They're bringing it in by the truckload. Literally
The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the U.S. government. When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction.
That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters.
Bill Powell stands in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in 2019. European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.
To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling. A young chestnut tree is seen along a row of research trees at the American Chestnut Foundation's Meadowview Research Farm Oct. 4, 2022, in Meadowview, Virginia. The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.
“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.
Chestnuts leaves, burrs, and nuts are seen on the ground at the American Chestnut Foundation's Meadowview Research Farm Oct. 4, 2022, in Meadowview, Virginia.I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added.
Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing. Genetically modified chestnut embryo clusters are stored in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse.
“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species.
Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.
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