The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut | Hacker News Reader

The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut

sierraclub.org

286 pointsjseliger86 comments

There is a good chance in 10 years we will look back and ask ourselves why the heck it took us so long to allow the genetically engineered chestnuts. There is a big difference between genetic engineering to remove a species from existence vs reversing a bad thing we did and protect a species from going extinct. Our duty is to protect nature from us, and not not intervening when we destroy it. We did this accidentally by introducing the fungus. It is therefore Our duty to protect the chestnut by any means we have to reverse the damage we did, and restore equilibrium

I was unfamiliar with the chestnut debacle until I read The Overstory - I immediately put the book down and went to read about chestnuts being wiped out in droves.

Same; reading Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers (which deserved its Pulitzer) was a profound experience. Trees are amazing.

I will admit I never expected to open the front page of HN in 2021 and read a comment about someone who had read The Overstory. Richard Powers is the preeminent American novelist of our time. With respect to all his works, HN types will especially enjoy Plowing the Dark and Galatea 2.2.

There is no better way to dig deep into the effects of modern technology on society than to read Richard Powers. It is no exaggeration to say that reading Powers fundamentally changed the course of my life. Reading his work is absolutely worth your time.

This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pigeons and likely thousands of other unique species. But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.

> would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease [...] went extinct

Now now, ecological disasters are only permitted if they make a few people temporarily very wealthy.

Globally improving everyone and their descendants' life a bit, without even paying for it, is just not okay. They can just constantly fumigate themselves with decreasingly effective chemicals to deal with it.

Interestingly, the disease carrying mosquito is an introduced/invasive species, so eradication in many parts of the world would be repairing the damage that humans caused.

> But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.

Remember when Mao tried that with evil evil sparrows stealing seeds from the party and caused the greatest famine in human history? Fun times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Not all mosquito spread disease or bite humans and the ones that do are not a major part of important ecosystems. When DEET was used heavily it didn't collapse any ecosystems. If we eliminate those species, the non-spreaders will fill the niche while eliminating major human suffering. It is not comparable to killing any sparrow sized bird.

As far as we know. My argument is that large chaotic systems are often poorly understood by us and we have gotten it wrong many times in the past.

I agree that erradicating bad mosquitos feels like a win, but I personally don’t know if there’s any unforeseen effects.

Your argument lacks nuance. It comes across as though you are unwilling to accept that we can learn from the mistakes of the past and be more careful this time, because with that attitude you don't have to engage with the specifics of a proposal. It really seems like pointless fearmongering, especially after the article already addressed some of the specific concerns about what might go wrong with introducing GMO chestnuts into the wild. Reminding people of the general concern that making significant changes to a whole ecosystem can have unforeseen consequences doesn't add anything to that conversation.

Ha. He learned from the past that some things are better to not mess with.

If you fail at something 1000 times at some point humility should force you to reconsider trying.

If something is worth doing it's worth doing. I'm glad for example the people trying to cure various diseases don't have the characteristic that you call humility but I reckon is something else entirely.

Risk vs. reward

Never risk the thing you can’t afford to lose to gain something you don’t need.

Different when it comes to life ending sickness.

Now you're talking about something completely different than what you were talking about initially.

My reply was to the comment I quoted, not the introduction of GMO chestnuts. We have had great success at introducing gmo crops very successfully.

We have more often caused harm than good when eradicating entire sections of ecosystems. From what I’ve read at least.

We could maintain a few populations in labs and/or isolated areas. Inspects repopulate hella fast, so it’d be easy enough to undo such a project if we found that they were a lynchpin of some kind.

Importantly, the mosquito that is the major spreader of malaria is an invasive species in most of the world. So wiping out that species is actually correcting the ecosystem. Win-win.

Is there consensus on how significant the sparrow thing was to the famine? I would have guessed that the whole “you’re not allowed to have your own farms any more, you now have to work in these farms, but you don’t get to keep any of the food from these farms” thing was a much more significant cause.

This is a core reason many are freaked out by too much government.

If a company screws up. It goes out of business. Others will take its place. If a government screws up, oh well.

