peaknix

If you have not lived in the deep south (in the USA) then you may not know the charms of kudzu. When you first come across it, you wonder why someone never trims their ivy then you realize its absolutely everywhere and consuming just about anything that is not tended on a regular basis.

Coming from your typical American suburban background where we dedicate our free time to vast tracts of inedible grasses, pouring toxic waste and precious water on this piggish crop to prove our neighborly worth, we might mistake kudzu as a plant that is all about rude infinite unsustainable growth.

Kudzu laughs at us for our blind zeal for order and complete willful ignorance of complex systems.

It is able to grow so fantastically because it doesn’t take from it’s environment so much as enhance it. It is a legume which means it fixes or captures nitrogen from the air (something our industrial mono-agriculture – other than soy beans – doesn’t do). It doesn’t suck the nitrogen from the ground, it gives it back.

It grows roots deep into the soil, bringing up water and minerals from way down, making it available to more surface dwelling organisms.

I could sing the praises of kudzu all day but its the way we DON’T appreciate it that is illustrative of our dysfunctional culture.

We don’t harvest it like the Japanese do, for food like kuzu starch and tofu. We don’t use it as a nitrogen amending cover crop. We don’t seriously develop it for cellulosic ethanol biofuels.

We emulate it’s prodigious growth without caring to understand it’s real nature.

We would, if we had our own misguided monkey brain ways, have a Kudzu Economy.

We built an economy these past 100 years based on infinite growth. We were lazy because, with liquid fossil fuels, the illusion of infinite growth is easily maintained.

Our consensus culture formed our minds to not ask where the power comes from or what to do if it stops. That is dangerous thinking when you are driving the bus on the very edge of a cliff.

No, we sip at the teat of fossil fuel even as it lies supurating in the morgue.

We suck ever harder as we close our eyes to a global economy that has ceased its expansion, inevitably resulting in disastrous immediate contraction.

We want our economy, our individual supremacy, our global domionism to grow on for ever, like kudzu growing greedily across a wasteland of broken down cars, moldering tires, burbling barrels of toxic waste, all the wages of that explosive growth, without ever once paying the dues, without ever once fixing the nitrogen for true and honest growth that requires a willful and respectful understanding of the complexity and limits to a system that may one day be sustainable.

No, I state the obvious when I say that we, as a nation, are snuggling up tight to that corpse in that cold morgue, sipping ever more ferverently.

We are closing our eyes and our ears tightly, living in a matrix-like construct where economic depressions get fixed, gutted banks pass their stress tests, deeper oil deposits are just waiting to be found, and a huge preponderance of hard data showing how we have committed climaticide and have overshot the tipping point quite completely are all utterly wrong.