June 10, 2020 • 36 mins
Gypsy moths and the invasive vine kudzu were supposed to be solutions. Instead they’re problems that seem to grow … and grow.
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We all need a break from the constant cycle to
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dot com slash as. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
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com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash as. Welcome to Flashback, a podcast about history's
unintended consequences. I'm Sean Braswell. In today's episode, a Tale
(01:08):
of twin invasions, one by vine and one by Caterpillar. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
(01:30):
eight seventy six. Welcome to the first World's Fair to
be held in the United States. It's called the Centennial
International Exhibition, and it's the celebration of America's on birthday,
and it is one hell of a history making affair.
It's exhibits read like a who's who of American inventions.
Alexander Graham, Bell's first telephone, Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph, Henry J.
(01:55):
Hyness catchup the first typewriter. Nearly ten million visitors will
attend the exposition, but two lesser known exhibits were also
present at the fair, ones that are at the center
of today's episode. For the first we enter into the
Japanese pavilion. When the World's Fair came to the United States,
(02:18):
there was an effort to build relationships between Japan and
the United States. This is Bill Finch, the historian, horticulturalist,
and a conservation advisor for the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.
A classic Japanese vine was on display inside that pavilion,
one hailed as the ideal shading plant for porches or courtyards.
(02:42):
It didn't really catch on. It was just a sort
of another one of many plants from Japan, like as
a is and comills and other things uh T plants
that that they thought might be of interest to Americans.
The vine was kud zoo, and while it wasn't a
hit at the eighteen seventy six World's Fair, kud zoo
(03:02):
is now perhaps America's most infamous weed, the poster child
for an invasive species. We'll get back to that. If
you walked around the World's Fair long enough, you would
also come across something else, some stunning pencil and pastel drawings,
gorgeous pictures of planets, stars, nebulas, the northern lights. They
(03:23):
were the work of an eccentric French artist and astronomer
named at the end Leopold Trouvelo. Thanks to Trouvolo, another
species every bit as invasive as kud zoo, would begin
its own assault on the United States, the gypsy moth.
Ye first though, we turned to that pesky invasive vine
(03:43):
cut suit. So that's a funny story. We we moved
to Florida tight years ago from New York City. This
is Dr Susanna Valente and my husband, he was an architect,
and he said, so today, no, I'm going to be
a farmer from now on. And it was quite of
a change. And so we bought this land and it's
(04:05):
in a very nice area of Florida, in the area
of West Palm Beach, and he wants to grow an
organic farm, and so we have animals with cows, chicken, turkeys, geese, ducks.
Volente and her husband found that running a farm can
be a challenging endeavor, and so one day we had
a an infection in the turkeys. It was a respiratory
(04:25):
infection in turkeys. Valenta and her husband wanted to find
a natural cure for the ailment, and they came up
with a regane oil, so we used it actually in
the water in the turkeys, and in within two weeks
we cleared the infections in the animals. And we got
interested in these natural products, and we're reading about a
lot of things and we tumble upon kudzu as well.
Kudzu was not just in the books that Valente and
(04:46):
her husband read. It was all over their farm pretty
much everywhere. It covers up a lot of the trees
around here. But I actually think it's a pretty thing,
and she soon learned that the invasive vine was more
than just pretty. So kudzu head is very interesting anti inflammatory,
anti microbial properties as well. So we started got interested
in it. In one day, my husband said, hey, why
(05:07):
don't you look into HIV as well. Valente's husband wasn't
worried about the turkeys getting HIV. You see, his wife, Susannah,
is not just an organic farmer. She's an immunologist at
the Script's Research Institute, one of several trying to find
new ways to combat HIV. And so, thanks to her
husband's suggestion, Valente started to investigate kad Zoo each spring
(05:32):
and summer. Across the American South, you hear a lot
of stories like this one from Channel thirteen w m
a Z News in Macon, Georgia. Right over here is
where it gets the most out of hand. Ginger Hudson
has overcome a lot of battles. She lost her first
husband and survived breast cancer, but now she's at war
with kad Zoo just choking everything out, is covering them.
(05:54):
You can't see anything like there. There was a tree
underneath that big bush right there, but it's no longer
they are because the killed him. It sometimes called the
vine that ate the South. Kud Zoo now blankets large
portions of the southeastern US. If you grew up in
the South like I did, and spend any amount of
time driving on the highways, it felt like Kudzoo was everywhere.
(06:17):
Kazoo is a trailing and climbing semi woody vine. It
can't get um woody stems up to you know, thick
as your arm, sometimes even up to ten inches or
so in diameter. Nancy Loewenstein is the executive director of
the Alabama Invasive Plant Council. The leaves are trifoliate, so
there's three leaflets um. The flowers are lavender to purple
(06:40):
colored with a yellow center. And the flowers smell like grapes.
So sometimes when we're walking around in the summertime and
just in the middle of nowhere and needs smell what
kind of smells like great kool aid or great bubblegum?
Start looking around and you're likely to find some Kudzoo
flowers in the area. And where does the vine grow best?
Might be easier to say where it does not grow well,
(07:00):
and that is it does not grow well in really
wet areas or very high pH sools. It does also
doesn't do well in the shade, so you don't see
it too often in dense forests. See it more often
in open areas and kad zoo has already started to
eat parts of America beyond the South. Well, it's already
spread all the way up into um southern New England.
(07:25):
It's up into Illinois, Indiana, western West, into Missouri and Arkansas.
It's even pushing into Kansas and Oklahoma, Texas, and then
there's a few disc junct populations over in Oregon in Arizona.
It's estimated that kud zoo costs up to half a
billion dollars in lost crop, land and control costs each year.
(07:46):
So how did the invasive plant go from being a
World's Fair novelty to a catastrophic nuisance in the years
after the World's Fair? If you found kud zoo in
the US, it was usually for ornamental purposes. Bill Finch again,
So if you were in New England in the nineteenth
century and you had a bit of money, and you
(08:07):
were a bit of a horticultural experiment, or somebody would
like to trying new plants in the garden, you might
have tried using kud zoo as an ornamental vine, and
a few people did. It was pleasant, kind of like wistaria,
but not as nice, and it might have stayed that
way if weather and the US government hadn't intervened, and
(08:28):
the dust Bowl transformed the way people saw the American landscape.
It it struck the fear of God and the people everywhere.