Companies screwing up has caused way more harm than gov. Bhopal, lead gasoline, asbestos, tobacco industry, strike busting layoffs company towns, oil spills, ozone hole, greenhouse gases. On and on.

Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

They are both collections of flawed humans. Accountability is necessary regardless of the collective noun you use.

>Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

This is how we get starving people and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. Because the government repossess farms and gives the farm land to people who don't know or don't care about farming. The lack of food forces the "good" government to import food by printing money. Since the excess money is not being invested into food production it is causing stagflation and since the obligation to import food never goes away the rate of printing has to keep going up which ultimately results in hyperinflation.

If anything, governments are fully responsible for causing bad incentives and encouraging destructive behavior by companies. It's absolutely laughable that people think that setting the wrong incentives should be compensated by cooperative goodwill of 7 billion people when greed is a much more effective way of achieving good outcomes if the incentives are right. Especially since there aren't 7 billion selfless people on the planet.

I’ve read “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but it’s been a while. Wikipedia [1] captures every contributing cause, but I’d emphasise the illusion of superabundance, which was essentially local government exaggerating the size of their harvests to make themselves look good to Beijing. Their province then had to export the entire harvest to cover their lies. Incompetent government was the major cause either way.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine#Causes_...

From the accounts I've read, I think the sparrows thing was more of a symbol of what happened in the culture and an exemplar of the Party's thinking than the linchpin in the ecology they're often portrayed as.

Remember when WHO tried that with smallpox and now humans don't die a hideous death, or survive with permanent disfigurement?

Fun times.

> bacteria that causes wet dog smell

Is wet dog smell caused by some particular bacteria, or would this be more like wiping out an entire ecosystem?

> bacteria that causes wet dog smell

My dog had a terrible yeast allergy. His paws would swell, his hair would fall out. He was constantly itching. We had to bathe him twice a week with what was basically a shampoo form of Vagistat, and every day had to coat his paw pads in actual Vagistat, and in between the toes and pads. Oh and tons of steroids 10mg 2x day.

He HATED it, but it kept him itch free, and he never smelled like wet dog.

The steroids also served a second function we didn't know at the time, they kept his brain tumor under control for about a year until we found it and had grown too big to be controlled any longer. So it gave us an extra year with him before we had to put him down after 2 days in an induced coma trying to get the seizures to stop.

I'm glad to see the Sierra Club on board with the GMO path forward. A couple of interesting links on this topic below. See the second link for how impressively massive these trees were before the blight killed them off.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/magazine/american-chestnu...

https://www.denverpost.com/2012/12/08/volunteers-work-to-rev...

Very interesting article. I wonder about the second and third order effects of genetic engineering, but I would say I’m optimistic about a tree that’s engineered to survive a blight, whereas engineering crops so they can survive being soaked in cancer-causing poison that kills everything else in the field —- and then eating them —- seems far more concerning.

You should really read more about how modern herbicides work. Glyphosate disrupts a specific enzyme that only plants use. That's why genetic engineering works so well for resistance to it, you can simply eliminate the vulnerability.

The issue isn't that it's cancer causing (there's next to no chance it is, the issues are with the surfactants). The real issue is that weeds are evolving to also have glyphosate resistance, as would be expected when such evolutionary pressure is applied.

The concerning thing about glyphosate from a biochemistry standpoint is that it's a very small molecule. As any engineer knows, small objects fit in lots of holes. It's also got a phosphonic acid component which is not a normal motif in biology and could (maybe) disrupt the function of any protein that happens to bind to it.

The intention of glyphosate is reasonable, but the effect can be different.

This is traditional cross breeding, not genetic engineering per se. Although I have to wonder why one way seems natural and the other not, when they are both guided by human intervention.

No actually. The article mentions it closer to the end, but what seems like it has a good shot of beating the blight is pulling in genes from wheat which apparently can produce chemicals to neutralize the acid the fungus uses to digest and kill the tree.

Thanks, I thought this was about the cross breeding that the American Chestnut Foundation has done for decades, but they are now advocating a mixed approach with GE as well.

