Well, good luck with that war:
BLOOMINGTON, Ind.— Indiana is making progress in its war on the fast-growing kudzu vine that's smothered parts of the state beneath leafy tangles of greenery.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.