During the early nineteen thirties, a severe drought over the
American Plains caused winds and choking dust to sweep the
region from the south up to Nebraska. Farmers were having
(08:49):
a real struggle. They were moving all over the place
trying to find some new land that worked. Georgia's fields
had been farmed so hard, the Carolinas had been farmed
so hard. Alabama was just being whipped again and again.
People were desperate. They were looking for solutions anywhere, and
(09:12):
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a good one when he became
president in nree When Roosevelt came into office, one of
his big campaigns was to was to overcome the problems
of the dust bowl UH and the barrenness of the
dust Bowl, to stop erosion at all costs. Roosevelt and
Congress created a new organization, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Five
(09:34):
days after the law was signed, twenty five thousand men
signed up to work for the c c C. Young
Gun citizen who arrived at Camp Flaby of arm and
copy of mine is now tough of the hickory nut.
The c CC eventually employed more than three million. It
was Roosevelt's most popular New Deal program. I wish that
(09:54):
I could take a couple of months off from the
White House and come down here and live with them,
because I know I get full of health the whare
they have. The c c C started a massive plan
to stabilize American soil, and they had a secret weapon,
a plant they called the miracle vine. Because of its
ability to flourish in difficult environments and to grow rapidly
(10:15):
kad zoo. Some of their folks realized, well, it's you know,
it is a great fodder. It can cover ground fairly
well once it gets established, And so the US government
started producing millions, literally millions of starts of kad zoo.
More than seventy million kud zoo seedlings were grown in
(10:36):
government run nurseries. Farmers were paid as much as eight
dollars per acre to plant the vine. But it wasn't
just the dust Bowl where kad zoo came in Handy
railroads and highways were being built all across the United
States at the time, and the railroads and the highway builders,
we're creating their own kind of barren landscapes as they
(10:56):
built these railroads and highways through the middle of the
woods that were no vegetation covering the causeways and the
and the embankments that they were creating along these highways,
and they needed something to cover it quickly, and so
they planted kud zoo all along the highways and railways,
especially in the South, and Kudzoo finally finally came into
(11:19):
its own along those highways and railroads because there were
no cows to eat it, there were no horses to
eat it. So once you planted it, it continued growing
and grew and grew and grew, and alongside that growth
something else sprouted a legend. So many of the South
highways and so many of the railroads were planted in
(11:41):
kud Zoo and h that had a really interesting effect
because suddenly people's view of the Southern landscape it was
what they saw at their car windows. It seemed like
Kudzoo was everywhere, and that's when the myth making began.
In Kudzoo really did grab hold of the popular imagination
(12:03):
but by the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties and sixties,
a new generation of Southern riders they actually began writing
about kutzoo. James Dickey, Um, who wrote the novel Deliverance,
had a very famous form about kut Zoo. Yes that Deliverance.
(12:26):
Seven years before he wrote Deliverance, Dickie published a poem
in The New Yorker called Kudzoo. It reads like a
Southern version of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in Georgia.
The legend says that you must close your windows at
night to keep it out of the house. The glass
is tinged with green, even so as the tendrils crawl
(12:47):
over the fields the night, the kud zoo has your pasture,
you sleep like the dead. And it's clearly meant to
be outrageous, but people took it seriously. It was about
kad zoo covering houses and and kad zoo invading people's lives,
and it's sort of caught the essence of of of
(13:10):
of how people feared kud zoo and what it was
going to do the landscape. James Dickey called kud zoo
quote a vegetal form of cancer. Some of his invaded
Southern compatriots. On the other hand, they began to identify
with their captor, and eventually Southerners adopted kad Zoo is
(13:30):
kind of a pet idea. They would come up with
ideas for let's name our restaurant after Kudzoo, let's name's
let's name our our website after Kudzoo. There there businesses
all across the South named for kud Zoo. Because of
this outgrowth of popularity, in some ways, the mythic reach
(13:52):
of kad Zoo became more important to the South than
the vine itself. It was far more part of our
social culture. Sure, it was far more part of our
speech in our language than it was part of the landscape.
But while the mystic version of kud Zoo has indeed
swallowed the South, the actual Vian script is far more
(14:12):
tenuous and more complicated. Do you have an interesting tale
about unintended consequences from history or your own life. Please
share with us by emailing flashback at Aussie dot com.
(14:34):
That's flashback at o z y dot com. We'll return
in a moment to kud Zoo and our tale of
(14:55):
vegetal cancer. But first I want to tell you about
another invasive species deflowering America, one that is also tied
to the eight seventy six World's Fair. Seemed to be
everywhere moths taking over backyards and front doors. The problem
is so bad that a swarm of moths actually delayed
a Jet Blue flight yesterday. So that's right. A few
(15:17):
years ago, a flight at Logan International Airport in Boston
was delayed for more than twenty minutes for an unusual reason,
a swarm of gypsy moths. The problem went well beyond
the airport. They're kind of like, really nasty and clothes.
Never seen as many moths as I've seen in the
last couple of days. Moths. A plague of gypsy moths
already afflicts many parts of the northeastern US during the
(15:39):
summer months, and it's only going to get worse as
they continue to spread to new places and in greater numbers.
So why this moth invasion, Well, the head of the
state's forestry health program blames several years of unusually dry weather.
That's true about the dry weather, But do you know
who I blame at Tienne Leopold Trouvolo. One fifty years
(16:05):
ago there wasn't a single gypsy moth in North America,
not one. But it only took a single man and
an unfortunate accident to change all that forever. Just the
side of them can make your skin crawl. They're gypsy
moth caterpillars and they're chopping through tree foliage in forest backyards.
I jumped off my bike. I was covered from head
(16:25):
to toe. Even on college campuses, gypsy moth caterpillars show
up in late April, about the time that oak trees
start to butt out. They can decimate trees and foliage,
and in some areas of the country they're slimy droppings,
coat roofs, decks, and sheds. It's a mess one that
really started back in the eighteen sixties with the blowback
from the pursuit of another smooth substance, silk. Silk was
(16:52):
a hot commodity in the nineteenth century. The aristocracy of
Europe couldn't get enough of it, and so silkworms were
in hide manned with silkworms. If you reel the silk
and wolve the silk and sold the silk uh you
would have literally a gold mine. Because silk was so valuable.
This guy knows all about unintended consequences. By the way,
(17:15):
my name is Edward Tenor. I'm a historian of technology.
