I have written before about the near extinction of American Chestnuts, called the greatest ecological catastrophe in the eastern forests of America.
I tried (and failed) to grow saplings from four nuts received in payment for my article in the American Chestnut Foundation magazine in 2013. The Foundation has made tremendous progress since then, but the unbounded optimism of those days is tattered. The goal is to repopulate forests and parks with blight-resistant chestnuts generated by crossing exceedingly rare American Chestnuts with blight resistant Chinese Chestnuts. By repeatedly backcrossing hybrids with Americans, the saplings will become more American in successive generations, and more resistant by selecting specimens testing negative for blight. The theory is sound, and the latest generation is more resistant but not completely. Plant geneticists aim to identify the genes responsible for Chinese immunity. That knowledge will improve screening and reinvigorate the transgenic program at the State University of New York where saplings did well in labs but failed to thrive in field trials.
The Foundation has achieved another kind of success that bodes well for breakthroughs in research. It has cultivated enormous public interest and sponsors despite chestnuts passing out of living memory. I know few people who remember stories told by grandparents or great grandparents about the bountiful trees dominating their forests, providing tasty nuts for them, hogs, and wildlife, also producing beautiful timber that doesn’t rot. I imagine when my generation was young a few of us saw hulking skeletons of the former four billion trees up and down and astride the Appalachian Mountain chain. They probably thought it was past time to restore them, like the extinct passenger pigeon. But today, as we face even more tumultuous environmental challenges, there is energy and urgency among people of all ages. The chestnut is an icon for this movement, and its recovery is far more likely than bringing back the wooly mammoth and dire wolf.
I look out for chestnuts on forest walks in the Allegheny Mountains. Occasionally, I find a few leaves on a stem sprouting from roots that survive where an old stump rotted, but are soon struck by blight. But last week I checked a fine specimen in a friend’s backyard. Standing over ten feet tall, it is covered in foliage and even has flower buds although unable to produce nuts because the species depends on cross-pollination. The branches will canker in late summer, as they do every year, but spring growth is a sign of how nature struggling against the odds needs our care and ingenuity to reverse the harms we have done knowingly or out of ignorance.