I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick
She's right!!
Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."
But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.
People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.
But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.
Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.
You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .
Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!
There are many American chestnut trees still living outside their original natural range. Michigan, for example, has a large number of chestnut farms and is the biggest grower of chestnuts in the US. The species is listed as endangered but is not extinct.
Where I grew up is considered oak/hickory forest now but was once oak/chestnut. Even the corpses of the chestnuts are gone now. It's a wood that takes a long time to decay and there was at least one fallen trunk still somewhat recognizable when I was a kid, but it too is just a mossy spot now. We're still seeing the impact of the loss on local wildlife.
If Darling 58 gets approved I'm going to have to see how many we can plant on the property.
*waves* I work at the university where Darling 58 was developed, and we're all really excited about it!
The devastation of losing the American chestnut can't be overstated. It was a keystone part of eastern North American forests, providing nuts for wildlife, leaves and wood for many specialized herbivorous insects, and was a vital source of pollen for bees, beetles, butterflies, and other pollinators during mid-summer - a time when there are few other flowering plants in forests. Not to mention many other aspects I myself don't know much about, such as their mycorrhizal networks, which I'm sure were quite important.
I mention that last bit specifically because I study pollinators, and my latest research is surveying pollinators in American chestnut orchards to better understand the importance of this tree for insects. Because the loss of the tree happened so long ago (not in ecological terms but for peer-reviewed science) we don't really have the ability to do before-after comparisons, just after. Chestnut orchards are really all we have to get a tiny glimpse into how these trees interacted with other species. There's even a specialized chestnut bee, Andrena rehni, that only collects pollen from chestnuts and chinkapins, which was thought to have gone extinct for decades after the loss of chestnut. It was rediscovered only around a decade ago, and has since been found in a few chestnut orchards.
Oaks, which are also keystone species, have largely replaced chestnuts in eastern forests, filling their empty niche, but they're not the same. Undoubtedly the dynamics of forest ecosystems have been greatly impacted in ways that are hard to quantify. Yes, you can still find American chestnuts growing in the wild - the vast majority are not at mature age, as the blight kills them back, and they will continue to stump sprout over and over. I am from New Hampshire and our woods are full of little chestnuts that are maybe up to 3cm DBH and won't ever produce nuts. Naturally blight resistant mature chestnuts are exceedingly rare and their locations are often hidden to protect them. The ones you see in orchards are usually Chinese chestnuts, or American x Chinese backcrossed hybrids, which was the previous method of breeding blight resistance.
We have a growing number of invasive pathogens threatening our native trees - hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and more it seems every year. The entire dynamics of our eastern forests are at risk of fundamental change, as the composition and diversity of woodlands are impacted by these exotic diseases. There are countless researchers studying and trying to develop ways to fight them, but it's happening far too fast to prevent some significant losses. Ecosystems that have been evolving together since the last Ice Age are unraveling in our lifetimes, and I can't stress how important it is for you to remember.
Remember chestnuts. Remember ash forests. While we're at it, remember wolves and mountain lions, remember ivory-billed woodpeckers and passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and Atlantic cod. So many species that were fundamental parts of North America but have either gone extinct or become just about functionally extinct across most of their range.
Do not let shifting baselines make you think what you see now is normal.
We have to remember that things are deeply wrong. Most of the green you see on roadside and forest edges are invasive vines and shrubs. There aren't supposed to be this many deer and deer ticks. Cowbirds once lived on the Great Plains, now they're parasitizing birds across the US to the level of being a true threat to the survival of some endangered species. Atlantic cod was once so abundant they jumped into fishermen's boats. And don't even get me started on the decline in so many insect groups - the abundance of all kinds of insects used to be exponentially greater. We used to be surrounded by a wealth of biodiversity and life. Despair and grieve momentarily at how mutilated this land is, but then get your hands in the dirt and do something about it.
When Darling 58s become available for the public, plant one. In the meantime, plant other native trees, and native wildflowers, native shrubs, native ferns. Read some books on our native ecosystems - there's thousands of them out there, whether you are interested in pollinators, raptors, salmon, squirrels, saltmarshes, you name it, ecologists have written books about them, or field guides, to try and get the public motivated to care and help restore them. Start noticing as many species as you can on your next walk, including the invasive ones. Learn to read the landscape, so instead of one big wall of green you see individual species, instead of a white noise of birdsong you pick out the conversations of orioles, vireos, sparrows, and warblers.
The most that ecologists can ask you to do is to care. If most people just cared, let alone took action or better yet became a conservation biologist, we'd be in a much different scenario. But the majority of people are indifferent, ignorant, or are in the case of corporations actively working to destroy. Anyone can restore habitat, if done thoughtfully and with the right native species. You can transform your backyard, or help redesign a town park, or work with your local garden club or conservation commission to get native plants installed in front of buildings instead of more hostas and daylilies. It's not happening because no one's demanding it, and few know enough to demand it. Destruction will keep happening until there's pushback against it, ignorance will remain until eyes are opened to other ways of being.
We can bring chestnuts back. We can bring many things back from the brink, so in a few hundred years they will perform the ecological roles they once did. Nature is resilient. Your actions today determine the ecosystems of tomorrow, and all the things that ecosystems do for us, from mitigating hurricane damage to clean drinking water to carbon storage to food production.
Want some books to get started?
Read 'Bringing Nature Home' by Doug Tallamy, or his latest book, 'Nature's Best Hope.' Or, if you want to revel in the awesomeness of oak trees, his book 'The Nature of Oaks.'
Read anything by Bernd Heinrich or Thor Hansson, who will make you feel connected to this land like you never have before.
You can find books about the biggest trees in New England, birding guides for each state that tell you where the best places are and what to find there. You can find natural history encyclopedias for most states too - for example, 'The Nature of New Hampshire,' 'Natural Landscapes of Maine', 'Wetland, Woodland, Wildland' (for VT), and I'm sure many others, all of which are detailed accounts of every type of natural community that occurs in each state.
Want to learn how to 'read the landscape' like I mentioned? For the northeast, get 'Reading the Forested Landscape' by Tom Wessels. It's so good it was assigned as a textbook in my undergrad at UNH. I'm sure there are many similar books for the mid-Atlantic or southeast.
Seriously, just, go to the natural history section of your local bookstore or library. I could list a bajillion websites here with resources that are fantastic, but I argue it's far more valuable to sit down with a book and get immersed in a narrative that will move you spiritually. There's still so much information that's only found in books, or is collected there in ways that you'd have to go searching all over the internet for, without the assurance it's even accurate.
Change the way you see this land; notice the absences, the new arrivals, the things that are slowly blinking out and becoming a ghost of eons past, the things that are changing before our very eyes. Connect the dots through time, and see your place in it too.
The best time to plant a tree was yesterday; the next best time is when you can get your hands on a Darling 58.
Also, I want to add, if you’re interested in these sorts of projects, check with your state Department of Natural Resources (or Department of Conservation, even Game Commisions can have resources) - they may have all sorts of guides to native plants, or even programs to assist (and Certification programs if you want a cute sign).
I know specifically Maryland DNR has the Wild Acres program, but other states have their own programs as well.