I study unintended consequences, and since more than fifty of
reality consists of unintended consequences, I have a lot of
work to do. Tennor wrote a book called Why Things
Bite Back, and the story of the Gypsy moth is
a good example of why they do. One of the
(17:35):
big fads in America in the nineteenth century was the
search for an American silk industry. People believe that the
Republic should not be spending all this money importing silk
from Europe and from China. We really should be cultivating
it here. After a great silkworm plague, yes that was
(17:58):
a thing, ravaged Europe in the mid eighteen hundreds, the
search for a silkworm alternative in America heated up. Some
of the nation's greatest minds took up the potentially lucrative challenge.
Chen Leopold Trouvalo was a French astronomer who became a
political exile. And if Trouvelo had not become infamous as
(18:23):
the man who would introduced the gypsy molets, he would
be really famous as an astronomer, and Truvalu was mostly
an astronomer and a World's Fair caliber artist, But he
had a sideline that proved faithful for the American forest.
He was experimenting with uh organisms that could replace the silkworm.
(18:48):
Trouvelo had a million caterpillars of various species feeding behind
his house in Medford, Massachusetts. To keep them contained, his
property was encircled by an eight foot wooden fence and
covered by net. It was hard work raising caterpillars. They
required constant feedings, Their platforms had to be swept three
times a day. Birds had to be constantly fought off,
(19:10):
but Trouvelo continued his quest for the next silkworm. Trouvelo
believed that the gypsy moss might be a good candidate,
even though it was already recognized in Europe as something
of a pest. Trouvelo started raising gypsy moth caterpillars in
eight sixty eight, but even their best silk was coarse
(19:32):
and ragged. It was disappointing, but a severe windstorm made
things much worse. The storm knocked over some of Trouvelou's
netting in cages scattering gypsy moth eggs into the countryside.
There were some mots that uh that escaped, and there
was a growing road traffic. This was before the automobile,
(19:55):
but America had had an awful lot of road traffic
before automobiles. Americans were taking many more crips in the
horse and buggy days too, and these wagons, especially in
the suburbs of Boston, were carrying the these moths all
around New England, from buggies to trolley cars, to trains
(20:17):
and automobiles. Gypsy moth eggs spread across the nation as
Americans themselves grew more mobile. It proved impossible to eradicate them.
The problem was recognized, but it was really too late,
and so the spread just continue a decade after decade,
and the caterpillar still blaze the destructive path today. This
(20:40):
is Denise dot She's a database manager for the Gypsy
moth Slow the Spread program. They are defoliators of oak
and hardwood forests. The caterpillars, if they are in a
high enough population density, will actually eat all of the
leaves off of a tree. Since nineteen seventy, the gypsy
moths defoliated more than eighty million acres in the United States,
(21:03):
not at all what Truvillo or anyone else intended, but
it's a consequence millions live with today. Up next, how
bad are the kud Zoo and gypsy moth epidemics really
and what can we learn from them? We also talk
to a researcher who believes that one of kud Zoo's
greatest unintended consequences might still be yet to come. Enjoying
(21:43):
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slash o z y The Great Courses plus dot com
slash Aussi kat zoo has become the bad boy of
invasive plant species, the one that makes local news stories
and inspires poetry. Back Congress officially listed the vine as
a noxious weed, and it is still illegal to plant
(22:51):
in some states. But how pervasive is kad zoo really?
It's a funny thing. Vines in the South all grow
very fast, and that's an important context. That's our kud
zoo expert Bill Finch. Again, the rate of growth of
kud zoo is nothing compared to the right of growth
of a lot of other vines, Asian wistaria probably is
(23:13):
uh is this bigger problem, if not a much bigger
problem than kudzoo itself. For a long time, says Finch.
Scientists and the media claim that kud zoo might cover
as many as nine million acres of the southeastern United States,
but more recent research by the U. S. Forest Service
finds otherwise. And it wasn't nine million acres, it wasn't
(23:36):
eight million acres, it wasn't seven million acres. Turns out,
when they actually did an inventory out of two hundred
million acres of forest land in the Southeast, kud zoo
only covered a little more than two hundred thousand acres.
That's less than one tenth of one per cent of
(23:58):
the forest land in the southeast. So why does kat
zoo feel so much worse than it is. Finch claims
that kudzu is not so much the king of the
forest but of the roadside. And that is why so
many Southerners like myself, who grew up looking at a
car window, became so enamored by and concerned with the vine.
We began spending all of our loss driving along roadsides.
(24:21):
It was how we understood the landscape. It was how
most of us were exposed to the landscape was was
framed in our car windows. So kut zoo seemed like
a much bigger threat than it actually was. In other words,
kudzu was not the vine that ate the South. It
was the vine that ate the part of the South
that we could see. Still, the desk Bowl Air decision
(24:43):
to plant kut zoo, the so called miracle vine and
massive numbers, continues to impact us in other ways today.
But here's the other problem with kutzo. There's a thing
called the kudzu bug. Have you seen these? They're creepy
Crawley downright annoying, and some folks in the Upstates say
they are overwhelmed by kazoo bugs. Kudzoo bugs look like
(25:04):
dark brown beetles with a round shell, like stink bugs.
They're harmless to people, but they travel in large packs.
Tavis Graham says when he walked out of his house Monday,
kudzoo bugs swarmed him. The entire house is covered. Everything
this white, you know of our white siding, The doors, windows,
they're covered. They're going inside the windows. Kudzoo bugs also
(25:26):
come from Asia, but far more recently. It's believed they
arrived not at the World's Fair but via the Atlanta
Airport about a decade ago, without a ticket or any bags.
But they are already overstaying there welcome. While kudzu bugs
helped keep kat zoo in check, they also like to
eat soybeans, which could have some serious consequences in the
future for soybean farmers across the South. Speaking of creepy bugs,
(25:56):
the gypsy moth caterpillar also promises to be a problem
in the future as it continues to colonize North America.
The niece Dot again is currently moving south and West,
uh there are parts of Canada that the winters are
just too cold for it to survive. Likewise, it will,
we think, reach a point in the south and so
(26:18):
where Georgia Florida, where the summers are just too hot,
and that will also affect survival. Programs like dogs have
indeed slowed that spread and helped manage caterpillar outbreaks. But
the best way of slowing the gypsy moth might be
a natural predator, a fungus known as the caterpillar killer.
Almost the entire trunk of this tree, from bottom to top,
(26:40):
is covered with thousands of now dead gypsy moth caterpillars.
The fungus created by the may rains killed them as
they entered adulthood. The spores of this fungus, also a
native of Japan, use the gypsy moth larvae to reproduce,
killing the larvae in the process. But as with the
katzoo bug, the long term concert points is of the
spread of this caterpillar killing fungus are unknown, and that's
(27:06):
really the moral of the story when it comes to
kud zoo, gypsy moths, or countless other plant and insects species.
