Missing in Action

All this trouble. In the name of kudzu.

 
Before me is a shrouded trail, emblazoned by moss-draped cypress trees. It appears gilded in sunset, drops of mist lingering on leaves, whimsical remnants of a light dusting of Asheville’s afternoon rain. Between these otherworldly scenes, I feel free, trekking onward as my scruffy-haired guide waves his palm, gesturing wildly as he chatters on about the many uses of fungi. A walking mushroom encyclopedia, if I’ve ever seen one. I settle in these little moments that provide a promise of peace.

But that sensation of serenity doesn’t last. Merely a day later, I find myself up to my ankles in some type of prickly bush as I wade through an open field outside the city limits of the charming North Carolina hub and its slew of bookstores, a type of turf I’m far more familiar with. My limbs heavy with the imminent knowledge that there are all kinds of critters bustling about their day-to-day lives around me, I feel the frown already etched into my face miraculously manage to further deepen as lines of distress and general discontent carve a map on the open plain that is my forehead. If I could, I’d snap my fingers and be back inside my rented room, curled up underneath the softest of covers, utterly unaffected by the elements outside.

Alas, that power is not mine to wield when I want. I am but an unimpressively average human who can no more protect herself from the great outdoors than an albacore can take shelter from a hunting hawk. Feeling far closer to prey than predator in this open expanse of field, I head in the direction of my destination: more than an acre of open farmland, corners swaddled in kudzu like newborns cloaked in quilted blankets.

Here is where I will pick handfuls of the plant, to be stir-fried, ground down to a starch, or made into a tea. And for the next hour, I tug leaves off of seemingly infinite patches of greenery, stuffing my hard-won prizes into a tote bag hanging at my side. I am starting to adjust to the environment I occupy, finding an unforeseen sense of satisfaction in the task I’ve committed to do.

Perhaps I can do this after all, I think. Perhaps this is the path I’ve always been meant to find, I wonder. For the longest of moments, I am suspended in that illusion of belonging, of finally finding a place free of heavy stares, free of the invisible cloak of persecution, knitted together by a past I can’t seem to outrun. Perhaps here I can belong. It’s a thought I dare to entertain for the shortest of seconds.

At least until the smallest of somethings, an indistinguishable insect fluttering about, lightly nips at my exposed ankle, startling me so deeply that my bag of foraged goods goes soaring through the air, blossoms scattering in the sky like a flock of violet-backed starlings jumping into flight. With that, my desire to stay any longer begins to splinter, my remaining courage shattering like specks of sand impacting minuscule particles in a bed of soil. If we were keeping score, it’d be an easy point for the other side: The Great Outdoors 1, Ayurella 0.

I grew up in urban expanses, where green spaces were only found in manicured parks miles away from the concrete units I called home, and the typical tree lining nearby roadways was shaped like a fan. Where sputtering air-conditioning units and fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles drowned out the sounds of nocturnal creatures. Where that which was wild was conquered, broken down, and kept under lock and key. Where the unfamiliar was bad, and so was anyone who resembled anything new. Where outsiders—be they pesky critters or children with different shades of skin—weren’t welcome.

Enclosed within slabs of brick, in houses where laundry spaces doubled as bedrooms, I dutifully read fanciful tales about the great outdoors, fables of adventure and glory, starring predators and prey and impossible tasks to overcome. I plucked voyages straight from their spines and let them swim in my daydreams. Between those pages, penned by authors far more courageous than I was, I lived several lifetimes, fueled by the riches of fictional escapes set in the python-ridden Everglades or the salt-drenched Dead Sea. On the wings of the thrilling prose created by someone before me, I could pretend: slip out of my safe, sterile world into the fearless lifestyle I’d always wistfully, bitterly desired.

At the cusp of youth, these make-believe characters lived in my head rent-free. When I needed to, I would wear them like indestructible armor. Their personality traits and physical characteristics would meld into my own, intangible shields that could protect me from reality. When the world around me became too heavy, I would flip open a book that would whisk me away to faraway lands. Within moments, I’d be lost in scenes where pirates with hearts of gold pillaged the rich and gave to the poor, mermaids lured bad men into unforgiving seas, and unlikely protagonists became heroes of immense cities. These were spaces of refuge, spaces where a quietly uncertain brown girl transformed into a powerfully glorious goddess overnight.

Magic and mayhem ruled these make-believe visions. But that’s all they were: artificial longings safely ensconced in my mind. For the longest time, books were my go-to ingredients for a priceless cure, applied when I needed to escape. An antivenom for a day-to-day existence wrapped in sorrow, hurt, and fear. A way to freeze time and leave the tough stuff behind. Until the day they were no longer enough.

This is precisely why I’m here, swimming in a sea of relentless mosquitoes, pesky no­see-ums, and curious spiders lurking on nearby trees. So completely at odds with my surroundings, unease mounting with every passing moment. Still, there’s something profound in being so far out of a comfort zone.

The air is charged, the beings making up the forest biome thrumming to a beat I can’t quite understand. My pulse ricochets under my skin, anxiety spreading throughout my system like a live wire. I feel warm, like any second I might explode into burning stardust, returning to the very universe I originated from. Teetering on the edge of something new, I am unbalanced, afraid, and wholly unprepared for what’s ahead. Adrenaline-pounding dizziness flirting with fear—a hesitance as the path forward shatters the safety net at the heart of my carefully curated world.

All this trouble. In the name of kudzu.

