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Inside century-old barns and farmhouses, ceiling beams and wide floor planks that are straight grained and honey red with age serve as reminders of one of the deadliest epidemics to ever reach American shores. Between best college application essay keystonesome 3. The loss was stunning—not just for sprawling ecosystems across much of the eastern United States, where the tree was a keystone species, but also for the Appalachian way of life.
At the dawn of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of chestnut board best college application essay keystone were milled annually, fueling a multibillion-dollar timber industry as measured in today's dollars. With the trees and their profitable nuts and timber gone, a culture of forest-based subsistence began to fade in the mountains, just as another business started to boom.
Bythere were 11, coal mines working to meet America's best college application essay keystone energy needs. The Appalachian landscape was reshaped twice over: first by the death of the chestnuts, then by a century of coal mining that stripped and scarred the earth, leaving piles of rubble in its wake. Experimental chestnut trees at a nursery in State College, Pennsylvania. By almost any best college application essay keystone, the American chestnut was a perfect tree.
Massive, fast-growing, and rot-resistant, best college application essay keystone, it was easy to mill into cabin logs, furniture, fence posts, and railroad ties. After being harvested, it resprouted; in 20 years, it was ready for the sawyer again. Wide limbs spanned the canopy, filtering sunlight and creating a diverse, layered forest below. Sweet, acorn-size nuts fed squirrels, deer, raccoons, and bears. Cooper's hawks nested in the high branches, wild turkeys in the lower forks.
Insects thrived in the craggy bark, which was naturally tannic and a good choice for preserving hides. Cherokee people made dough from the crushed nuts, treated heart troubles with the leaves, and dressed wounds with astringent brewed from the sprouts.
And in the fall, best college application essay keystone, when the chestnuts piled up in carpets half a foot thick, white settler families collected and sold them by the bushel. One railroad station in West Virginia shippedpounds of chestnuts to destinations along its northern route. In a range stretching from southern Maine to the Florida Panhandle and west to the Mississippi River, the chestnut dominated the landscape, accounting for a quarter of all trees in the eastern hardwood forest.
In Appalachia, the heart of the tree's native range, best college application essay keystone, generations of people were rocked in chestnut cradles and buried in chestnut caskets. But the dominance wouldn't last. Ina forester noticed something odd happening to the chestnuts at the Bronx Zoo in New York.
The trees best college application essay keystone developing cankers surrounded by strange spotty, orange-yellow patches. He called in mycologist William A. Murrill to examine the fungus. By the time Murrill published his findings just over a year later, the disease had spread to New Jersey, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. Scientists from the US Department of Agriculture would later determine that the fungus had arrived on ornamental Japanese chestnuts imported as early as When the blight was discovered at the Bronx Zoo, it was already too late to stop it.
Researcher Sara Fern Fitzsimmons of the American Chestnut Foundation. Shouting over the hum of a greenhouse fan, Fitzsimmons, who is the director of restoration at the research nonprofit the American Chestnut Foundation TACFis waving a golden, jagged-edged leaf at me as she explains that the chestnut genus, Castanea, originated in China.
The Cryphonectria parasitica blight fungus survives on dead tree tissue, and in the three species of chestnuts in China, it lives mostly unobtrusively, feeding on damaged cambium under the bark where a tree's been wounded by weather, an animal, or insects. These trees, which evolved alongside the blight, grow burl-like callus tissue around the best college application essay keystone, creating barriers that keep the fungus from spreading.
It polishes off the already-dead tissue, then secretes oxalic acid, best college application essay keystone, a toxin that kills more and more of the chestnut's cells, feeding the fungus but killing the tree. Carried on the wind, the blight spread an estimated 50 miles a year, tree by tree.
First a canker would appear, causing the bark to bulge or sink, best college application essay keystone. Soon the wound would burst open, best college application essay keystone, sending spores sailing outward from an ocher-colored blotch, the tree's inner layers exposed. The mighty upper limbs died first, then the trunk.
Bycoalitions had been formed and quarantine lines drawn. Boy Scouts were enlisted to scour forests and cut down blighted trees. It was no use. By the time the blight had run its course, nearly 4 billion American chestnuts across somesquare miles were gone. My father and grandfather told me they'd been chestnuts and these were their standing skeletons. The American chestnut does have one defense mechanism best college application essay keystone the blight: While the tree aboveground dies, often what's beneath the soil remains viable.
Chestnut roots in Appalachian forests are constantly shooting up new sprouts. They resemble shrubs more than trees—live stems clustered around a dry, dead one, with serrated oval leaves that pop, golden yellow, against the underbrush. There are an estimated million wild American chestnuts still growing in their native range, and while the majority of them are less than an inch in diameter, they're easy to find if you know what you're looking for.
But even these persistent saplings are doomed. Most survive only five or 10 years before the blight gets them too. MEANWHILE, best college application essay keystone, THE COAL INDUSTRY has left its own wake of destruction in the Appalachian forest. In a single scoop, an average-size Bucyrus-Erie dragline can move more than tons of earth. This machine drove the biggest technological shift mining has ever seen, wiping out ecosystems as well as a lot of the underground mining jobs that had rescued the region's economy after the chestnuts died off.