When you introduce them into a new setting. You don't
know what is going to happen, and in some cases
it might be the exact opposite of what you expect.
Edward Tenner calls this species an unintended consequence, a revenge effect.
A revenge effect is something that isn't just the price
(27:28):
of something. It cancels out your your reasons for introducing
it or for using it. And that's what distinguishes a
revenge effect from a trade over side effect. And when
it comes to the introduction of species to new environments,
sometimes that species will thrive in new conditions. Sometimes it
will backfire and become a monumental pest like kud zoo
(27:49):
or gypsy moths. It can be hard to tell. Biological
science has no good way to predict how these things happen.
It's it's very good at explaining after the fact why
they happened, but it is not so good yet in
predicting just what's going to be dangerous and what's going
to be harmless or beneficial. So what should we do?
(28:10):
Maybe the lesson there is that whenever there's a question
of introducing any new organism, it has to be done
under extremely strict controls, and the experiment has to last
longer than most people would like. Nancy Lowenstein agrees, essentially,
we just need to be wary of quick fixes and
silver bullets. They rarely work out like we think they will.
(28:35):
We now use risk assessments to evaluate the potential for
invasiveness of new plants, but it's still an imperfect process,
and it's really difficult to predict how a new species
will grow in a new environment. And what should we
tell Enterprising amateur ecologists like Etienne Leopold Trouvelo. Denise Dodd
has some advice. Oh, I don't know, maybe a nice try,
(28:58):
but you should stick with astronomy. And I think that
one ended up doing a little bit less damage to
before us. It can be easy to get hung up
on the negative effects of something as invasive as kudzu,
but the vine actually has a number of other uses
and some surprising benefits. For one thing, kudzoo leaves can
(29:18):
be eaten like spinach, cooked or raw in kichha's and
in salads. If you cook with kudzu, though, just be
sure you choose only the smallest, most tender leaves that
are free of discolorations and critter bites. Ancient Chinese medicine
has also long used the kudzoo route to relieve hangovers,
upset stomachs, headaches, and flu symptoms, and modern researchers are
(29:40):
learning about some further potential benefits. Researchers that you ab
have uncovered new medical benefits from kudzoo, the fast growing
vine that covers many southern hillsides. New research suggests that
kad zoo might help lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin levels,
which could be beneficial for fighting a number of conditions.
The root of kud zoo may help patients suffering from
(30:03):
metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that increase your risk
for heart disease and diabetes. The kudzoo root has also
been shown to help alcoholics lower their consumption of alcohol.
And that's not all, which brings us back to our
organic farmer and researcher Susanna Valente. Thanks to her husband's suggestion,
she started to study the kudzoo root to see if
(30:24):
it could help with any of the anti retroviral therapies
being developed to treat HIV, and, much to the surprise
of Valenta and her colleagues in the lab, it did
so for cluz. We found that it was preventing a
staff that is actually not even targeted by other compounds
in clinical use, which is attachment. In other words, the
kudzoo helped prevent the HIV virus from attaching to the
(30:47):
human cell surface and beginning its harmful process of replication. Finally,
a surface that all of us can rejoice in kud
zoos swallowing up the outside of an HIV virus. Valentia
and her colleagues have not been able to isolate the
particular compound in kud zoo responsible for the inhibiting effects,
but she's's great potential in discovering or rediscovering some of
(31:09):
the beneficial effects of natural compounds like the kad zoo root.
They have immense power, and they are original compounds and
if very interesting structures, and uh there's I think definitely
we should there should be more interaction between classic academics
and some of these um less classic medicine like Chinese
(31:33):
medicine or or tribal medicine in Africa, or you know,
there are parts of the world. What did we learn
from our tangled vine of history today? One not everything
you see at a World's Fair is a groundbreaking effort
in human progress. Two it's possible to treat one calamity
(31:54):
like the dust boll by introducing another, so be careful
you don't make the problem worse with your soul oushan.
Three there's more to the world around us than what
you can see out your car window. For a lot
of things, from kudzu to fun guy to anime, seem
to work far better in Japan than they do elsewhere.
Five Kudzu is useful for treating everything from alcoholism to HIV.
(32:19):
And Finally, if your backyard is overrun with something creepy
and crawley and disgusting, it might not be an act
of God so much as the act of some misguided
man decades ago. Flashback is written and hosted by me
(32:40):
Sean Braswell, Senior writer and executive producer at Aussie. It
was produced by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Diorio Di Giziwa,
and Shannon Williamson. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks
to the crew at I Heart Radio podcast Networks, especially
Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to
Flashback on the I Heart radio app or listen wherever
(33:01):
you get your podcasts. Flashback is the latest podcast from Ozzie,
a modern media company producing original TV series, festivals, news
and podcasts for curious people. Ozzie's unique storytelling focuses on
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(33:23):
ways of looking at history. What is that sound do
you hear? That's the sound of pest control looking for
an all natural and effective way for getting rid of
(33:45):
the kudzoo on your property. There's a new method that's
all the rage where I live in North Carolina. Are
some new contract employees for the City of Winston Salem.
They're efficient, they're hard working, and they're pretty cute. Do
you know who these employees are? Cities experien minting with
goat escaping for the first time. City officials hired a
heard of about thirty goats to go in and help
(34:06):
clear a plot of land there the Dixie Classic fair
Grounds that had been overrun with kud zoo. Officials say
the goats are quicker and cheaper than your standard methods,
and they are better equipped to navigate the plot of land.
Apparently it's also good for the goats and the goalkeepers say.
The goats were just fine with their new job. Kud
Zoo very healthy for them because it contains a lot
of protein. It looks like they're hard workers too, and
(34:28):
they don't complain short lunch hours. Back to her. To
dive deeper, head to AUSI dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash flashback. There you can find
my other lecture notes from today's episode, featuring extended interviews,
(34:49):
links to further reading and more information on the invasive
history of kud zoo and gypsy moths, as well as
links to other hidden stories from history. I'm covered by
me and reporters at AUSIE. We all need a break
(35:15):
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Great Courses plus dot Com slash o z Y The
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We all need a break from the constant cycle to
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Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
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new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
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(00:25):
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dot com slash as. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
(00:45):
com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash as. Welcome to Flashback, a podcast about history's
unintended consequences. I'm Sean Braswell. In today's episode, a Tale
(01:08):
of twin invasions, one by vine and one by Caterpillar. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
(01:30):
eight seventy six. Welcome to the first World's Fair to
be held in the United States. It's called the Centennial
International Exhibition, and it's the celebration of America's on birthday,
and it is one hell of a history making affair.
