The Bamboo Parable
The war of attrition against an invasive foe in my garden is a parable for the battle against the agri-corporation in our agricultural landscapes
Bamboo; it’s an incredible plant. The subject of Pandas’ dreams (as well as eco-conscious consumers), some species are able to grow at a rate of 1mm every 90 seconds (an absurdly fast growth rate for a plant), and in China, vast forests of what is essentially a grass cover mountainsides up to 46 metres high. Like I said, bamboo is an incredible, even wonderful plant. Yet at the moment, it is my arch-enemy. For I will tell you where bamboo is not meant to grow: in a small patio-garden in the sunny south of England. Here it is not a wonderful plant — it is an absolute catastrophic menace.
We rent our small house. For now, it is all we can afford — especially in the south of England where prices are sky high and mortgage rates are still recovering from Liz Truss’ ill-fated economic experiment1 along with the rampant inflation the West has been plagued with. So, for now, we have to make do with the imperfections of renting and the frustrations that come with the decisions made by previous tenants. And this is where we get to the mystery of how a plant native to the warm and humid climate of China came to inhabit our garden. A garden which, for a good part of the year, is definitely not warm, and hardly ever is humid (one aspect of our weather that English people can be universally grateful for). A previous tenant decided that it would be a splendid idea to plant numerous bamboo plants in the tiniest of borders to the patio in our minuscule garden. Any horticulturalist worth their salt would have told you this is a bad idea — no, more than that — a very, very bad idea, as certain species of bamboo have invasive tendencies which cause them to shoot out rhizomes everywhere in order to spread far and wide. Needless to say, the bamboo that our unnamed tenant planted can be numbered among these unenviable species. So, lo and behold, we inherited a sprawling, towering, green mess that is pushing its way up through the patio and spreading to neighbours gardens...
Far from ideal.
It is a constant and relentless war one has to fight with this bamboo. No matter how hard one beats it back, come the summer, new shoots emerge like living rockets. Everywhere. One day there could be nothing, the next there are myriad purple spear tips erupting all around. This year, I lost control. Having spent (to my wife’s displeasure) too much attention on my prized heritage tomatoes, I neglected to keep up the war of attrition against the invasive nemesis. Couple this with a week in Germany which coincided with the heat of spring (and thus the most intense offensive mounted by the bamboo), come the Autumn our garden currently contains a matted green mess of thick, new bamboo growth shooting off from hundreds of thin bamboo stems. It is an impenetrable wall of greenery — a Great Green Wall of China in our tiny little garden.
Far from ideal.
Now that the bamboo’s offensive has slowed, thanks to the cold weather we have been having of late, I have seized my chance to take back the initiative. I have spent the last few weeks cutting back this explosion of growth bit by bit to try and tidy our garden’s jungle — and hopefully stop the spread to our neighbours garden. It is easy to focus on the accessible outer growth, but to really make progress — to deliver killer blows — one needs to get at the stems that are hidden away in the impenetrable green wall. One cut here with the secateurs (or loppers for the thicker stems) and a whole mass of growth can be removed at once which otherwise would have taken countless cuts to remove. I am known for bemoaning our society’s infatuation with efficiency — but there is one area of life where efficiency is almost unequivocally a virtue: war (provided, of course that one is on the side of justice). And this, my friends, is a war.
As I have been contemplating my Autumn Offensive, my mind has wandered on to what I would rather be doing — writing about agricultural and nature themes. However, I came to realise that I was enacting a living parable in my relentless war against the green invader — one that was perfect fodder for an essay. I saw the similarities between the attritional battle I was waging against bamboo and the fight against the big agri-corporation’s dominance in our weak and vulnerable agricultural landscapes.
Our beautiful and precious agricultural landscapes have been long exposed to the invasive forces of the agri-corporations, whose sprawling arms of control and influence have come to dominate almost every part of our agricultural system: from fertility to horsepower, from to pest control to seed genetics, almost every part of the agri-system is under the iron-grip control of the agri-corporations. And these agri-corporations really do exhibit invasive dynamics. Invasive species reconfigure landscapes to become more hospitable to themselves2, and less hospitable for what should naturally inhabit the habitats. Agri-corporations act likewise. They, through the laws of economic efficiency, force the creation of monocultural mega-fields a perfect habitat for their mega-machines. And they, through encouraging farmers to their pesticides, indirectly create pesticide-resistant weeds which require new pesticides to be formulated in the agri-corporations own labs and sold as the next “solution” (a solution that will in turn create new resistant weeds and so on).
