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.
A lot of the south too was covered in Canebreaks, basically bamboo forests like a lot of South Asia, I don't know the specifics of the ecology, but bamboo being a grass I assume is rhizomatic like other grasses and forms a big net of roots that prevent erosion. *I assume* (pleez ecologists weigh in)
Yes, the destruction of Canebrakes was a direct cause of this erosion we see here. Canebrakes were destroyed, using slave labor, to make room for cotton plantations. You can read about it here.
Canebrakes built up incredibly rich, fertile soil and are amazing at preventing erosion. They form incredibly strong mats of rhizomes. And their roots are known to go 10 feet deep into the soil.
The erosion we see in these pictures was a result, very much directly, of the Canebrakes being destroyed.
This is a case study in how violence against ecosystems goes so closely hand in hand with violence against people. The violence against the indigenous caretakers of the land, and the violence against the enslaved captives that were forced to clear the Rivercane and work the cotton fields that would degrade the soil into nothing.
Alexandre Hogue, Crucified Land, 1939
This painting was added in another reblog chain, it's good to have it on this thread