It's exhibits read like a who's who of American inventions.
Alexander Graham, Bell's first telephone, Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph, Henry J.
(01:55):
Hyness catchup the first typewriter. Nearly ten million visitors will
attend the exposition, but two lesser known exhibits were also
present at the fair, ones that are at the center
of today's episode. For the first we enter into the
Japanese pavilion. When the World's Fair came to the United States,
(02:18):
there was an effort to build relationships between Japan and
the United States. This is Bill Finch, the historian, horticulturalist,
and a conservation advisor for the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.
A classic Japanese vine was on display inside that pavilion,
one hailed as the ideal shading plant for porches or courtyards.
(02:42):
It didn't really catch on. It was just a sort
of another one of many plants from Japan, like as
a is and comills and other things uh T plants
that that they thought might be of interest to Americans.
The vine was kud zoo, and while it wasn't a
hit at the eighteen seventy six World's Fair, kud zoo
(03:02):
is now perhaps America's most infamous weed, the poster child
for an invasive species. We'll get back to that. If
you walked around the World's Fair long enough, you would
also come across something else, some stunning pencil and pastel drawings,
gorgeous pictures of planets, stars, nebulas, the northern lights. They
(03:23):
were the work of an eccentric French artist and astronomer
named at the end Leopold Trouvelo. Thanks to Trouvolo, another
species every bit as invasive as kud zoo, would begin
its own assault on the United States, the gypsy moth.
Ye first though, we turned to that pesky invasive vine
(03:43):
cut suit. So that's a funny story. We we moved
to Florida tight years ago from New York City. This
is Dr Susanna Valente and my husband, he was an architect,
and he said, so today, no, I'm going to be
a farmer from now on. And it was quite of
a change. And so we bought this land and it's
(04:05):
in a very nice area of Florida, in the area
of West Palm Beach, and he wants to grow an
organic farm, and so we have animals with cows, chicken, turkeys, geese, ducks.
Volente and her husband found that running a farm can
be a challenging endeavor, and so one day we had
a an infection in the turkeys. It was a respiratory
(04:25):
infection in turkeys. Valenta and her husband wanted to find
a natural cure for the ailment, and they came up
with a regane oil, so we used it actually in
the water in the turkeys, and in within two weeks
we cleared the infections in the animals. And we got
interested in these natural products, and we're reading about a
lot of things and we tumble upon kudzu as well.
Kudzu was not just in the books that Valente and
(04:46):
her husband read. It was all over their farm pretty
much everywhere. It covers up a lot of the trees
around here. But I actually think it's a pretty thing,
and she soon learned that the invasive vine was more
than just pretty. So kudzu head is very interesting anti inflammatory,
anti microbial properties as well. So we started got interested
in it. In one day, my husband said, hey, why
(05:07):
don't you look into HIV as well. Valente's husband wasn't
worried about the turkeys getting HIV. You see, his wife, Susannah,
is not just an organic farmer. She's an immunologist at
the Script's Research Institute, one of several trying to find
new ways to combat HIV. And so, thanks to her
husband's suggestion, Valente started to investigate kad Zoo each spring
(05:32):
and summer. Across the American South, you hear a lot
of stories like this one from Channel thirteen w m
a Z News in Macon, Georgia. Right over here is
where it gets the most out of hand. Ginger Hudson
has overcome a lot of battles. She lost her first
husband and survived breast cancer, but now she's at war
with kad Zoo just choking everything out, is covering them.
(05:54):
You can't see anything like there. There was a tree
underneath that big bush right there, but it's no longer
they are because the killed him. It sometimes called the
vine that ate the South. Kud Zoo now blankets large
portions of the southeastern US. If you grew up in
the South like I did, and spend any amount of
time driving on the highways, it felt like Kudzoo was everywhere.
(06:17):
Kazoo is a trailing and climbing semi woody vine. It
can't get um woody stems up to you know, thick
as your arm, sometimes even up to ten inches or
so in diameter. Nancy Loewenstein is the executive director of
the Alabama Invasive Plant Council. The leaves are trifoliate, so
there's three leaflets um. The flowers are lavender to purple
(06:40):
colored with a yellow center. And the flowers smell like grapes.
So sometimes when we're walking around in the summertime and
just in the middle of nowhere and needs smell what
kind of smells like great kool aid or great bubblegum?
Start looking around and you're likely to find some Kudzoo
flowers in the area. And where does the vine grow best?
Might be easier to say where it does not grow well,
(07:00):
and that is it does not grow well in really
wet areas or very high pH sools. It does also
doesn't do well in the shade, so you don't see
it too often in dense forests. See it more often
in open areas and kad zoo has already started to
eat parts of America beyond the South. Well, it's already
spread all the way up into um southern New England.
(07:25):
It's up into Illinois, Indiana, western West, into Missouri and Arkansas.
It's even pushing into Kansas and Oklahoma, Texas, and then
there's a few disc junct populations over in Oregon in Arizona.
It's estimated that kud zoo costs up to half a
billion dollars in lost crop, land and control costs each year.
(07:46):
So how did the invasive plant go from being a
World's Fair novelty to a catastrophic nuisance in the years
after the World's Fair? If you found kud zoo in
the US, it was usually for ornamental purposes. Bill Finch again,
So if you were in New England in the nineteenth
century and you had a bit of money, and you
(08:07):
were a bit of a horticultural experiment, or somebody would
like to trying new plants in the garden, you might
have tried using kud zoo as an ornamental vine, and
a few people did. It was pleasant, kind of like wistaria,
but not as nice, and it might have stayed that
way if weather and the US government hadn't intervened, and
(08:28):
the dust Bowl transformed the way people saw the American landscape.
It it struck the fear of God and the people everywhere.
During the early nineteen thirties, a severe drought over the
American Plains caused winds and choking dust to sweep the
region from the south up to Nebraska. Farmers were having
(08:49):
a real struggle. They were moving all over the place
trying to find some new land that worked. Georgia's fields
had been farmed so hard, the Carolinas had been farmed
so hard. Alabama was just being whipped again and again.
People were desperate. They were looking for solutions anywhere, and
(09:12):
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a good one when he became
president in nree When Roosevelt came into office, one of
his big campaigns was to was to overcome the problems
of the dust bowl UH and the barrenness of the
dust Bowl, to stop erosion at all costs. Roosevelt and
Congress created a new organization, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Five
(09:34):
days after the law was signed, twenty five thousand men
signed up to work for the c c C. Young
Gun citizen who arrived at Camp Flaby of arm and
copy of mine is now tough of the hickory nut.
