Seems legit
we all hear about kudzu being introduced as "erosion control" in the South but I don't think contemporary people understand on a gut level what that means
these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"
It was Bad.
Invasive plants need to be understood as part of a much larger cycle of incredible violence against the land.
For context: erosion on that scale occurred as a result of our clear-cutting entire states. The land east of the Mississippi used to be covered in old-growth forest to an extent that we literally can’t imagine anymore, because most of us have never seen a forest over 100 years old. It turns out if you remove all vegetation from a landscape, you end up with a bunch of loose soil ready to move downstream. A fast-growing plant that covers everything in dense vegetation sounds like salvation when you’re surrounded by 40-foot deep gullies that get wider with every rainstorm.
Disturbed soil has a specific process it goes through, where seeds from the seed bank (the ones already existent in the dirt) pop up in a specific order - Plants that like direct sun, hard, bare dirt and are tolerant to wind come up first (called pioneer species). Then, when the pioneer species has loosened the soil, shaded the understory, and changed the soil chemistry (many pioneer species are nitrogen fixing), the more sensitive Upper Story Plants will sprout. Around the slow growing upper story plants and tall weedy pioneer species, ground covers, shrubbery and understory species will grow in gradually. It takes HUNDREDS OF YEARS to get from bare dirt to a canopy of trees.
If you mess up this cycle, all kinds of messed up environments are the result, (yknow, like the ones humans make on purpose, or out of ignorance). Dirt ends up hydrophobic and chemically imbalanced, with large monocultures, dense insurpassable vines overgrowing saplings and more. Saplings without the shade of a canopy over head functionally bolt, making their rings wide and weak. Imbalanced ecosystems are why the dustbowl happened, why Kudzu "ate the south" and that's why canopy trees are NOT a 'renewable' resource (like the paper and lumber industry wants you to believe). Lumberyards are a monoculture that gets cut to the ground every 75ish years, destroying any meaningful ecological progress that has occurred in the mean time.
Make no mistake, the clear cutting in the south was both an agent for colonization and a method of attack against indiginous peoples.
The Great Raft was sacred to the indiginous peoples of Louisiana and its destruction faculitated both the deforestation of the south and the trail of tears. It was Native americans who were living in harmony with that ecosystem who suffered most. Convenience comes at a cost that cannot be understated. Balanced ecosystems might as well be endangered unless they're on well managed private lands.
This is one big reason that the Land Back movement should be a core tenant of rewilding, however we must be cognizant not just to expect indiginous peoples to do the hard work of restoring ecosystems destroyed by colonizatuon. I live on Creek/Muscogee lands in the south, but as I discovered 8ish yearr ago when I naively tried to donate my horribly overgrown and unwalkable land to the Ocmulgee mounds, there are no longer enough educated stewards of the land to care for and restore these imperilled ecosystems. As climate change picks up speed and the modern human landscape becomes increasingly more barren and made of monocultures, everyone is going to have to knuckle down and learn how to restore the depleted ecosystems, and put our hands to work alongside our indiginous brethren. We don't just need to give it back, we need to turn it back as much as possible.
I have spent literal hundreds of man hours, just me and my household, removing invasive species, breaking up monocultures and increasing biodiversity, trying to restore less than an acre of palustrine intermittent wetland. We've gotten access to another half acre of continguous land but its not mine, not truly, and the other 25 adjacent acres of swamp could be ravaged by the construction company that owns it without notice any day. They need permission to build on it, but here in Georgia, they need next to no permission to clear cut all 25 acres of swamp. The only thing stopping them is the cost of towing their sunken backhoes out of the swamp mud. Edited to add: Oh yeah it also destroyed the habitat of the red wolf which has a *minumum* range size of a single red wolf is 80 square miles (12,800+ acres). My entire critically imperilled swamp is barely large enough to support coyotes and black bears.