Because one of these involves cross breeding similar species and the other includes things like implanting fish DNA in a tomato? I'm not opposed to GMOs per se but this is the main difference that I see.

On the other hand, engineering corn to produce Bt toxin, which is harmless to mammals, such that less broad-spectrum insecticide must be applied to get the crop to harvest, seems like a straightforward win.

The toxin only affects insects which actually eat the corn, so it shouldn't be contributing to the alarming crash in insect population we've been seeing worldwide.

I think that's a compelling argument, but I find I'm still cautious about anything that we're eating, especially as a staple good. It's just extremely difficult to _know_ what the long-term effects of any significant change in diet will be for any creature, and in particular for us humans it's hard to be an outside observer since by definition we don't live long enough to observe multiple generations. There have been a lot of things that science thought were "harmless" or even "good for us" in the 20th century which we later realized was quite harmful. I see no reason to think that we've passed some magic threshold where we no longer make such mistakes.

They added BT-toxin to potatoes years ago. I think major buyers didn’t like it, organic growers were worried insects growing resistant to it (they spray it). But compared to the really toxic chemicals used in “regular” farming it seems like a win.

A little old but pretty interesting piece on gmo crops, different farming techniques: one question the piece brings up, which is who is who if anyone is regulating these things for safety. 20 years later I don’t know if things have changed.

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...

The article also compares growing gmos to software licenses:

“The guide put me in mind not so much of planting potatoes as booting up a new software release. By ''opening and using this product,'' the card stated, I was now ''licensed'' to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine.”

> which is who is who if anyone is regulating these things for safety

Great question! Perhaps it's been asked before: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/restrictions-on-gmos/usa.php

This seems like the most relevant bit:

> The FDA regulates the safety of all human and animal food products in the US (other than meat, poultry, and eggs), as well as drugs and biological products.

As to licensing:

It may be worth considering that while a quite jarring experience for a home gardener, the prospect of buying seed anew every year is likely a familiar one to most modern farmers.

Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'm intruiged as to your take on how this ties into this.

Longfellow was the great American lyric poet of the 19th century. The chestnut tree in question was an American chestnut, without a doubt. Thought it was a clever choice of quote, myself.

Longfellow was fond of trees. One fragment of his poetry I will always remember is "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks", which my main lesson teacher in elementary school taught us as an example of dactylic hexameter. It is also the first verse of Evangeline, probably his best known poem in his lifetime. Now largely forgotten, which is a pity.

As a West Coast native, I wasn't familiar with this rather significant piece of American Natural History, until I started reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I highly recommend the book, it features several heartfelt narratives about the various people who have come to this country to start their own 'roots'.

I hope we can help the American Chestnut recover. From the descriptions in the novel above, it must have been quite a beautiful scene to have such large, hearty, majestic trees, dumping bushels of shelf stable food, and of course the beautiful color changes of deciduous trees.

The article goes into some genetic modifications to the chestnut, which is always a wonderfully hot topic. I'm glad to see the technology being used outside of securing corporate profits, but I still fear our hubris can lead to a disastrous outcome in the ecosystem. We're smart, but we're not always good at realizing our limitations.

Wonderful article, thanks for sharing.

If chestnut trees were wiped out by 1940, that means Mel Tormé & Bob Wells, writing The Christmas Song in 1946 ("chestnuts roasting on an open fire"), were already being nostalgic.

The bight is believed to have come from trees introduced from east Asia. Here in the Pacific North West there are plenty of chestnut trees. Last autumn I picked like 4 or 5 full shopping bags full of edible chestnuts. They were delicious. I’m not sure if it is from American, Chinese or even Japanese chestnuts trees though.

It is highly likely that Mel Tormé and Bob Wells were roasting the east Asian chestnuts over the open fire.

EDIT: And I just found out that Bob Wells was born in Raymond, Washington. So it is entirely likely that the chestnuts that he picket and roasted in his youth were similar to the once you can pick today in the Pacific North West.