The c CC eventually employed more than three million. It
was Roosevelt's most popular New Deal program. I wish that
(09:54):
I could take a couple of months off from the
White House and come down here and live with them,
because I know I get full of health the whare
they have. The c c C started a massive plan
to stabilize American soil, and they had a secret weapon,
a plant they called the miracle vine. Because of its
ability to flourish in difficult environments and to grow rapidly
(10:15):
kad zoo. Some of their folks realized, well, it's you know,
it is a great fodder. It can cover ground fairly
well once it gets established, And so the US government
started producing millions, literally millions of starts of kad zoo.
More than seventy million kud zoo seedlings were grown in
(10:36):
government run nurseries. Farmers were paid as much as eight
dollars per acre to plant the vine. But it wasn't
just the dust Bowl where kad zoo came in Handy
railroads and highways were being built all across the United
States at the time, and the railroads and the highway builders,
we're creating their own kind of barren landscapes as they
(10:56):
built these railroads and highways through the middle of the
woods that were no vegetation covering the causeways and the
and the embankments that they were creating along these highways,
and they needed something to cover it quickly, and so
they planted kud zoo all along the highways and railways,
especially in the South, and Kudzoo finally finally came into
(11:19):
its own along those highways and railroads because there were
no cows to eat it, there were no horses to
eat it. So once you planted it, it continued growing
and grew and grew and grew, and alongside that growth
something else sprouted a legend. So many of the South
highways and so many of the railroads were planted in
(11:41):
kud Zoo and h that had a really interesting effect
because suddenly people's view of the Southern landscape it was
what they saw at their car windows. It seemed like
Kudzoo was everywhere, and that's when the myth making began.
In Kudzoo really did grab hold of the popular imagination
(12:03):
but by the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties and sixties,
a new generation of Southern riders they actually began writing
about kutzoo. James Dickey, Um, who wrote the novel Deliverance,
had a very famous form about kut Zoo. Yes that Deliverance.
(12:26):
Seven years before he wrote Deliverance, Dickie published a poem
in The New Yorker called Kudzoo. It reads like a
Southern version of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in Georgia.
The legend says that you must close your windows at
night to keep it out of the house. The glass
is tinged with green, even so as the tendrils crawl
(12:47):
over the fields the night, the kud zoo has your pasture,
you sleep like the dead. And it's clearly meant to
be outrageous, but people took it seriously. It was about
kad zoo covering houses and and kad zoo invading people's lives,
and it's sort of caught the essence of of of
(13:10):
of how people feared kud zoo and what it was
going to do the landscape. James Dickey called kud zoo
quote a vegetal form of cancer. Some of his invaded
Southern compatriots. On the other hand, they began to identify
with their captor, and eventually Southerners adopted kad Zoo is
(13:30):
kind of a pet idea. They would come up with
ideas for let's name our restaurant after Kudzoo, let's name's
let's name our our website after Kudzoo. There there businesses
all across the South named for kud Zoo. Because of
this outgrowth of popularity, in some ways, the mythic reach
(13:52):
of kad Zoo became more important to the South than
the vine itself. It was far more part of our
social culture. Sure, it was far more part of our
speech in our language than it was part of the landscape.
But while the mystic version of kud Zoo has indeed
swallowed the South, the actual Vian script is far more
(14:12):
tenuous and more complicated. Do you have an interesting tale
about unintended consequences from history or your own life. Please
share with us by emailing flashback at Aussie dot com.
(14:34):
That's flashback at o z y dot com. We'll return
in a moment to kud Zoo and our tale of
(14:55):
vegetal cancer. But first I want to tell you about
another invasive species deflowering America, one that is also tied
to the eight seventy six World's Fair. Seemed to be
everywhere moths taking over backyards and front doors. The problem
is so bad that a swarm of moths actually delayed
a Jet Blue flight yesterday. So that's right. A few
(15:17):
years ago, a flight at Logan International Airport in Boston
was delayed for more than twenty minutes for an unusual reason,
a swarm of gypsy moths. The problem went well beyond
the airport. They're kind of like, really nasty and clothes.
Never seen as many moths as I've seen in the
last couple of days. Moths. A plague of gypsy moths
already afflicts many parts of the northeastern US during the
(15:39):
summer months, and it's only going to get worse as
they continue to spread to new places and in greater numbers.
So why this moth invasion, Well, the head of the
state's forestry health program blames several years of unusually dry weather.
That's true about the dry weather, But do you know
who I blame at Tienne Leopold Trouvolo. One fifty years
(16:05):
ago there wasn't a single gypsy moth in North America,
not one. But it only took a single man and
an unfortunate accident to change all that forever. Just the
side of them can make your skin crawl. They're gypsy
moth caterpillars and they're chopping through tree foliage in forest backyards.
I jumped off my bike. I was covered from head
(16:25):
to toe. Even on college campuses, gypsy moth caterpillars show
up in late April, about the time that oak trees
start to butt out. They can decimate trees and foliage,
and in some areas of the country they're slimy droppings,
coat roofs, decks, and sheds. It's a mess one that
really started back in the eighteen sixties with the blowback
from the pursuit of another smooth substance, silk. Silk was
(16:52):
a hot commodity in the nineteenth century. The aristocracy of
Europe couldn't get enough of it, and so silkworms were
in hide manned with silkworms. If you reel the silk
and wolve the silk and sold the silk uh you
would have literally a gold mine. Because silk was so valuable.
This guy knows all about unintended consequences. By the way,
(17:15):
my name is Edward Tenor. I'm a historian of technology.
I study unintended consequences, and since more than fifty of
reality consists of unintended consequences, I have a lot of
work to do. Tennor wrote a book called Why Things
Bite Back, and the story of the Gypsy moth is
a good example of why they do. One of the
(17:35):
big fads in America in the nineteenth century was the
search for an American silk industry. People believe that the
Republic should not be spending all this money importing silk
from Europe and from China. We really should be cultivating
it here. After a great silkworm plague, yes that was
(17:58):
a thing, ravaged Europe in the mid eighteen hundreds, the
search for a silkworm alternative in America heated up. Some
of the nation's greatest minds took up the potentially lucrative challenge.
