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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Gesundheit!

Well, good luck with that war:

The Herald-Times reports (http://bit.ly/mP0YmP ) that there are 133 known kudzu sites in 36 Indiana counties. But Ken Cote of the state Department of Natural Resources says the agency is slowly winning its battle against the vine that originated in Asia and can kill trees.

But forgive me if I'm skeptical about the "making progress" part. The story notes that "the prolific vine has long been a meance in Southern states." No kidding -- "menace" is too tame a word. The vine was especially, um, "prolific" in the part of Kentucky I grew up in (and people there called it a "kush vine"). If you went away on vacation for a week, there was a chance the damn stuff would be crawling through your front yard by the time you got back.

Kudzu was one of our biggest "oops, didn't think of that" disasters of unintended consequence. It was imported from Japan and promoted as a tool to control erosion, and hundreds of young men were actually paid to plant it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. Now, it covers more than 7 million acres, mostly in the South.

Comments

littlejohn
Fri, 08/19/2011 - 11:33am

Surrender now. I spent a dozen years living in South Carolina. The stuff will survive WWIII, along with the cockroaches.

William Larsen
Fri, 08/19/2011 - 12:30pm

I lived in Lynchburg, VA for many years. It was beautiful. When a relative came out to visit, their girls were amazed at how green it was traveling through West VA. I was told the "kudzu vine" was brought in to control erosion. Well it stops erosion and strangles everything else. I am not sure if a Nuke would stop the stuff.

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