A while ago (probably several years now), an article went live on the internet about rethinking the label "invasive species"; I think it was this one in the Smithsonian. I could be mistaken, but the timbre is correct and anyway the contents of the article aren't really the point here. It was, in my lay estimation, interesting, thoughtful, and nuanced, and the Twitter link to it that I saw featured almost exclusively people arguing with the arguments they imagined it was making based on the headline. Several people repeated a form of the quip: "I guess kudzu is just misunderstood, huh?"
The thing is: literally yes. Kudzu was not something I was familiar with, never having spent any amount of time in kudzu territory, so I googled it, and found this article (also in the Smithsonian), and, like, the long and short of it is that kudzu really only flourishes along unmanaged roadsides but has been built up in the cultural consciousness as this monstrous unstoppable plant that would drown out all native biodiversity if left unchecked. But the truth, apparently, is that it really only grows along roadsides: it only appears universal because we seldom leave the road.
When I think about this I'm always reminded of the word "jungle", which is often used to just mean "tropical rainforest" but comes with it these connotations of the wild, the savage, this dense unnavigable tangle of plants. It's a word with a problematic history and it only really exists, especially with those connotations, because Europeans only ever explored the rainforests by river, and of course plants grow in a thick tangle by the banks of the river.
It is easy to forget, I think, that the world we perceive is not the world as it is; sometimes it's hard to even grasp the way the structures by which we interact with the world shape our perceptions. The world is unfathomably and fractally vast, filled with depths and nuances that we can spend entire lifetimes studying and still only scrape the surface; we don't have time to waste arguing with headlines.
Huh. As a Kudzu Seer, I never really considered this. It reminds me of when I learned to identify Tree-of-Heaven how I noticed what a large percentage of roadside trees it makes up.
It's true, humans often spend most of our time in disturbed areas, so we disproportionately see opportunistic invasive plants that thrive in disturbed areas. When I worked in conservation spaces I would even hear the term "native invasives" to refer to native species that would take over areas after disturbance and create unbalanced secondary ecosystems. Invasives in general tend to be less of an issue in old, undisturbed habitats because their quick weedy strategies only work when they aren't competing with an ancient preestablished system. This is why preserving undisturbed habitat is so important.