Chen Leopold Trouvalo was a French astronomer who became a
political exile. And if Trouvelo had not become infamous as
(18:23):
the man who would introduced the gypsy molets, he would
be really famous as an astronomer, and Truvalu was mostly
an astronomer and a World's Fair caliber artist, But he
had a sideline that proved faithful for the American forest.
He was experimenting with uh organisms that could replace the silkworm.
(18:48):
Trouvelo had a million caterpillars of various species feeding behind
his house in Medford, Massachusetts. To keep them contained, his
property was encircled by an eight foot wooden fence and
covered by net. It was hard work raising caterpillars. They
required constant feedings, Their platforms had to be swept three
times a day. Birds had to be constantly fought off,
(19:10):
but Trouvelo continued his quest for the next silkworm. Trouvelo
believed that the gypsy moss might be a good candidate,
even though it was already recognized in Europe as something
of a pest. Trouvelo started raising gypsy moth caterpillars in
eight sixty eight, but even their best silk was coarse
(19:32):
and ragged. It was disappointing, but a severe windstorm made
things much worse. The storm knocked over some of Trouvelou's
netting in cages scattering gypsy moth eggs into the countryside.
There were some mots that uh that escaped, and there
was a growing road traffic. This was before the automobile,
(19:55):
but America had had an awful lot of road traffic
before automobiles. Americans were taking many more crips in the
horse and buggy days too, and these wagons, especially in
the suburbs of Boston, were carrying the these moths all
around New England, from buggies to trolley cars, to trains
(20:17):
and automobiles. Gypsy moth eggs spread across the nation as
Americans themselves grew more mobile. It proved impossible to eradicate them.
The problem was recognized, but it was really too late,
and so the spread just continue a decade after decade,
and the caterpillar still blaze the destructive path today. This
(20:40):
is Denise dot She's a database manager for the Gypsy
moth Slow the Spread program. They are defoliators of oak
and hardwood forests. The caterpillars, if they are in a
high enough population density, will actually eat all of the
leaves off of a tree. Since nineteen seventy, the gypsy
moths defoliated more than eighty million acres in the United States,
(21:03):
not at all what Truvillo or anyone else intended, but
it's a consequence millions live with today. Up next, how
bad are the kud Zoo and gypsy moth epidemics really
and what can we learn from them? We also talk
to a researcher who believes that one of kud Zoo's
greatest unintended consequences might still be yet to come. Enjoying
(21:43):
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It's an excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a
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and anthropology and the studea of humanity. With the Great
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(22:05):
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(22:29):
slash o z y The Great Courses plus dot com
slash Aussi kat zoo has become the bad boy of
invasive plant species, the one that makes local news stories
and inspires poetry. Back Congress officially listed the vine as
a noxious weed, and it is still illegal to plant
(22:51):
in some states. But how pervasive is kad zoo really?
It's a funny thing. Vines in the South all grow
very fast, and that's an important context. That's our kud
zoo expert Bill Finch. Again, the rate of growth of
kud zoo is nothing compared to the right of growth
of a lot of other vines, Asian wistaria probably is
(23:13):
uh is this bigger problem, if not a much bigger
problem than kudzoo itself. For a long time, says Finch.
Scientists and the media claim that kud zoo might cover
as many as nine million acres of the southeastern United States,
but more recent research by the U. S. Forest Service
finds otherwise. And it wasn't nine million acres, it wasn't
(23:36):
eight million acres, it wasn't seven million acres. Turns out,
when they actually did an inventory out of two hundred
million acres of forest land in the Southeast, kud zoo
only covered a little more than two hundred thousand acres.
That's less than one tenth of one per cent of
(23:58):
the forest land in the southeast. So why does kat
zoo feel so much worse than it is. Finch claims
that kudzu is not so much the king of the
forest but of the roadside. And that is why so
many Southerners like myself, who grew up looking at a
car window, became so enamored by and concerned with the vine.
We began spending all of our loss driving along roadsides.
(24:21):
It was how we understood the landscape. It was how
most of us were exposed to the landscape was was
framed in our car windows. So kut zoo seemed like
a much bigger threat than it actually was. In other words,
kudzu was not the vine that ate the South. It
was the vine that ate the part of the South
that we could see. Still, the desk Bowl Air decision
(24:43):
to plant kut zoo, the so called miracle vine and
massive numbers, continues to impact us in other ways today.
But here's the other problem with kutzo. There's a thing
called the kudzu bug. Have you seen these? They're creepy
Crawley downright annoying, and some folks in the Upstates say
they are overwhelmed by kazoo bugs. Kudzoo bugs look like
(25:04):
dark brown beetles with a round shell, like stink bugs.
They're harmless to people, but they travel in large packs.
Tavis Graham says when he walked out of his house Monday,
kudzoo bugs swarmed him. The entire house is covered. Everything
this white, you know of our white siding, The doors, windows,
they're covered. They're going inside the windows. Kudzoo bugs also
(25:26):
come from Asia, but far more recently. It's believed they
arrived not at the World's Fair but via the Atlanta
Airport about a decade ago, without a ticket or any bags.
But they are already overstaying there welcome. While kudzu bugs
helped keep kat zoo in check, they also like to
eat soybeans, which could have some serious consequences in the
future for soybean farmers across the South. Speaking of creepy bugs,
(25:56):
the gypsy moth caterpillar also promises to be a problem
in the future as it continues to colonize North America.
The niece Dot again is currently moving south and West,
uh there are parts of Canada that the winters are
just too cold for it to survive. Likewise, it will,
we think, reach a point in the south and so
(26:18):
where Georgia Florida, where the summers are just too hot,
and that will also affect survival. Programs like dogs have
indeed slowed that spread and helped manage caterpillar outbreaks. But
the best way of slowing the gypsy moth might be
a natural predator, a fungus known as the caterpillar killer.
Almost the entire trunk of this tree, from bottom to top,
(26:40):
is covered with thousands of now dead gypsy moth caterpillars.
The fungus created by the may rains killed them as
they entered adulthood. The spores of this fungus, also a
native of Japan, use the gypsy moth larvae to reproduce,
killing the larvae in the process. But as with the
katzoo bug, the long term concert points is of the
spread of this caterpillar killing fungus are unknown, and that's
(27:06):
really the moral of the story when it comes to
kud zoo, gypsy moths, or countless other plant and insects species.
When you introduce them into a new setting. You don't
know what is going to happen, and in some cases
it might be the exact opposite of what you expect.
Edward Tenner calls this species an unintended consequence, a revenge effect.
