
American chestnut trees are “technically extinct” - mixmastamyk
https://timeline.com/american-chestnut-trees-disappeared-39217da38c59?source=collection_home---7------1----------
======
spqr0a1
Good news! this article understates the current stage of development for at
least one of the reintroduction projects.

A blight resistance gene (oxalate oxidase) has been added by state university
researchers in new york. The genetically modified trees are being crossed with
pure-bred chestnuts for improved genetic diversity before wider distribution.
[http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/](http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/)

The plan is to distribute seeds from these trees within 5 years through a
partnership between SUNY-ESF and the NY chapter of The American Chestnut
Foundation.

I've committed to planting at least 4500 of these trees (interspersed across
60+ acres) in their native forest setting once available. If you care about
the chestnut or ecology but agroforestry isn't your thing, these organizations
could really use donations to ensure this project continues.

~~~
bluejekyll
I don't know if it understates the status of these new breeds. They haven't
been proven, yet. It could be 50 years before it's clear that they are
resistant.

My parents are also doing this on their property, it is exciting, and I hope
this new breed is resistant to the fungus.

~~~
cpfohl
You can be pretty certain the plants they've got are extremely resistant.

They designed a brand new type of testing for resistance to be able to make
the progress they've made as quickly as they have. Instead of testing a whole
tree they can effectively test blight resistance on a single leaf, allowing
their time between generations to be measured in weeks rather than years.
(Time to first leaf, rather than time to whole tree).

~~~
bluejekyll
I hope that you and they are correct, of course. While reading through the
information the NY organization had sent, it just appeared that they were less
certain than that.

I am very excited. What was strange is that in order to accept the trees, you
had to agree to an entire set of restrictions. You can not sell any nuts was
one; another was you must cut down the tree if you ever sell your property, I
suppose there is an exception if the new owner also signs onto to the
agreement. Seemed a little awkward, but still worth it.

------
doomlaser
The emerald ash borer is currently having the same effect on the billions of
ash trees in North America.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_ash_borer#Invasiveness...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_ash_borer#Invasiveness_and_spread)

It's a similar story. The species was accidentally introduced from Asia in the
1990s, and it's spreading dramatically across the continent. No effective
strategy has been discovered to stop the destruction as of yet.

~~~
rotten
They have effectively wiped out all Ash trees around central Ohio. Once these
beautiful trees were 20 - 25% of our forest, tree lines, and even shade for
parking lots. Now they are all gone. You can really notice it in areas where
they haven't been removed by tree services. We have an abundance of
woodpeckers now because of all of the dead standing trees around us. I wonder
what they'll make baseball bats out of when the lumber supply runs out?

~~~
panglott
Louisville Slugger has started shifting to yellow birch and maple.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baseball-bats-
mad...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baseball-bats-made-from-
ash-may-fall-victim-of-climate-change/)

------
panglott
This article almost criminally understates the amount of success the
restoration program has had in the last few years. The American Chestnut
Foundation's effort to backcross the American chestnut with blight-resistant
Chinese chestnuts has been successfully producing trees for over 10 years. Our
local parks department has planted a number of these in our urban forest,
including an orchard of a dozen trees or more.
[http://www.kychestnut.org/louisville-american-
chestnuts](http://www.kychestnut.org/louisville-american-chestnuts)

------
aresant
From Wikipedia:

"Salvage logging during the early years of the blight may have unwittingly
destroyed trees which had high levels of resistance to this disease and thus
aggravated the calamity."

One of many good examples of humanities best intentions having adverse effects
on an ecosystem or species.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut)

~~~
tabeth
Isn't salvage logging entirely just to make money? Humanity reaps what it
sows.

~~~
kbutler
The implication that anything done to make money is automatically bad is
completely false.

The economic effects of "the invisible hand", whereby voluntary exchange
yields benefits to both parties and provides an economic surplus, is a "win-
win" whereby both parties are better off.

This is not without possible negative effects ("negative externalities") but
it is the most effective way to improve people's lives we've found so far.

Remember that nature and natural selection works by a more damaging mechanism
- "take what you can" \- and yet still manages to produce beneficial results -
though obviously not better for every individual or species.

~~~
panglott
Much of the economic history of economic exploitation has been "take what you
can" rather than free exchange.

It leads to the liquidation of a valuable long-term resource for a quick
short-term gain. A fishery that would be worth many billions over centuries is
liquidated for millions in a few years, for example.

