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Failure of the GE American Chestnut with Anne Petermann and Dr. Donald Davis

• Global Justice Ecology Project / Host Steve Taylor • Season 4 • Episode 2

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The American Chestnut Foundation has long supported a controversial plan to release genetically engineered chestnut trees into the wild.

 The Tree was being developed by the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). 

But now poor performance in field trials and the revelation that researchers had even been field testing the wrong tree prompted The American Chestnut Foundation to pull its support for the GE Tree. The American Chestnut Foundation has also called for SUNY-ESF to pull its application before the United States Department of Agriculture for deregulation of the tree.

On this episode of Breaking Green, we spoke with Anne Petermann.  Petermann co- founded Global Justice Ecology Project in 2003.

She is the international coordinator of the Campaign to STOP GE Trees, which she also co founded. Petermann is a founding board member of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series. 


 She has been involved in movements for forest protection and indigenous rights since 1991, and the international and national climate justice movements since 2004. 

 She participated in the founding of the Durban group for climate justice in 2004, in Durban, South Africa, and Climate Justice Now in 2007 at the Bali Indonesia UN climate conference. 

 Anne Petermann was adopted as an honorary member of the St. Francis- Sokoki band of the Abenaki in 1992 for her work in support of their struggle for state recognition. In 2000, she received the wild nature award for activist of the year.


 We will also  talk with Dr. Donald Davis, author of the American Chestnut: an environmental history. His exhaustive book explores how the American Chestnut Tree has shaped history as well as the cultural and environmental significance of the once ubiquitous tree.

He also calls the story of the American Chestnut, a cautionary tale of unintended consequences, and criticizes plans to conduct a massive and irreversible experiment by releasing genetically engineered American chestnuts into the wild.

Davis is an independent scholar, author and former Fulbright fellow. He has authored or edited seven books. His book, Where There are Mountains: an environmental history of the southern Appalachians, won the prestigious Philip D. Reed environmental writing award. Davis was also the founding member of the Georgia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, serving as its president from 2005 to 2006. He is currently employed by the Harvard forest as a research scholar and lives in Washington DC.

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Steve Taylor:

Welcome to Breaking Green, a podcast by Global Justice Ecology Project. On Breaking Green. We will talk with activists and experts to examine the intertwined issues of social, ecological and economic injustice. We will also explore some of the more outrageous proposals to address climate and environmental crises that are falsely being sold as green. I am your host, steve Taylor. The American Chestnut Foundation has long supported a controversial plan to release genetically engineered chestnut trees into the wild. The tree was being developed by the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, also known as SUNY ESF, but now poor performance and field trials prompted the American Chestnut Foundation to pull its support for the GE tree. The American Chestnut Foundation has also called for SUNY ESF to pull its application before the United States Department of Agriculture for deregulation of the tree.

Steve Taylor:

On this episode of Breaking Green, we will talk with Ann Peterman and Dr Donald Davis. Ann Peterman co-founded Global Justice Ecology Project in 2003. She is the international coordinator of the campaign to stop GE trees, which she also co-founded. Peterman is also a founding board member of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series. Peterman has been involved in movements for forest protection and indigenous rights since 1991 and the international and national climate justice movement since 2004. Ann Peterman was adopted as an honorary member of the St Francis-Sikoki Band of the Abinacke in 1992 for her work in support of their struggle for state recognition. In 2000, she received the Wild Nature Award for activist of the year.

Steve Taylor:

We will also talk with Dr Donald Davis, author of the American Chestnut and Environmental History. His exhaustive book explores how the American Chestnut tree has shaped history, as well as the cultural and environmental significance of the once ubiquitous tree. Davis is an independent scholar, author and former full bright fellow. He has authored or edited seven books. His book when there Are Mountains and Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians won the prestigious Philip D Reed Environmental Writing Award. Davis was also the founding member of the Georgia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, serving as its president from 2005 to 2006. He is currently employed by the Harvard Forest as a research scholar and lives in Washington DC. Ann Peterman, dr Donald Davis, welcome to Breaking Green.

Steve Taylor:

Both of you have been guests before on Breaking Green. Dr Davis, you were on an episode about the environmental history of the American Chestnut tree and you have been on several times, including an episode on genetically engineered trees. This episode is about recent developments on attempts to deregulate a genetically engineered American Chestnut tree. So, Ann, could we please start off with you? Could you explain briefly what is a Darling 58 genetically engineered American Chestnut tree, what is it and who is behind it?