A revenge effect is something that isn't just the price
(27:28):
of something. It cancels out your your reasons for introducing
it or for using it. And that's what distinguishes a
revenge effect from a trade over side effect. And when
it comes to the introduction of species to new environments,
sometimes that species will thrive in new conditions. Sometimes it
will backfire and become a monumental pest like kud zoo
(27:49):
or gypsy moths. It can be hard to tell. Biological
science has no good way to predict how these things happen.
It's it's very good at explaining after the fact why
they happened, but it is not so good yet in
predicting just what's going to be dangerous and what's going
to be harmless or beneficial. So what should we do?
(28:10):
Maybe the lesson there is that whenever there's a question
of introducing any new organism, it has to be done
under extremely strict controls, and the experiment has to last
longer than most people would like. Nancy Lowenstein agrees, essentially,
we just need to be wary of quick fixes and
silver bullets. They rarely work out like we think they will.
(28:35):
We now use risk assessments to evaluate the potential for
invasiveness of new plants, but it's still an imperfect process,
and it's really difficult to predict how a new species
will grow in a new environment. And what should we
tell Enterprising amateur ecologists like Etienne Leopold Trouvelo. Denise Dodd
has some advice. Oh, I don't know, maybe a nice try,
(28:58):
but you should stick with astronomy. And I think that
one ended up doing a little bit less damage to
before us. It can be easy to get hung up
on the negative effects of something as invasive as kudzu,
but the vine actually has a number of other uses
and some surprising benefits. For one thing, kudzoo leaves can
(29:18):
be eaten like spinach, cooked or raw in kichha's and
in salads. If you cook with kudzu, though, just be
sure you choose only the smallest, most tender leaves that
are free of discolorations and critter bites. Ancient Chinese medicine
has also long used the kudzoo route to relieve hangovers,
upset stomachs, headaches, and flu symptoms, and modern researchers are
(29:40):
learning about some further potential benefits. Researchers that you ab
have uncovered new medical benefits from kudzoo, the fast growing
vine that covers many southern hillsides. New research suggests that
kad zoo might help lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin levels,
which could be beneficial for fighting a number of conditions.
The root of kud zoo may help patients suffering from
(30:03):
metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that increase your risk
for heart disease and diabetes. The kudzoo root has also
been shown to help alcoholics lower their consumption of alcohol.
And that's not all, which brings us back to our
organic farmer and researcher Susanna Valente. Thanks to her husband's suggestion,
she started to study the kudzoo root to see if
(30:24):
it could help with any of the anti retroviral therapies
being developed to treat HIV, and, much to the surprise
of Valenta and her colleagues in the lab, it did
so for cluz. We found that it was preventing a
staff that is actually not even targeted by other compounds
in clinical use, which is attachment. In other words, the
kudzoo helped prevent the HIV virus from attaching to the
(30:47):
human cell surface and beginning its harmful process of replication. Finally,
a surface that all of us can rejoice in kud
zoos swallowing up the outside of an HIV virus. Valentia
and her colleagues have not been able to isolate the
particular compound in kud zoo responsible for the inhibiting effects,
but she's's great potential in discovering or rediscovering some of
(31:09):
the beneficial effects of natural compounds like the kad zoo root.
They have immense power, and they are original compounds and
if very interesting structures, and uh there's I think definitely
we should there should be more interaction between classic academics
and some of these um less classic medicine like Chinese
(31:33):
medicine or or tribal medicine in Africa, or you know,
there are parts of the world. What did we learn
from our tangled vine of history today? One not everything
you see at a World's Fair is a groundbreaking effort
in human progress. Two it's possible to treat one calamity
(31:54):
like the dust boll by introducing another, so be careful
you don't make the problem worse with your soul oushan.
Three there's more to the world around us than what
you can see out your car window. For a lot
of things, from kudzu to fun guy to anime, seem
to work far better in Japan than they do elsewhere.
Five Kudzu is useful for treating everything from alcoholism to HIV.
(32:19):
And Finally, if your backyard is overrun with something creepy
and crawley and disgusting, it might not be an act
of God so much as the act of some misguided
man decades ago. Flashback is written and hosted by me
(32:40):
Sean Braswell, Senior writer and executive producer at Aussie. It
was produced by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Diorio Di Giziwa,
and Shannon Williamson. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks
to the crew at I Heart Radio podcast Networks, especially
Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to
Flashback on the I Heart radio app or listen wherever
(33:01):
you get your podcasts. Flashback is the latest podcast from Ozzie,
a modern media company producing original TV series, festivals, news
and podcasts for curious people. Ozzie's unique storytelling focuses on
the new and the next, whether that's forward looking news
and features, bold new perspectives on TV or brand new
(33:23):
ways of looking at history. What is that sound do
you hear? That's the sound of pest control looking for
an all natural and effective way for getting rid of
(33:45):
the kudzoo on your property. There's a new method that's
all the rage where I live in North Carolina. Are
some new contract employees for the City of Winston Salem.
They're efficient, they're hard working, and they're pretty cute. Do
you know who these employees are? Cities experien minting with
goat escaping for the first time. City officials hired a
heard of about thirty goats to go in and help
(34:06):
clear a plot of land there the Dixie Classic fair
Grounds that had been overrun with kud zoo. Officials say
the goats are quicker and cheaper than your standard methods,
and they are better equipped to navigate the plot of land.
Apparently it's also good for the goats and the goalkeepers say.
The goats were just fine with their new job. Kud
Zoo very healthy for them because it contains a lot
of protein. It looks like they're hard workers too, and
(34:28):
they don't complain short lunch hours. Back to her. To
dive deeper, head to AUSI dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash flashback. There you can find
my other lecture notes from today's episode, featuring extended interviews,
(34:49):
links to further reading and more information on the invasive
history of kud zoo and gypsy moths, as well as
links to other hidden stories from history. I'm covered by
me and reporters at AUSIE. We all need a break
(35:15):
from the constant cycle to learn something new, to gain
new perspectives. The Great Courses Plus streaming service is an
excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a variety of
subjects or pick up a new hobby. I've been enjoying
the Great Courses Plus while researching this season of flashback
lectures like Playball, the rise of Baseball is America's pastime,
(35:36):
History of the Supreme Court and Battlefield Europe have helped
me connect the dots on several stories from history. Right now,
they're giving our listeners a special, limited time offer, a
free month of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign
Up now through our special U r L. Go to
the Great Courses plus dot Com Slash Aussie. That's the
(35:57):
Great Courses plus dot Com slash o z Y The
Great Courses plus dot Com Slash Ozzie m
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