IVY Gourd, Wood Rose, Kudzu ... they might sound like the name of exotic dancers but these not-so-cuties are in the business of covering up, not taking it off. Bounty on plants
can make us reapThey are vines and they are well on their way to covering every tree, telephone pole and and abandoned car on the island. Their dance is slow yet relentless. With few natural enemies, they can gradually climb the highest trees, covering leaves and limbs and converting the trees into gigantic organic dinosaur sculptures. Deprived of sunlight, the trees die.
The state Department of Agriculture is trying to find ways of wiping out the alien vines. But so far, nothing has worked. (They are having some success against the ivy gourd using African vine-boring moths.)
I've got a better idea.
The main problem with these vines is that they have no value. They are simply a pest. The way to wipe them out is to give them value. That is, make it worthwhile for people to harvest the vines.
Imagine if marijuana suddenly began sprouting all over the island. Do you think it would be allowed to run wild or would it quickly be harvested out of existence? Because even though it is illegal, marijuana has value.
As far as I know, you can't smoke any of these alien vines. Well, you could, but you'd probably come down with Ivy Gourd Lung or Oozing Kudzu Sores. A friend of mine at the Agriculture Department said there are cultures that eat some of these vines. But it would take a powerful appetite to deal with the mass of vines in Hawaii. They'd have to taste like bacon-double-cheeseburgers before I'd start gorging on them.
But there is a way to give them value and provide a service to the island. Turn them into H-POWER food.
IMAGINE what would happen if the state put a bounty on the vines, say a few bucks per dried pound. New businesses would spring up to harvest them. The state could issue contracts for certain tracts of public land. Private landowners could raise money by stripping the vines from their property or allowing free-lance kudzu cowboys to collect the vines from their land.
The vines would supply a steady diet for the H-POWER energy beast, at least until the vine problem disappeared.
Now, some would ask why should H-POWER pay for dried vines when there's plenty of free garbage to burn? But we throw away good tax money away on stupid things all the time. The beauty of paying people to collect vines is that instead of simply shelling out public funds to people who sit on their butts, we'd actually be getting something in return for our money: electricity.
There is the danger that as the vines began to disappear, some entrepreneurs would actually begin cultivating them. This probably won't happen, simply because land is too expensive to raise vines. It couldn't even support sugar cane and pineapple. Besides, the great thing about this idea is that the vines are essentially free to anyone who wants to go to the trouble of harvesting them.
There could be a certain number of liability problems involved. Some guy falling from a tree while trying to take vines on government property might try to sue the state or city. But you could solve that problem by making sure that anyone wanting to sell vines to the H-POWER plant signs a liability waiver first.
So, there you go. By simply making the vines valuable, you assure their destruction. It's one of the weird fundamental laws of free enterprise and the environment.
Now, if we could just get rid of cockroaches. Hey, how about C-POWER? Anybody willing to build a cockroach-to-energy plant?
