When I was a kid, we were told stories of kudzu growing feet per day, and of people going away for a trip and coming home finding their house engulfed. Southerners legitimately thought it would grow to engulf everything. However, as the author points out, the giant fields of it that were there when I was a kid, are still there today, and they aren’t much bigger than they were then.
It swarms over sidewalks/power poles/lawns. The city has to come cut it back every 3 to 4 weeks, and I consistently lose bike lane space to it.
Now - it was here when I moved in, so maybe in the absence of kudzu, something else would be doing the same thing.
But it really does seem to love the spaces that we've cleared for use, and it makes keeping them clear much harder.
One house that was flipped about a year ago borders a large patch of it. The flippers put up a fence to block the hillside (sloping down away from the house) and stop it coming into the yard. It's about 13 months later now, and it's about to drag the fence down. I've seen the folks who moved in clear it off the fence at least twice.
That said, you can go a mile over and struggle to find any, since the soil/sunlight conditions are different.
I would hesitate to buy property with large swathes of it nearby, since it truly is a nuisance. That said, areas we haven't cleared seem mostly free of it. So more of a people problem, less of an ecological problem.
But he did find that goats will eat it -- if there isn't anything tastier around.
And it’s that same with Himalayan blackberry in Washington. It chokes out our native berries. We have patches of salmon berry, native blackberry and salal in my area that are under threat from himalayan blackberry.
>More important, it obscures the beauty of the South’s original landscape, reducing its rich diversity to a simplistic metaphor.
The destruction of that 'rich diversity' is the problem. It's same way Himalayan blackberries take over roadsides and provide monoculture ecosystems in the northwest. That 'rich diversity creates canopy layers used by different wildlife, bird and insect species. How many species were adapted to living in the natural habitat there before those kudzu patches, while not as big as sensationalism says, have overrun other natural species.
Introduced species that dominate the ecosystems they're introduced to cause more problems then we can even understand because in many cases, the historical data just doesn't exist and we're not even sure what was lost.