This is especially true in the US, where so many plants and animals did not
live within a system of property. The American bison was saved only because
one or two landowner had a sentimental attachment to a local herd and spared
them from the carnage. The passenger pigeon was exterminated for cheap meat
with industrial hunting methods. Markets create positive sum games, but this
was just destruction.

The opportunity cost of billions of American chestnuts producing valuable nuts
and timber over the last century is incalculable.

------
joecool1029
Everytime I hike in the region I wonder what it might have looked like 100
years ago with these trees.

I still find myself looking for them sometimes, have spotted a few here and
there, many old giants that keep trying to send up shoots only to have them
re-infected and die again.

------
bhouston
The North American Elm tree is also being wiped out as we speak in a similar
very thorough manner:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease)

~~~
ComputerGuru
Yup. We lost two, massive elms in our yard this past spring to Dutch Elm
Disease. By the time you spot it, it's too late.

~~~
gyrgtyn
I hope we've learned from the Chestnut fiasco that the 'solution' to this is
probably not to cut down all Elm trees.

------
nickparker
Lost biodiversity fills me with a bizarrely deep sense of sadness.

I'm really hoping biotech will advance far enough to A) stop the anthropocene
extinction and B) eventually reverse it, if not by reviving species then by
creating new and wonderful additions to our ecosystems.

On an odder tangent, this is also part of why I'm really excited about space
habitats and eventual Mars habitats. When we start creating massive enclosed
spaces where we fully control the conditions, I think we'll start seeing some
beautiful engineered ecosystems. Utilitarian stuff at first, like those ugly-
yet-functional urban hydroponics setups you see today, but eventually I'm
hopeful we'll create some 'natural' beauty.

~~~
annnnd
On a different tangent: do you think thus created nature will be beautiful to
us? Will it be beautiful to people who are born there?

I wonder why the trees are beautiful to us.. Maybe because we are used to them
and connect nice memories to the image of trees?

~~~
nickparker
I don't think we'll create anything radically different enough to _not_ be
beautiful.

Modifying what already exists is usually easier than creating something from
nothing, and I would expect that to apply for engineering new organisms.

If you mean will the ecosystems be beautiful to us, as in, will a forest in a
space station really be a forest, or more of a gaudy tourist attraction and/or
a sterile research environment, I'm hopeful that we'll choose to include some
allowance for beauty in our planning.

Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy touches on these themes a lot, and I'm
also drawing to some degree from the Culture series' vision of orbitals. We're
clearly centuries (at least) from being able to build orbitals, but I think
far smaller ring structures - and even more likely mere two-body tether set
ups - may be just decades ahead.

------
wyclif
I'm old enough to remember large chestnut trees on our old farm in eastern
Pennsylvania, but they're all gone now. It's a genuine tragedy, and I hope
botanists can produce a blight-resistant tree soon.

------
pogba101
This makes me very sad. I love eating roasted chestnuts as a snack. This might
be part of the reason why I find chestnuts to be so expensive when compared to
back home (spain).

Seriously, try to get some chestnuts and roast them (oven or microwave) with
some salt. They are delicious, especially during the cold months.

~~~
panglott
In the U.S., chestnuts were one of the cheapest foods in the 19th century.
They were gathered up in huge amounts and sent into the cities. Like passenger
pigeon meat, which was so cheap that it was regarded as a food for the poor.

~~~
yareally
Coincidentally, both are now extinct.

~~~
panglott
The American chestnut is not extinct. Every single passenger pigeon is dead.
Whereas there are genetically pure, blight-resistant trees still living in the
wild, but they are so widely distributed that they couldn't breed
naturally—each surviving tree is documented, and researchers are still
searching for more, such as on isolated Appalachian mountainslopes. But new
American chestnuts are being planted. The American chestnut is more like an
animal that was nearly extinct in the wild, but rescued in zoos and captive
breeding programs, and is now being reintroduced to the wild.

The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation breeds genetically pure blight-
resistant American chestnuts and plants thousands (4,090 in 2015) of seeds
every year in an effort to grow genetically pure blight-resistant saplings.
[http://accf-online.org/](http://accf-online.org/)

The American Chestnut Foundation spent decades back-crossing American
chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts to develop a variety with the characteristics
of the American tree and the blight resistance of the Chinese one. Since
getting nuts in 2005, they've planted hundreds of trees in national parks;
there's an orchard of a dozen in our city's nature center; there are thousands
planted at the Flight 93 memorial alone.
[https://www.npca.org/articles/939-cracking-the-
nut](https://www.npca.org/articles/939-cracking-the-nut)
[http://www.acf.org/](http://www.acf.org/)

Chestnuts are similar to American bison: only a few very small bison herds are
genetically pure; but there are numerous large herds of American bison with a
small amount of domestic cow genes.

------
ommunist
I will be very happy to see a blight-resistant chestnut in the US as a result
of some genetic engineering. I am even ready to donate for such a good cause
if this effort will ever be crowdfunded by known biologists in the field.
Heck, I am even ready to get the US visa just to take part in planting them
back, once they get saplings. Guys, do it!

------
devy
And there is this promising news recently.
[http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree-
good-s...](http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree-good-shot-
making-comeback/)

------
mixmastamyk
Growing up in CA, I had no idea about the former glory or struggle of the
chestnut tree, and so found this piece quite interesting.

------
droithomme
Didn't realize it was that bad.

I'll continue to keep secret the location of the small grove of ancient mature
trees where I gather the nuts each year. If word got out you'd have the
crazies showing up wanting to cut them all down.

------
eppp
There are a few still alive near my house. Several professors have come to
take the seeds for use in these projects.

