A Year of Kudzu

A year ago the SPARTANBURG JOURNAL appeared in local driveways and drop boxes the first time. When it was first proposed it was clear that the weekly paper could fill a valuable niche here in Spartanburg and offer a badly needed alternative to what has almost always been a one horse news and opinion town. It appeared as a sprout last May and has now year later matured into a strong sapling.

The Kudzu Telegraph has appeared in all 52 issues this year except one, a holiday absence on July 4th. My first column was about snakes and since then Ive written about local deer (a few too many times according to a friend), minks, beavers, frogs, geese, wildflowersand even once about kudzu. Ive discussed regional planning, registered my disapproval about 4-wheelers riding our neighborhood trails, and even suggested Union County be preserved as a national park. Ive reported on vacations to Wisconsin and school trips to Mississippi. Ive considered last Septembers Hurricane Katrina and what I saw of its impact on the Gulf and chronicled my own 5-day river journey from Spartanburg to Columbia.

Ive talked of dreams and made lists of realities. Ive quoted from the work of Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Michael Pollan, Annie Dillard, local friends and family.

This is an opinion column, so Ive opined about local news issues that engage me and others: Ive argued against a clear cut on the Lawsons Fork, weighed in with my opinion about Waste Management and the now dead landfill proposal near Enoree, and discouraged the building of Patriots Lake at the confluence of Fairforest Creek and the Tyger River.

One of the best moments as a columnist this year came during the public hearing about the landfill when a thousand concerned citizens of Spartanburg County showed up at The Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium and a man I didnt know stopped me in the lobby and said he was present that night because of a column Id written that week. He thanked me and said Id helped sway his position and now he was opposed to signing up the county for another landfill.

The funniest moment came when a man wrote me, disappointed, when he realized halfway through one of my early columns that he wouldnt get any advice from me on how to control the kudzu in his yard if he read on.

And if you put yourself out there week after week in print there cant help but be some nitpickinglast week some invertebrate sent an anonymous letter to my college address. Inside was my latest column and circled on the page was my misuse of the word pour, accompanied by a photocopied page from a usage dictionary.

So why write? Why put yourself out there? I write this column because it makes me pay attention to the world around me. At least once a week I have to sit down here in this hard chair and put something together, open at least a little window on the larger world.

Some people think a great deal about money and how to make it, others look out at a week just passed and wonder what they did to help others. What I think about mostly when I sit down to write The Kudzu Telegraph is how we humans interact with what David Abram calls the more-than-human worldland, flora, fauna, weather, time. The KT has offered me a space for public registration of my attention. Each week theres a new angle on the age-old problem of living in the world. All I have to do is notice and offer it to others.

Im not alone in these concerns. In the year since I began writing this column Ive been interested in how often our relationship to the planet has hit the hard news cyclesglobal warming, oil as a resource, the bird flu, Katrina. Some people are even speculating that environmental issues might just track as a major issue in our presidential elections in 2008. There could even be a full-scale greening of American politics in our future.

So whats to expect from the next year of Kudzu? More of the same. I wish I had two times the space this week because what I really wanted to talk about this morning was how I walked out in the yard yesterday and found two hatchling eastern box turtles and rejoiced that a nest had survived and a clutch of turtles had wandered away from the egg shells out into the landscape around our house.

My field guide says that these land turtles often live 30 or 40 years and a very few may reach the century mark. Maybe Forbes magazine should use the health of eastern box turtle populations and the habitat that supports them as an indicator on their ranking of metropolitan areas around the South. Thats a survey the Kudzu Telegraph could get behind.