Additionally, like the bamboo in my garden, exponential growth is the doctrine all the agri-corporations devotedly pursue and is essential to the invasive dynamic. They must continually grow their market share to satisfy their corporate executives in their ivory-glass towers, and the mass of shareholders who underpin these corporate structures. Thus, ever more farmers must come under their influence (and in turn are replaced by their products), and ever more landscapes must bear the scars of the agri-corporations mega-machines — all to satisfy the demand of those who will never that their hands dirty in the soil. If left unchecked, the domain of the agri-corporations will grow even stronger in our rural lands, outcompeting and subduing more small farms and their Good Farmers who try to eek out a living in the marginal lands by farming in their own agro-ecological or regenerative way. They have tried, with varying degrees of success, to live lives ‘adjacent to the machine’. Sadly, as the agri-corporational machine grows stronger, such a life becomes ever more vulnerable and ever harder to sustain.
Good Farmers, and their agrarian advocates are, though, a tenacious breed. They will not go down without a serious fight. We can try to attack the corporate influence here and there — but ultimately this is like cutting the outer growth of the bamboo. It will just grow back — and perhaps come back even stronger. It would be much more effective to attack the root of the agri-corporation’s tree — but this is hidden behind an impenetrable mass of labyrinthine corporate structures and legal obfuscation, and is propped up and kept fed by vast sums of wealth and commandeered politicians (who are just as enamoured with constant growth as the agri-corporations and who may even have once sat on their executive boards). Making any sizeable difference to the invasive modern agricultural system will thus require an incredible amount of time and power fighting in distant corporate arenas and lobbying halls — time that could be better spent addressing the degradation currently plaguing our own local agricultural lands. And it should be obvious that this task is well beyond the means of any individual farmer, agrarian, or enlightened consumer.
Farmer collectives and unions may be able to beat back the agri-corporation from a set local area3, but to really address the entire system, to really lay the killer blow to the corporate behemoth and thus restore the dominance of the Good Farmer, would require getting politicians on to our side so that they may wield their regulative powers — which, noting how closely aligned politicians interests are with the agri-corporations, and how the agri-corporations have convinced the politicians about their fundamental importance to “food security”, seems highly unlikely. No politician in their right mind would threaten what supposedly keeps the nation fed, would they?
What then is there left for us to do? For the answer is surely not to roll over, submit to the inevitable, and let the agri-corporations tractors and chemicals obliterate what is left of our Good Farm landscapes. No, these are too precious to relinquish. The war of defence and attrition must go on through the long and strenuous work of carving out and protecting small areas of agro-ecological resistance. We know that the invasive is here to stay and that most areas have already been lost to its control. But what we can do (like the conservationists who fight against invasive species) is to set up Protected Areas — places where either the invasive has not yet spread to such as traditional agricultural landscapes, or wrest back some control on the individual lands we own to create new agro-ecological reserves. For those of us who do not own land, contributing to this endeavour will involve heavily and consistently supporting those farmers who are trying to resist the invasive machine by farming in lower intensity, agro-ecological, or more traditional ways by committing to buy from them directly and advocating on their behalf.
And perhaps looking to the distant future, we can hope that one day the agri-corporational machine will have grown so big that it will collapse under its own over-inflated weight or that our politicians will finally act in favour of what is truly valuable — but we cannot pause our action and wait for this to happen. The war of attrition continues unabated. There is too much good — beautiful landscapes, traditional industries, agri-biodiversity, and wise old Good Farmers — that is at stake for us to slacken in the fight.
And what ever you do (unless you are in China), do not plant bamboo on your land.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/trussonomics-for-dummies/
https://news.umich.edu/invasive-species-alter-habitat-to-their-benefit/
As I will come to explain below, this is a worthwhile and necessary activity.
An important parable. It got me thinking about the most notable invasive species of the American South: the Japanese vine called kudzu. In the North Georgia mountains where my extended family lives, the common solution is to simply burn the kudzu off of hills and fields once a year; but where it begins overtaking the woods, there's really nothing to be done. I don't usually see kudzu in our part of Virginia, but 2-3 hours' drive South of here we reach what my kids call "Ghostland," where the woods along the highway are so covered with kudzu that the trees look like sheeted phantoms. How long until the kudzu reaches us? Ten years? Twenty? It's definitely coming.
I feel you on the pains of renting! Invasive species too—much of my professional life is spent dealing with exotic invasive species.