the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 44
called to researchers Derek and Donna Alderman an incident that hap-
pened during the two decades that she lived in Florida. She had collected
a bag of kudzu roots in a brown paper grocery bag and put them on a low
shelf in a closet, intending to plant them a few months later. When she
opened the closet the following spring, she “noticed a white rope that I
didn’t remember having. I started pulling the rope, and pulling the rope,
and pulling the rope, until finally I realized it was not a rope at all. The
kudzu root had grown to about fi fty feet over the winter, in a bag and in
the dark.”
Ranchers also reported that kudzu, a member of the bean family,
had a rather unfortunate side effect for those who used it as forage food for
their livestock: methane. Ed Bostick, a biology professor at Kennesaw
State College in Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal- Constitution in 1993 that
cows that graze on kudzu are excessively fl atulent—which contributes to
global warming—and that “they actually came up with a lance to stab cow
bellies and let out the gases. I have this image of cattle shooting through
the sky like balloons.”
The environmental havoc was undeniable, and overwhelming. One
kudzu booster, quoted years later by writers for Mother Earth News, said:
“It was like discovering Old Blue was a chicken killer.”
By 1953, with foresters and transportation engineers reporting
similar concerns about runaway growth, the federal government stopped
recommending kudzu for any purpose; farmers were demanding compensation
for land and income lost to kudzu. The Kudzu Club of America,
which in 1943 boasted a membership of twenty thousand, was quietly disbanded.
Studies on how to best eliminate the vine began in 1956, at least
one of them at the university now known as Auburn, which had led the
way in promoting the plant. The feds officially labeled kudzu a common
weed in 1970, but the policy shift had the approximate impact of epithets
shouted at a charging rhino.
The balance of nature in the South was wobbling noticeably. As
kudzu’s own nitrogen-fixing qualities improved the region’s depleted