Anne Petermann:

Sure, the Darling 58 genetically engineered American Chestnut tree is an experimental genetically engineered tree. That is a tree that has been worked on for quite a few years at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry up in Syracuse and it's gone through a lot of iterations the genetically engineered tree American Chestnut tree until they finally came up with one called the Darling 58. It's obviously the 58th version of a series of Darling genetically engineered trees and they're designed to be blight tolerant. So in the early part of the 1900s many of the American Chestnut trees growing up and down the East Coast were eradicated by a blight that was introduced from Asia.

Anne Petermann:

And this is supposedly an attempt to bring the American Chestnut back into the forest by making it blight tolerant by using a gene from wheat, an OXO gene from wheat that is resistant to that, that is, fungal resistance, has fungal resistance and supposedly this was going to give the American Chestnut tree blight tolerance. So that was the idea behind it and ESF, the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, was pushing it really hard with a lot of support from industry. Actually, you know, from different timber industries had come up with the idea quite a few years ago, decades ago actually. And then they also had technical and financial support from Arborgen, from Monsanto, from Duke Energy. So it wasn't really all that altruistic, but the American Chestnut Foundation decided to get behind it because they also thought genetic engineering would be a good way to bring back the American Chestnut tree from this blight that had done such damage to its population.

Steve Taylor:

Dr Donald Davis, could you give us a quick summary of what happened to the American Chestnut? Why is it considered a functionally extinct tree?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yeah, sure. So up until the late 1800s the American Chestnut was one of the more common trees in the eastern United States, Although my environmental history showed that it probably wasn't as common in certain parts of the eastern US than people had thought. But it certainly was. You know, a ubiquitous tree. It was most common in what they used to call the Chestnut Belt, which is kind of the southern Appalachian region, and as you go towards New England it became less and less common.

Dr. Donald Davis:

But it was a tree that had many uses. Not only could you eat the nuts but you could make all kinds of wooden products from the wood. It was used for fodder. The young tree shoots could be fed to cattle, for example, or even sheep. So I had lots of uses.

Dr. Donald Davis:

It was very popular among people, especially in rural areas. People, individuals always like to have Chestnut trees growing on their property, and in the late 1800s they started importing Japanese Chestnuts to some of the largest nurseries in the New York City region, including New Jersey, and those Chestnuts, those Japanese Chestnuts that originated around Tokyo, had the blight on them and the blight eventually leaves the Japanese Chestnuts, starts spreading into the American you know ecosystem and by 1904, it had been detected there at the Bronx Zoo and kind of. The rest is history. The blight spread rapidly, quickly and by 1950, you really could consider the American chestnut functionally extinct, meaning that most of the trees did not reproduce, Although today we're finding that to even kind of be a misnomer because we're finding more and more trees in the wild that actually are blooming and reproducing.

Steve Taylor:

So you're saying that the American chestnut is surviving a bit more than sometimes reported in the natural world?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yes, some of the Forest Service Inventory show there's many as two million blooming chestnut trees in the eastern forest today, and by blooming that means they're blooming size. So they're anywhere from, you know, two inches in diameter to eight or 10 inches in diameter. So there's a lot of them out there. They tend to die after they bloom once or twice, so you don't necessarily find lots of reproduction, although we're seeing some of that now in the northern states. Maine, for example, has a wonderful grove of chestnut trees. More than a thousand individuals are surviving there in southern Maine on the farm of Burnt Heinrich, and of course he got his trees from Michigan and there's several stands in Michigan that are doing well and growing and reproducing as well.

Steve Taylor:

So you are the author of an American Chestnut, an environmental history, a book which is comprehensive. I recommend it to our listeners. But you are also a founding member of the Georgia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, so you are a fan of the tree. It's clear when you read your history. You talk about the cultural and historical significance of the tree, but you were critical, or are critical, about attempts to produce a genetically engineered variant.

Dr. Donald Davis:

That's right and you could say I've parted ways with the American Chestnut Foundation once they started putting so much emphasis and focusing on the GE trees. I thought that was a bad idea. I had fairly long discussions with a former CEO of the American Chestnut Foundation about this. In fact, I was also the governmental affairs representative to the American Chestnut Foundation for several years when I lived here in Washington DC. I would go on the hill and do some lobbying on their behalf, but again once I saw they were putting so much emphasis on the GE trees, I said I can't really endorse this and started promoting more what they're doing at the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation, which is using pure American trees and trying to breed trees that are resistant to the bite, and they've been somewhat successful at that.