A cultural staple in the Southeast, the weed at the center of my inner turmoil covers an undetermined number of acres across the U.S. Because it dwells mostly in disturbed habitats and at the edges of forested land, the federal agencies in charge of tracking invasive species growth don’t measure, or really even know, exactly how much land it covers. Or the rate at which it spreads. Up-to-date reports recording kudzu range are limited and incomplete, missing essential data.

A 2001 chapter penned by Richard J. Blaustin in the book The Great Reshuffling: Human Dimensions of Invasive Species cites figures from 1996 detailing how kudzu covers over 2.8 million hectares in the United States, with the largest concentrations in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. The chapter concludes that the vine was “actively promoted by the government as a ‘wonder plant’” and expanded to cover over one million hectares by 1946 and “well over” two million hectares at the time of publication.

USDA reports since have estimated that kudzu’s total land coverage may be anywhere between a couple hundred thousand acres to nine million. However, none of these numbers are comprehensive, as they only capture kudzu’s estimated range on forested land. This is significant, as it means those measurements don’t account for where kudzu grows and thrives—in areas considered “non-forest.”

Chris Park and Michael Allaby’s third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, published in 2017, defines these spaces as “land that is not used for forestry or timber production, but is used for other activities such as farming, transport, industry, commerce, and housing.” How quickly kudzu spreads is also unclear. Estimates of the vine’s land coverage vary, from the U.S. Forest Service’s 2015 estimate of an annual increase of 2,500 acres per year to the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of as much as 150,000 acres every year.

Qinfeng Guo, a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station, isn’t able to provide a more recent, or even accurate, number quantifying the total land kudzu covers. “This is hard to determine as it depends on the scales to measure the range,” Guo told me. “The smaller the scale, the smaller [the] coverage.”

Initially, he suggests nine million acres, quoting a USDA study from 2001. When pressed, Guo shares a 2015 USDA webpage that shows the estimated forest-only coverage of kudzu is 209,630 acres. He confirms that this isn’t a correct measure, nor is it comprehensive, since it only approximates kudzu’s forest coverage, missing the areas where it’s known to be most prevalent.

“Even the Forest Inventory and Analysis data, it only covers a certain… very small part of the real forest,” Guo noted.

Something has become increasingly clear—when it comes to our collective invasive species understanding, it all boils down to data.

At the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) national program, his colleagues shed some light on this rather unsatisfying response. Sonja Oswalt and Christopher Oswalt are foresters with the Southern Research Station. Over email, they explain that capturing kudzu’s modern persistence and spread is a task as tangled as a swath of tap roots.

“Our program only measures kudzu on forestland—and to be honest, kudzu is one of the lesser problematic species affecting forestland, specifically, compared to much more widespread honeysuckle and privet in the South. Kudzu can’t persist well in the understory, so it tends to be in highly visible areas next to roads and homes, which is why it’s such a high-profile species. We can provide you with acres of forestland impacted, but that won’t give you any indication of how much land at the forest edge has been affected that is considered non-forest (e.g., on farmland, gullies, roadside easements, etc., where it tends to be the most voracious),” wrote the Oswalts.

According to the USDA foresters, reported forestland coverage of kudzu “will be an underestimate of total acres of land infested.” The two contributed to the 2021 book Invasive Species in Forests and Rangelands of the United States: A Comprehensive Science Synthesis for the United States Forest Sector, where they analyzed the gaps and challenges in current efforts to assess and monitor invasive species, especially in light of the uncertain impacts of climate change on ecosystems. Their chapter details the lack of longitudinal datasets and the broad scale of existing spatial data, which they determine makes “generating simple distribution data for many species” a challenge, particularly for “species in non-forest systems and aquatic habitats.”

Another obstacle they pinpoint is the concern around the reliability of citizen science data as well as the varied approaches to inventory and monitoring invasive species and the need to standardize these among all agencies, organizations, and programs across the country.

This brings us back to the question: Does this lack of data hurt any emerging moves to examine kudzu further? Without that quantitative evidence, I’m told by a smattering of scientists in this space that it becomes very difficult—sometimes impossible—to get the funding necessary to carry out desired research. All of these dilemmas seem to stem from an existing, jumbled system where everyone involved tackles invasive species differently.

Would a facelift of the invasive plant tracking system to align with one standard, one universal tool, and one form of measurement, assigned as the responsibility of one singular agency, help solve these problems? It’s a question I posed to Guo.

“That’s ideal,” Guo admitted, “but it’s so hard to do. Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen anything like that anywhere in the U.S.” The scientist points out how even for federal lands, different agencies have different policies regarding their work overseeing invasive plants and species. “I don’t know anybody powerful enough to do that kind of work,” he continued. When asked who among federal, state, and local governments is responsible for tracking the growth of an invasive species like kudzu in the U.S, Guo is also adamant that “it really depends.”

Something has become increasingly clear—when it comes to our collective invasive species understanding, it all boils down to data. An abundance of quantitative data both educates and informs decision-making at the national, state, and local level, helping determine what research gets funded, what questions are explored, and what potential expansion of information is ultimately cast aside.

It is why I am baffled by the limited nature of data on kudzu in the U.S.—and how laborious it is to access. How much forestland and non-forestland is covered by kudzu in the U.S., how much money has been invested in mitigating kudzu populations, and when it comes to tracking the growth, economic impact, and management of kudzu, who is responsible for what?

Working this out seems straightforward enough. It is anything but.

Based in Florida, Ayurella Horn-Muller is a staff writer at Grist and the author of Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South. Her award-winning reporting has been published in CNN, National Geographic, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, WIRED, and PBS NewsHour, among others. She has received media fellowships from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Uproot Project, Metcalf Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Oregon State University.

Header photo by Christie S Simpson, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Ayurella Horn-Muller by Jennie Bergqvist.