~~~
dmm
Perhaps they were acting on behalf of the American Chestnut Cooperators
Foundation, they have been working to cross various American Chestnuts with
demonstrated blight resistance to create a fully resistant strain.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chestnut_Cooperators_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chestnut_Cooperators_Foundation)

------
billfor
There are a number of hybrid American chestnuts that are blight resistant. I
have a Dunstan Chestnut that is doing rather well after a few years. It still
gets the blight but heals itself over time.

------
orasis
The real tragedy was that people were implored to chop down blighted trees. A
few of those may have had genetic resistance that could have kept the species
going.

------
51Cards
There is one in Stanley Park in Vancouver. I came across it and didn't know
what the nuts were so collected several off the ground to look up. I didn't
know anything about the tree before that.

For the curious: [http://imgur.com/a/eis4a](http://imgur.com/a/eis4a)

~~~
patall
I am not a botanist and cannot say from the pictures but that might as well
have been a european sweet chestnut, as its outside of the natural range
either way and the european is probably more common.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanea_sativa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanea_sativa)

------
mvidal01
If you want to help the Chestnut tree join The American Chestnut Foundation -
[http://www.acf.org/](http://www.acf.org/). They do research into developing
disease resistant varieties of Chestnut.

------
driverdan
They have it backwards. They're technically not extinct, just rare. I've seen
them in the wild.

My parents have one in their front yard they planted around 30 years ago from
a sapling they found while camping. It makes me wonder if it's a resistant
strain.

~~~
aacook
I think the term is "functionally extinct". The blight doesn't affect them
until they're 20-30 years old. There's a very good chance they'll die. I don't
think they've found a blight-resistant strain yet, just isolated trees, which
always eventually get blighted.

------
Pxtl
Butternut is also on its way out too thanks to canker fungus, but some have
been identified that are resistant so those are getting bred.

------
ttoinou
I always wondered if Americans cook chestnut spread ?

------
ausjke
Can I buy trees from lowes or homedepot or walmart to plant them? At Texas we
do have some chestnut trees, but not too many.

------
petre
It's always a fungus or a bug imported from Asia. The Emerald Ash Borer, the
Asian Longhorned Beetle etc.

------
virtualwhys
Cambridge, MA. Lone chestnut tree Enchanting fruit To a 70s child

Long gone now :\

------
Pica_soO
Hack its genom? Grow kevlar crusted chestnuts! There under the chest-nuttree,
i betrayed humanity and it betrayed me.

Curious question- is there a law against CRISPR-terrorism?

------
mac01021
The best kind of extinct.

------
lutusp
> There used to be 4B American chestnut trees, but they all disappeared

Not long ago this would have been rendered as, "There once were four billion
American chestnut trees, all now gone." People are no longer learning how to
write, they're learning how to type.

~~~
CalRobert
Can you elaborate? The title, as presented here, is nothing spectacular, but
it's not necessarily inadequate to the task. Also, the "all now gone" phrase
in your alternate strikes me as somewhat awkward.

While reading your version I also wondered why you might go with "There once
were" rather than "There were once"?

We all have our own pet peeves, though. I weep at the loss of the subjunctive
in English (For most usages it's "I wish I WERE there", not "I wish I WAS
there", dammit!!!)

~~~
lutusp
> The title, as presented here, is nothing spectacular, but it's not
> necessarily inadequate to the task.

I just see too many uses of "There used to be", which to me is a crude way to
concatenate two stock phrases without reflection, but in a awkward way that
grates on my ear. Also I think Strunk & White's concision emphasis still rings
true.

> I also wondered why you might go with "There once were" rather than "There
> were once"?

