The true story of kudzu, the vine that never ate the south

>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University. This was my experience as a child. We'd drive by groups of huge pines completely engulfed by kudzu and my mother…

There is a key bit in this article that isn't expanded upon. It's something I only learned about after spending hundreds of hours controlling invasives and talking to other people. Plants that are considered noxious weeds and plants that are harmful to our natural environment are pretty different things. If you look at who has authority under the Federal Noxious Weed Act, you'll see it is the department of agriculture. They really don't care about natural areas much at all…

I grew up believing many of the myths that this article addresses. So I'm hesitant to believe it entirely without verifying additional sources. In particular, this quote seems misleading: > the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland I quickly verified this statistic. But I know that "forestland" is a specific category of land. What about non-forestland? How many acres of kudzu are there on land that is not considered forestland? >…