You may have a different Bob Wells in mind.

https://performingsongwriter.com/christmas-song/

> The “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” image was a memory from Wells’ childhood in Boston, when there’d be vendors on street corners at Christmas, serving up paper cones full of roasted chestnuts.

Interesting, because in Europe we have Cameraria ohridella [0] which wreak havoc on horse chestnuts. The moth replicates like crazy and the only recourse is collecting and burning fallen leaves every year. Luckily it looks worse than it is for the trees, they loose their leaves in August, but by then most of a years photosynthesis is done ( just losing like 17%)

Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths, so a lot of newly planted chestnuts are the American variant.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-chestnut_leaf_miner

Horse chestnuts and chestnuts are different genera, though both have "American" and "European" species. The American horse chestnut is often called the "buckeye". The nuts are vaguely reminiscent of each other, but the horse chestnuts and real chestnuts aren't closely related.

This may seem pedantic, but it's sort of important, as real chestnuts are edible (and delicious), while horse chestnuts are toxic to human beings.

You are right and I should have known better. Didn’t read the former article.

In German we make the same distinction, sometimes referring to the real chestnut as Esskastanie (Food/edible-chestnut).

I hate leaf-miners with a passion. I planted a bunch of citrus trees a while ago, and citrus leaf-miners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllocnistis_citrella) took a great liking to them. They nearly killed a few of the trees – and this is in a backyard with me attending to them pretty much every day. I hate to think of the industrial-scale agricultural damage these little jerks must inflict on commercial citrus orchards.

But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).

Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.

A note. Typically non organic pesticides are less broad spectrum poisons but applied in higher concentrations since they "can't" hurt humans

To contrast leaf-miners with other agricultural pests – before the leaf-miners came to town, we also had a bunch of Giant Swallowtail Butterflies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papilio_cresphontes) that made their homes in our citrus trees. Their caterpillars never did too much damage, and the annual presence of huge, striking butterflies was pretty enjoyable.

Sadly, I think our (organic) efforts to get rid of the leaf-miners also killed off the butterflies.

I once had the opportunity to talk with some apple growers in Washington (state).

They said that they regularly sprayed their trees with a mix of water and soft detergent early in the season, to prevent parasites and larvae from taking hold. As I understood it, they viewed soap as a simple solution. It was not completely organic and natural, but it helped to keep pests away and it did not seem to cause undue harm to the orchards or the apples.

Interesting, I'll give that a try this Spring! Thanks for the tip. Soapy water in general doesn't seem like something that's problematic as far as eating the oranges later... whether it's technically "organic" or not is secondary for me. I guess that maybe raises an eyebrow about what "organic" means, if soapy water isn't acceptable.

The second year of the leaf-miners, I would go out there every morning and look for affected leaves, just so I could squish the little bugger inside the leaf before it could become an adult moth. It was satisfying, but never really helped.

There is an old chestnut orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains above Silicon Valley that has the Asian, European AND American chestnut species. American chestnut has the smallest nuts of the three, but they are the sweetest and best tasting.

Are the Asian and European varieties different in other important qualities? The article mentions straight grain and rot resistance, besides trunk size.

In terms of the qualities of the wood, the Asian and European Chestnuts are less dense, less strong and has coarser grain structure compared to the American Chestnut. I might be wrong but I've heard the other Chestnuts don't grow nearly as large or as fast.

Here is some more information about the orchard.

http://skylinechestnuts.com/about2.html

Curiously, resistance to oxalic acid is also a question in human health. We are protected by the symbiotic bacteria Oxalobacter formigenes, which normally functions to prevent oxalate kidney stones and is lost with some antibiotic treatments. So my first thought was to find a similar microbe that degrades oxalic acid and teach it to live on chestnut trees.

Indeed, however Oxalobacter formigenes is not widely present in all human biomes, even those without antibiotic therapy.

I have attempted to garner the interest of major enzyme corporation (Novozymes, for example) in mass producing the oxalate degrading enzyme through fermentation, but no response.

It's not exactly what you're proposing, but the CHV1 virus attacks C. parasitica and it's being used to combat it in Europe. I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.