Steve Taylor:

Right, you mentioned the trees of Dr Heinrich's property and also the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation, I believe, has come out against the genetically engineered variant. Ann Piederman, why is the campaign to stop GE trees opposed to the Darling 58?

Anne Petermann:

Thanks, steve. Yeah, well, the campaign to stop genetically engineered trees, as implied by our name, is very concerned about the idea of genetically engineering trees, and when we learned about the genetically engineered American Chestnut tree, or the work to produce genetically engineered American Chestnut trees, which was back in about 2011 or so, this was something that was very concerning, not just because of the genetically and genetic engineering of the tree itself, but because the plans were, once it was genetically engineered, to release it into the forests where it was designed, to spread its pollen and seeds and contaminate the remaining populations of wild American Chestnuts, which Dr Davis just mentioned. There are more than 2 million that are actively flowering and producing chestnuts. So the idea that they wanted to create these genetically engineered trees and then release them to spread irreversibly and uncontrollably, without regulation of any kind, was terribly concerning to us, and so we waged a campaign for jeez, I guess it's been over a decade now to make sure that these trees are not released into the environment.

Anne Petermann:

So when it all of a sudden, on December 8th, the American Chestnut Foundation announced that the trees were not doing what they had expected them to do and they were now saying that they should not be approved by the USDA for release into wild forests.

Anne Petermann:

We were quite surprised by it, but we were not surprised that the trees didn't work.

Anne Petermann:

We work with a lot of different scientists in different areas who were very concerned about this tree, that it wouldn't work and that it wouldn't work over time. The juvenile trees, the trees that were three years old, appeared to have the blight resistance trait, appeared to be doing just fine, and then, all of a sudden, a few years later, when they're seven years old which is, you know, in the lifespan of a chestnut tree is still not very much they started dying and nobody understood why. And if you look at the conversations between the people in the American Chestnut Foundation, you hear them talking about how this was a learning experience and they didn't have the science and they didn't have the technology to know what was going on. They don't have any idea what they're doing, and yet their idea is that they're going to make these trees and release them into wild forests where they can never be recovered. So that's why we're working against the release of this and all genetically engineered trees into the environment.

Steve Taylor:

Well, it was a stunner. I think it was December 8th of last year. The American Chestnut Foundation said it was withdrawing a support because of the poor performance of the Darling line. Also, some errors, some basic, fundamental errors. After many, many years of promoting it I think it had more promotion than cold fusion, talking about releasing something into the wild. I want to ask Dr Davis. Dr Davis, in your book the American Chestnut and Environmental History, you called the Darling 58 a dangerous and irreversible experiment. Could you elaborate on that?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yes, that was the section in the book towards the end of the book where I was looking at some of the concerns and issues and problems potential problems with releasing a GE American Chestnut into the wild and at one time I had actually worked for the Center for Food Safety, an organization that also does a lot of work trying to monitor what's going on with GE food products, so on and so forth. Even earlier, I even worked with Jeremy Rifkin, who's one of the founders of anti-GMO legislation and organizational movements In any event. So I was aware, I've been aware of the potential problems of GE trees and I knew this was just kind of a bad idea. In the book I discuss some of the issues, including, as Ann just mentioned, this idea that in order to really see how a GE tree is going to perform, you have to monitor it for many, many years. You need to look at how it's going to perform 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, even 30 or 40 years down the road. In fact, a few years ago I found the famous Joyce Kilmer American Chestnut trees. It's five huge, large American Chestnut trees that were photographed in 1909. The logs of those trees, even though they've been dead for almost a century. They're still there in the forest in Joyce Kilmer Forest. That means when you think about the long-term consequences of genetically modifying a tree, you have to look at how is it going to impact the forest 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road or possibly centuries down the road?

Dr. Donald Davis:

When I made my comments to the draft environmental impact statement that was released last year I think it was on my birthday, november 10th I said just that that I was really concerned about no one doing any really scientific tests on how these trees were going to behave and perform in the forest. For 20 years I taught in the university system of Georgia. Every semester I did election on the scientific method. To do true science you have to have validity and reliability. Clearly, these experiments that were done on the Darling 58 trees were not reliable and not valid because they weren't reliable. If the American Chestnut Foundation says they're doing science when they promote the release of the trees, they're not, because to really do science you need to look at the impact of these experiments over the long, long, long term.

