Botanical Prophecy

I'm currently reading American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel. The following quote really struck me:

The only consolation may be a common belief that began circulating when the chestnuts started to die--something Coy Lee Yeatts repeated when I visited his store. "You know," he told me, "the old-timers used to say that after a hundred years the chestnuts will come back."

The Blight was first discovered in 1904 by the chief forester, Hermann Merkel, at the New York Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo). By the middle of the 20th century the fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, had reached the southern extent of the chestnut's range in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. So sometime within the next 50 years or so? And what does "come back" mean, exactly? There are a few hundred mature, decrepit trees that still cling to life, and of course there are the haunting sprouts that succumb to the deadly pathogen before they're mature. I'd like to think that it prophesizes the first step in re-establishing the chestnut into its previous niche as one of, if not the most, dominant tree in the Appalachians. I look forward to continuing this book (I'm about halfway through) and discovering what strategies are being used to "resurrect" the chestnut. What will ultimately prove to be the solution? Blight-resistant hybrids? GMO chestnuts? Biological control? Some combination, or something completely different? Or is the whole endeavor just a fool's hope?

It's odd how I've developed this emotional attachment to a tree that's been functionally extinct since before I was born. It started the first time that I saw sprouts while working in the Great Smokies. There are a couple of reasons that I can think of. One is the sheer magnitude of the tragedy (the American Chestnut was extremely important, ecologically, as I've posted about previously). It's the epitome of the destructiveness that our species is capable of, especially considering that it was completely unintentional (those importing Chinese and Japanese trees had no idea that they were bringing the blight with them as well). Indeed, the chestnut was a very important tree economically (both the nuts and wood were valuable). Many rural Appalachian residents depended on this tree for their very way of life, as the mountain slopes were unsuitable for farming (including raising feed crops). Thus, hogs were fattened with forest forage, the nuts themselves were collected and sold, and the wood was extremely versatile. But most of all, the tenacity of the surviving chestnuts (to anthropomorphise) as well as the scientific efforts being put into the species fate present an opportunity to right a great ecological wrong.

Another reason is simply seeing the sprouts that the roots send up; a futile effort. The species is extinct, and yet tangible. Seeing one makes you yearn to view a series of ridges, covered in blooming chestnuts, or to wander through a forest in late summer, collecting the nuts (and eating them along the way). And yet, that vision is utterly impossible (but the tree's right in front of me, damn it!). Even if the blight is defeated, the chestnut is unlikely to be dominant to the extant that it once was in my lifetime. I was born a century too late, and hopefully a century too early as well.