I thought the Dunstan Chestnut was an American Chestnut that was blight resistant. I have one growing in my yard for the last 4 years and it's doing fine.

https://chestnuthilltreefarm.com/learning-center/dunstan-che...

Reading that page, I think the problem is that that hybrid might be insufficiently derived from the American chestnut for wide-scale replanting of it to count as conservation.

I actually saw the last surviving American chestnut tree in Pennsylvania.

It was a lone tree on a hillside for miles around.

Those nuts too are still being harvest for biogenetic rework.

Last surviving mature tree. There are vast numbers of saplings all over Appalachia. They die quickly as they mature, but the roots are alive and keep producing new sprouts. As the article points out, in some areas where the coal companies took all the soil away (and therefore the fungus spores), the chestnuts can reach significant size before they get infected and die, but they always will get the blight eventually.

I sometimes daydream about finding a mature American Chestnut while in the PA woods. I know it'll never happen, but it's fun to think about.

The novel "The Overstory" instilled a greater appreciation for trees, in general, but in particular for the American Chestnut.

My parents grew chestnuts on their farm, when my father was still alive. They were mostly American, with a bit of Chinese for blight resistance, and did pretty well. I've long wondered if regular breeding might have done the trick, if we'd spent the past century trying. Keep back-breeding for more American properties, but resistant, too. For my parents, tent caterpillars were more of a problem.

We have been trying, and the trees are available. They aren't as good as the original (whatever that means )

The goal can be accomplished through hybridization and backcrossing, with marker assisted selection.

I have a Chinese-American F1 hybrid growing here on my farm that is in its 8th year doing very well. I keep meaning to get some more, since I don't get consistent pollination on it.

But the seeds from these hybrid trees will not breed true in the next generation meaning that some of the characteristics of your hybrid will not be in the plants grown from it's seeds.

I worked in a plant pathology lab (Dr. Fulbright) at Michigan State University in 2007-08 which was studying C. parasitica. I would run to the fields on Fridays and collect samples to look at under a microscope. Behind my family’s land in northern Michigan, we have American chestnuts that were one of the few remaining stands in the state. They seemed to have some better luck than the rest, though they never grew too tall.

It would be wonderful for the Chinese chestnut to get the spotlight it deserves!

Chestnut wood has many desirable properties such as rot resistance which lowers the need for toxic wood preservatives. It makes great roofing shingles.

I recently bought a house in a wooded area. In the backyard was a large old tree that I could not identify. After much searching I figured out that it was a chestnut tree! The article says they are the "perfect tree", but the chestnuts are incredibly sharp and tough. Very painful to step on.

There is a chestnut tree in North Bergen NJ. Just right on the street. I should grab some of the chestnuts and try and plant them.

Green spiny balls of death with nuts inside? That's a Chinese chestnut if so, we have two or three on our property. Deer love them but I'm not a huge fan.

Yes, we get so many deer that hop the fence. It never occurred to me that they were going after the chestnuts though.

I hope similar efforts at genetic modification can save American ash trees, which are being wiped out by the Emerald Ash Borer.

In my childhood town in the Midwest my street was lined with massive 80 year old ashes that shaded and sheltered the neighborhood. Most of them have now died and been cut down.

So did this play a part in the demise of the Passenger Pigeon?

It seems the pigeons ate the nuts, and the also plummeted in numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut

There are multiple factors involved with both collapses. Chestnut trees were planted in dense clusters in parks and along streets so their growth intermingled. This extreme unnatural density enabled pathogens to spread.

Carrier pigeons were delicious and easy eating. Rampant hunting had already crashed the population at that time.

The range of the chestnut tree surprises me it's so limited. Almost US only except for southern Ontario. The tree is not southern, not northern not even mid-western it's pretty much a mid-Appalachian tree.

Except I think I know where one was growing about 20 years ago. I took a nut home intending to plant it, but forgot about it for years. I wonder if that tree is still there in Wisconsin.

There is a Grove of chestnuts in Wisconsin. They are not native and isolated enough that the blight never reached the area so they grow well.

The site is blocked in Russia. I wonder what American secrets it holds.

Nothing to see here comrade

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