It takes a skeleton crew to run a strip mine, using explosives to blast apart several hundred feet of ground and reveal the coal layers beneath. The dragline lifts away the topsoil and rock and deposits it in nearby valleys, reshaping entire topographies and leaving behind wide swaths of barren, contaminated land. While a raft of federal and state regulations require the cleanup of former mine sites, even the best remediation techniques often fall short of returning the stripped land to anything resembling a natural state.
A carefully bred chestnut seedling. If the land was forested before best college application essay keystone was mined, regulations required it to be reforested. They turned that earth upside down, and when they did the reclaiming, it was just rearranging what was at one time 50 feet underground and trying to get something to grow on it.
Heavy equipment was used to tamp down the ground to stem erosion, and while trees didn't root in the compacted earth, fast-growing, non-native grasses did. This twisted version of restoration created meadows where there ought to be forests, explains Michael French, a best college application essay keystone ecologist and the director of operations for the Kentucky-based nonprofit Green Forests Work.
By some estimates, a million or more acres of Appalachian forest were denuded by the coal companies and then converted, in the name of reclamation, into pasture areas with low or nonexistent biodiversity. In the early s, a coalition of environmental groups, mining companies, and government agencies launched the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, which partners with Green Forests Work and other local restoration organizations. More than a quarter of a million acres have been re-reclaimed in this way.
But while the poplars will flower and the oaks will stretch for the sun, from the moment they're planted, the chestnuts' days are numbered. I'M PICKING MY WAY THROUGH BRAMBLE, trying to keep up with Fitzsimmons as she navigates a stand of young trees, identifying species in a clipped, low alto. The prickly bushes seem to part willingly for this woman in her forties with a mess of dark curls and a loud laugh. The hillside we're standing on is former mineland in Coal Township, an hour north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Though Fitzsimmons assures me that at one point the trees on the plot we're surveying grew in neat rows, there's nothing neat about them now. The only evidence that this is not a wild place is a tall fence and white plastic tubes around the bottoms of the trees. Fitzsimmons squats to tug at a tube, sweeping dirt and shiny black bits of coal out of the way, best college application essay keystone.
InFitzsimmons and a team of volunteers with TACF planted hundreds of chestnuts here, driving tubes into the ground to protect the trees as they sprouted. One of the planters was first-time volunteer Liz Schwartz, who remembers saying a little prayer every time she tucked a nut into the hardscrabble.
Leaves of a Chinese chestnut. Six years later, improbably, the chestnuts seem to be thriving, the largest maybe 25 feet tall. Between them, there are yellow poplar, black locust, aspen, sumac, and fire cherry trees, volunteers whose seeds blew in or were dropped by birds or small mammals. In 10 years, we'll have canopy closure. Trees will mature, and shrubbery will spread out. Eventually, "it becomes a forest. This is one of 40 plantings on former mining sites across Pennsylvania's coal region.
The reclaimed mines have become unusual nurseries for TACF's breeding program, which has spent more than three decades trying to create blight-resistant trees. Not much thrives in the torn-up, thin, and acidic soil, but chestnuts seem to love it.
Superimpose maps of the historic chestnut range and the coalfields and the two overlap almost exactly. The acidic ground offers chestnuts the low-pH earth they prefer.
And because the topsoil was carried out with the coal, there's no Phytophthora, a dirt-dwelling, root-rot-causing mold that has plagued chestnut test plantings elsewhere. Most of these trees will eventually succumb to Cryphonectria parasitica. In the meantime, best college application essay keystone, however, the plantings offer an opportunity to observe how trees produced by the breeding program grow and what, if any, blight resistance they may have.
You're certainly not going to make it worse. IN A PLASTIC-WALLED SHADE HOUSE at Penn State University, Fitzsimmons inspects chestnut sprouts in plastic pots. Some look healthy, with big, saw-toothed leaves. Others are struggling, orange spores beginning to climb their tiny trunks. They are this year's crop of crossbreeds, trees descended from an initial cross of American, Japanese, and Chinese chestnuts.
A few months ago, Fitzsimmons and her colleagues punctured their bark, introduced Cryphonectria parasitica spores, and let the fungus go to work. We got about 40 to 50 percent survival through this particular year, best college application essay keystone. The breeding program began in at a research farm in Meadowview, Virginia. The scientists of TACF hypothesized that it would be possible, over generations, to breed a chestnut that had all the characteristics of its native forebears but contained just enough Chinese genes to fend off the blight.
Their method, called backcross breeding, best college application essay keystone, began with creating half-American, half-Chinese chestnut trees.
That generation, known as F1, was backcrossed with an American, creating generation B1 F1. The backcross was repeated twice, resulting in B2 F1, then B3 F1. For the trees in Fitzsimmons's Penn State lab, six generations down the line, resistance still isn't guaranteed.
Some appear to have no resistance at all.
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, time: 2:21The Demise and Potential Revival of the American Chestnut | Sierra Club
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