At their peak in the late 1800s, over 4 billion American Chestnuts called the United States home, making up nearly a quarter of all trees in the Eastern United States. The “cradle to grave tree” was widely used for food, furniture and building materials, and was considered amongst the most important trees on the east coast.
In 2024, the American Chestnut is functionally extinct, a deadly parasite having nearly wiped out the entire population beginning at the turn of the 20th century.
The Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative will be hosting a screening of “Clear Day Thunder,” a feature-length documentary about the American Chestnut Foundation and the work it is doing to save the imperiled tree, at 5 p.m. today at Smith Wilkes Hall.
“People today kind of don’t even know that we had this tree — that we had 4 billion of these trees,” said Catherine Martini, TACF northeast regional outreach coordinator. “We’re just trying to keep telling the story so that we don’t forget that this happened, and so that we don’t forget that there are still some Chestnuts out there, and that we can still save them.”
The American Chestnut population was decimated by Chestnut blight, a fungal disease that came from Japanese Chestnut trees that were introduced to the United States. The fungus makes its way beneath a tree’s bark and eventually causes the tree to girdle, when a ring of bark is removed from the tree. When a tree girdles, it is no longer able to send nutrients back and forth between the roots and the canopy, causing the tree to die. Chestnut blight first appeared in American Chestnuts in 1904, and took only 40 years to wipe out nearly the entire population.
But all hope is not lost for the American Chestnut. TACF was founded 40 years ago with the sole purpose of preserving, protecting and reviving the American Chestnut population, Martini said, and researchers at TACF have started utilizing a method called backcross breeding to combine genes from American Chestnuts with genes from Chinese Chestnuts, which are far more resistant to chestnut blight, to create a new version of the American Chestnut that can survive in the range it once used to dominate.
“What we did was take an American Chestnut and a Chinese Chestnut, which is resistant to the blight, … and crossed those,” Martini explained, “and then took the offspring from that and crossed it with an American, took the offspring from that and crossed that with an American, to try to get the genes for blight resistance, but have a tree that looks and acts like an American Chestnut.”
There is still lots of work to be done, Martini said, but she hopes that Chautauquans who watch the film will leave with a deeper understanding of how important the American Chestnut once was to the Eastern United States, as well as what their roles could be in joining the movement to save the tree — and any other creature that depends help of humanity to survive.
“I hope that they gain hope, not only for this tree, but for a lot of other ailing creatures in our environment,” she said. “Whether they have legs or roots or fins or wings or whatever, there are people out there that aren’t going to give up. Ever.”
