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This story is part of our Climate Solutions week coverage. Read more here.
On a hot sunny day in Fairview, a crew of six people unload a truck’s precious cargo – big buckets and plastic tubs containing little rivercane plants set in about a foot of soil. The group, convened by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, takes the plants to the flowing Cane Creek — a site likely named for the native bamboo now being returned to its banks after a long absence.
There are more than 450 cane-related place names in the Southeast, according to Adam Griffith, a cooperative extension agent for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who’s known as a regional rivercane wrangler. He doesn’t know for sure that the names are all tied to rivercane, but he guesses it’s likely. At one time, this grassy bamboo covered the banks and valleys of western North Carolina. But its population is not what it was.
When European settlers got to the region, they didn’t understand what rivercane did, Griffith said. It was treated as a noxious weed.
“The plow took a lot of it, the mower took a lot of it,” Griffith said, as the crew began to dig next to the creek. “Here in the Southeast with a lack of flat farmland, people would farm on just about any piece of land, and did what they could to survive.”
Over hundreds of years, development and agriculture led to the loss of 98% of all rivercane throughout the Southeastern United States.
What remains is in small pockets, rather than the lush canebrakes, or thickets, that once held streambanks together and shaded vital river habitat. Now, people are returning to rivercane as a climate solution – one that could also carry significance for the cultural preservation efforts of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
That day in Fairview was warm for spring, and it was near the end of the annual planting season for rivercane.
“If the plants survive this summer, their chances of long-term survival are very good,” Griffith said, as he and the planting crew began to dig. The creek flooded during Helene, and flooding was worse because there were no deep-rooted native plants like rivercane to catch storm water and slow it down.
If these roots make it, they’ll grow into larger canebrakes that absorb stormwater, trap sediment, provide habitat, and keep the water shaded and cool. Canebrakes, Griffith said, protect the creek and everyone who lives near it.
“They'll form a super dense jungle gym of rhizomes and roots underground and that's what stabilizes the stream banks during the floods,” Griffith said.
“They'll form a super dense jungle gym of rhizomes and roots underground and that's what stabilizes the stream banks during the floods,” Griffith said.
Since Helene, Griffith has seen a surge of interest in rivercane. There are multiple organizations taking on planting projects including government agencies, nonprofits like RiverLink and MountainTrue, as well as UNC-Asheville and Warren Wilson College.
And these groups are turning to the Eastern Band to help bring it back.
An enduring indigenous tradition
While rivercane is now seeing a resurgence among conservationists, the Eastern Band of Cherokee have long known its value — for both its flood prevention powers, and its key role in the tribe's traditions.
Basketweaver and enrolled tribal member Mary Thompson told BPR that rivercane has been a vital tool for the tribe’s entire history, which goes back at least 15,000 years in the archeological record.
“We used it for housing, for roofing, for toys, for musical instruments, for weapons, for storage, vessels, basketry,” Thompson said.
She’s teaching her own children and kids in the community her craft, but in order to do it, they need access to the material.
Thompson finds herself trekking hours away to find rivercane for her crafts.
“We don't have that access to it on a regular basis,” Thompson said. “We've gone as far away as Barbourville, Kentucky.”
Historically, Cherokee people both lived with and managed the natural rhythms of the landscape. What canebrakes did to control flooding was common knowledge, and still is within the tribe. Controlled burns, Thompson said, were key to reducing wildfire risk and making land more suitable for certain species the tribe depended on for food.
Some scientists believe prescribed fire may have been used to make land more suitable for rivercane, which can be fire-dependent. Basket weavers in previous generations would return to the same canebrakes and monitor them.
“Now I think that people are starting to recognize the science behind what we did as a tribe,” Thompson said.
A post-Helene ‘powerhouse’
At Warren Wilson College, a group of students is taking cues from that science.
The bucolic campus is home to hundreds of acres of farmland that wind around the Swannanoa River. And along its banks, the number of feathery green fronds of rivercane are slowly but surely expanding, with some of them hovering over the students.
Tim Comstock is among a group of graduate students working to restore cane along the middle Swannanoa River as part of a collaboration with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Riverlink. The project was funded by a grant from the Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources, an organization working to restore and maintain the natural resources used in Cherokee craft.
Comstock, a member of the applied climate studies program, said the resilience of the plant speaks to him.
“The river can rise as much as it wants and the river cane doesn't care,” he said. “It stays intact. You can bury it with, like, three feet of sand and it'll just poke right up through it.”
“The river can rise as much as it wants and the river cane doesn't care,” he said. “It stays intact. You can bury it with, like, three feet of sand and it'll just poke right up through it.”
Comstock, along with fellow graduate students Hazel Pardington and Fiona McColley, have spent all year harvesting rhizomes from healthy patches and planting them at local parks and riverbanks, where Helene has left the land crumbly and fragile.
“I got interested in this project because it felt almost like the most hands-on, practical way to help post Helene,” Pardington said. “Rivercane is just a powerhouse.”
Prior to starting the graduate program, Pardington had never heard of rivercane.
“Now I feel like I'm obsessed with it,” she said. “One of our program partners calls people who are really into River Cane Caniac. So we're all proud Caniacs now. We love the stuff.”
For these students, the possibilities of the plant are boundless. They have ideas about how government agencies could plant rivercane at utility easements, or how gardeners and businesses could plant it in their yards. They’ve distributed educational pamphlets about the value of the plant.
There’s just one problem getting in the way: the supply chain.
“Getting our hands on enough of it and being able to have it, so nurseries could sell it. Things like that have been the major challenge,” McColley said. “We've got the proof that it does a great thing, but being able to actually have more of it is the hardest thing.”
To that end, Comack is working on simpler ways to propagate the plant without having to harvest the roots from the ground.
“So far it appears that nobody has really tried it or at least has not published any trials on rivercane with those methods,” he said. “So, I said, ‘Well, if we can propagate it more efficiently without having to dig it from where it's already growing, all the better.’"
The hope of all of the efforts to grow more rivercane is that replanting and spreading the word can help to heal old harms to land and people – and allow the riverbanks to hold together a little stronger when the next flood comes.