Voicing the candidates shows the difference. I imagine speaking anything I
write, which reveals phrasings that would be hard to say out loud.

> We all have our own pet peeves, though. I weep at the loss of the
> subjunctive in English (For most usages it's "I wish I WERE there", not "I
> wish I WAS there", dammit!!!)

I have a funny story about that. A depressed child enters the kitchen and
says, "I wish I was dead!" The child's mother says, "Oh no! Not that! Don't
you mean 'I wish I _were_ dead'?" :)

> Also, the "all now gone" phrase in your alternate strikes me as somewhat
> awkward.

Perhaps, but in my view not compared to "They all disappeared," which suggests
proactive agency (did they run away?) rather than passive fate.

~~~
CalRobert
'Perhaps, but in my view not compared to "They all disappeared," which
suggests proactive agency (did they run away?) rather than passive fate'

Ah, I see your point. Sadly I think a generation or two of teachers maniacally
chastising their students for ever using the passive form could have something
to do with this.

Even in this forum, you'll find plenty of people saying that all writing need
be direct, simple, and brief. There's virtue in that for quick memoranda, but
to say that there's no place in the world for complex, abstract writing or the
expression of nuance in careful word choice (as you describe) is a real shame.
Too often I've been corrected by people who say "you mean 'I wish I _was_'
because the subject is singular".

There's some evidence that language is what makes abstract thought even
possible. Perhaps we're leaving our minds unable to comprehend abstractions
when we reduce that available in our language. More discussion is at
[https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-
langua...](https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/).

Or maybe I just need to get over it. I overcame my violent aversion to
starting sentences with "or" and "and", after all.

~~~
coldpie
Just want to say that what I feared was going to be an angry grammar-nazi-
stand-off was actually a pleasant, friendly, and informative discussion of the
possibilities of language usage in different contexts. Cheers for keeping your
heads, all.

~~~
Ensorceled
I was thinking pretty much exactly the same thing, more "grammar gentlepeople"
please!

------
toodlebunions
They were all turned into peanut butter. True facts!

~~~
jacobush
Eh, alternative facts.

------
cmrdporcupine
The American chestnut has become some sort of poster child for GMO advocates,
but there is no need to resort to genetic modification to bring it back.

There have been and are blight resistant trees developed through conventional
breeding programs.

I have hybrids on my own property that are blight resistant. There are some
that are 95%+ American chestnut genetics and are not blight susceptible. There
are programmes in both Canada and the U.S. breeding these trees.

Marker assisted selection might be used which I suppose is a kind of GM
technology, but there is no need to resort to gene _editing_ or _splicing_.
That is a far more expensive and has the disadvantage of having extremely bad
PR.

Same thing for the non-browning apple, BTW. There was no _need_ beyond
availability of funding and various ag department/company politics to resort
to GM for that. There have been non-browning apple strains around since the
19th century.

I should also point out that there are rare instances of what appear to be
naturally blight resistant mature trees in the wild found here or there. Maybe
they're natural hybrids, or just lucky to avoid the blight, but if you find
one, various breeding groups would love to know.

~~~
Neliquat
This is the kind of anti science drivel I never expect to see on HN, but here
goes.

You paint this as being a 'gmo posterchild' when clearly, it is humans,
scrambling with Every technology at our disposal, to save a species. Your
whole rambling post harbors the implicit notion that 'GMO BAD, "Natural" GOOD'
with no statement to support that backward notion.

The GM strains are superior in apples for a plethora of reasons, or they would
use your obscure, bitter, non-browning, and less disease resistant apples
requiring even more pesticides. But they do not.

I concede that quite likely we can use thousand year old tech to accomplish
these goals. However the timeframe may be much longer (omitting red tape) for
a result, and time is of the essence.

If you can substantiate the unsaid evils of GM vs breeding by selected random
mutations, please, be my guest.

~~~
gyrgtyn
Tree genes work way differently than plant (like corn) genes. Trees evolve
very rapidly. Genes vary wildly between generations.

Planting a ton of Chestnut trees, maybe mixing in come Chinese genes, and re-
breeding the ones that seem immune is probably the fastest, cheapest way to
get immune trees again.

\--

Side thought, is the company making GMO Chestnuts going to have IP on the
seeds? That seems like it would create some bad incentives recreate this whole
scenario with other tree species -Kill all the 'native', free trees of some
species, reintroduce your expensive super-tree.

~~~
astrolabe38
> is the company making GMO Chestnuts going to have IP on the seeds?

No. The ACF's only problem is insufficient funding -> insufficient production.

