We all need a break 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, 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 as. That's the Great Courses Plus dot 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
of twin invasions, one by vine and one by Caterpillar. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 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.
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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. That's flashback at o z y dot com. We'll return in a moment to kud Zoo and our tale of 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 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 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 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
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
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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 this episode, check out the Great Courses Plus streaming service. It's an excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a
variety of subjects. In researching this episode of Flashback, I dove deep into the lectures understanding cultural and human geography and anthropology and the studea of humanity. With the Great Courses Plus app, we can keep our minds active, escape into this vast world of information. Watch or listen at any time anywhere. 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 ausy. That's the Great Courses Plus dot com 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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
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? 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 Great Courses plus dot Com slash o z Y The Great Courses plus dot Com Slash Ozzie m