu clubs, festivals, and floats featuring smiling, waving kudzu queens. The Civilian Conservation Corps set to work planting kudzu and, by 1946, some 3 million acres of kudzu splashed green across the South.
The tide turned against kudzu in the 1950s as farmers began to recognize kudzu’s invasive nature and uncontrollable growth.
In 1953, the USDA removed kudzu from its list of suggested cover plants.
It was listed as a weed in 1970.
By 1997, kudzu was placed on the "Federal Noxious Weed List".
Wikipedia: In the forestry industry alone, kudzu is responsible for $100 million to $500 million lost productivity.
Why am I, a certified brown-thumb non-gardener, writing about a plant parasite?
The world’s history is full of stories of unintended consequences, solving one issue with a solution that creates a different problem, often worse than the original one. These stories all too often started out with the best of intentions.
For example, cobras in India. In order to protect people from deadly cobras, India offered a bounty on cobras. Result? People started raising cobras in order to get the bounty and the cobra population increased.
Or, cane toads in Australia and now almost everywhere. Beetles were decimating sugarcane crops so cane toads were introduced. Turns out, the beetles causing the problems lived in the tops of the sugar cane plants while the toads were on the ground so the problem was unsolved by the intervention.
However, it gets worse. Cane toads are toxic and many predators die when they eat the toads. Biodiversity down. Number of internet articles warning about protecting pets (and people) from cane toads up.
Or, for examples closer to home, think about Prohibition. Drunkenness was enough of an issue in 1920 that the 18th Amendment was passed outlawing the production and sale of alcohol. Instead of the issue going away, it created a fertile ground for organized crime and was eventually repealed in 1933, just two years after Al Capone was imprisoned after being convicted of tax fraud.
Because we didn’t learn the lesson of unintended consequences from Prohibition, we tried again … with the best intentions … in 1970 with a War on Drugs which not only didn’t solve the problem but created “mass incarceration” and an explosion of privatized prisons. (*Studies indicate that imprisonment does not correlate with lower rates of drug consumption and may actually increase the risk of relapse upon release.)
New warning sirens are screaming: “kudzu’s coming!”
It’s easy to scoff at stories about unintended consequences … after the fact. “We’d never be that stupid,” we say. However, the new administration’s call for mass deportations of immigrants has kudzu written all over it.
What are the unintended consequences of mass deportation? We don’t know … yet.
Because unintended consequences aren’t known until after an action begins, we don’t know all of what might happen as a result of this decision. Lots of smart people are thinking about this and running different scenarios. Most indicate that, beyond the devastation to the families involved, the impact of this decision will most probably include food prices going up, the availability of house cleaners going down, and, the overall growth rate of the United States slowing.
Most of us remember the horrors of separated families under the previous administration. Here’s a reminder from Wikipedia:
The family separation policy under the first Trump administration was a controversial immigration enforcement strategy implemented in the United States from 2017 to 2018, aimed at deterring illegal immigration by separating migrant children from their parents or guardians. The policy, presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach, was intended to encourage tougher legislation and discourage unauthorized crossings.
In 2019, a release of emails obtained by NBC News revealed that although the administration had said that they would use the government's "central database" to reconnect the thousands of families that had been separated, the government had only enough information to reconnect sixty children with their parents. The administration refused to provide funds to cover the expenses of reuniting families, and volunteer organizations provided both volunteers and funding. Lawyers working to reunite families stated that 666 children still had not been found as of November 2020, and by March 2024 the ACLU increased the estimate to 2,000 children.
Today I had the pleasure of hearing Nicholas Stein, Series Producer for National Geographic’s series “Border Wars,” talk about this issue. It’s a highly complicated issue. And, there are definitely problems that need to be solved. However, there are also millions of lives at risk as well as our economy. We need to be thinking beyond politics and quick fixes.
As a nation we’ve done a lot of things wrong … and a lot of things really right … this plan, should it come about, has the potential to break us.
Please Help: Per my statement in the header above, I can’t look away from this. I’m starting the research on this project right now and welcome your input … especially stories, informative articles, pointers to organizations engaged in this fight, plus thoughts and prayers that we get this thing right.
There are so many, but that one is my favorite. And then there are the possums that they introduced in New Zealand to establish the fur trade. To control the burgeoning population, they introduced the stoat, a predator to eat the possum, but the predators discovered that flightless birds were easier prey, which rendered several species extinct, and puts the kiwi at risk.
My details may be slightly off, but it’s another classic case.
In his book, “In a Sunburnt Country,” Bill Bryson tells the story of a farmer who imported 13 rabbits to Australia in the early days of the continent’s settlement. He wanted something to hunt. Apparently he was a bad shot because the rabbits multiplied like, well, rabbits. And then proceeded to eat all of the grass and greenery which caused the layer of topsoil to blow into the ocean. Creating the rather arid topography now typical of Australia. Unintended consequences, indeed.