MAINE - AMERICAN CHESTNUT
Can Genetic Engineering Bring Back the American Chestnut? / The New York Times Magazine
In Appalachia, companies have scraped the trees from an area larger than Delaware, to gain access to the coal beneath. The heart of coal country happens to overlap the heart of what was once chestnut country. The American Chestnut Foundation has partnered with organizations that plant trees on abandoned coal mines, and chestnuts are now growing on thousands of acres of these devastated places. Those trees are only partly blight-resistant hybrids, but they could become the parents of a new generation of trees that will someday rival the forest giants of old.
Last May, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit, for the first time in human history, 414.8 parts per million. The nonwater weight of the American chestnut, like other trees, is roughly half carbon. Few things you could plant on a piece of land would suck carbon out of the air faster than a growing chestnut tree. With this in mind, an essay last year in The Wall Street Journal suggested, “Let’s farm chestnuts again.”
The new chestnut will be birthed into an old, broken world. It will have its work cut out for it. - Gabriel Popkin