Steve Taylor:

I believe Dr Cisco, who was an academic and scientist affiliated with the American Chestnut Foundation, previously had stated he thought that this type of tree should have to be studied 50 years before put into the wild. Am I correct in remembering that?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yes, he wrote an email to me, actually wrote an email to William Powell, which was then shared by the American Chestnut Foundation. In that email he said just that that you would need to look at the impact of these trees 50 years down the road or to study them 50 years down the road. I think the recent Chestnut Chat that was done one month ago by the American Chestnut Foundation after they withdrew their support of the Darling 58 trees. One of the American Chestnut partners I think his name is Jim McKenna. He said that we're going to have to look at GE trees 15, 20 years down the road. In other words, if the American Chestnut Foundation does develop a GE tree, it's going to take them 15 or more years before they can decide to release it into the wild. Of course I think that's too short of a time span, but now they're beginning to sort of say what we were saying months ago about the potential problem of the Darling 58 tree.

Steve Taylor:

It's stunning how closely the criticisms and concerns of the American Chestnut Foundation, which was a major supporter of this project, mirrors the concerns of those who opposed it the scientists, citizens and organizations that opposed it. I mean they were turning on this portion of the plant's genome which was supposed to be kind of an antacid sort of reaction to the blight, but this actually dwarfed the growth, or appears to have dwarfed the growth rates. It's just not working. It's just not working. And what's surprising about this? If there wasn't such opposition to the permit, to the USDA and the citizens and scientists and organizations mounting this opposition, the tree may have already been deregulated and introduced into the wild. And if it weren't for these people that they like to characterize as Luddite or anti-science, their scientific experiment, their failure, it's a failure.

Steve Taylor:

The Darling 58 is a failure, according to the American Chestnut Foundation. I know that SUNY is still in the camp of the Darling 58, but I think they're there by themselves. It would have been released in no way of returning that. So do either of you have any comments regarding that?

Anne Petermann:

Sure, yeah, I mean exactly the American Chestnut Foundation, which is now saying that the release of this genetically engineered tree into forests could cause some problems.

Anne Petermann:

When they originally found out that the tree had these fatal flaws, their first reaction was not so much Not so much that the tree could have been out in the wild causing wreaking havoc, but rather that and here's a quote from their chief conservation officer that premature distribution of this or other inferior varieties may also unfairly skew public perception against biotechnology solutions to save threatened forest tree species.

Anne Petermann:

So it's less about that this tree could have gotten out of control and caused havoc with the remaining wild chestnut populations, and more about the fact that they still believe, even after this terrible experience. They still believe that the genetically engineered tree is the way to go and that not this particular genetically engineered tree, but different strains of genetically engineered trees, using CRISPR or gene editing or any of these other newer technologies, could be the way to restore the genetically engineered American chestnut to forests. So it's not that they've learned a lesson from this disaster, this near disaster, it's that they've learned that they need to try something different and that the D58 didn't work, so they need to go in a different direction with their genetic engineering, which is unfortunate, you know. It would have been nice if they had said hey, you know, this technology is really too revolutionary, too radical. We don't know what it's going to do, so let's step back from it. But that's not what's happened.

Steve Taylor:

SUNY is still pursuing its application for deregulation. If that happens, couldn't this variant adversely impact naturally blight resistant trees, or how would it possibly impact the trees that are already out there?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yes, I mean ESF SUNY had suggested that if the trees are deregulated they want to plant as many as 10,000 trees a year. So you're talking about, over a course of two or three years, 30 or 40,000 of these GE trees planted in a wild forest. These trees, as we now know, will have the blight, their offspring will have the blight, so there's just going to be more blight vectors in the forest and so if there are any sort of remaining naturally kind of blight resistant American chestnuts, they're going to contaminate those trees and that's to me a plant past risk. I mean I don't see how AFIS can really condone the Darling 58 tree, because it does look like they could have a detrimental impact not only on wild American chestnuts but also wild American chestnuts grown in orchard settings. There's quite a few Chestnut orchards out there these days where the chestnuts are grown commercially, so they could even impact those.

Dr. Donald Davis:

And of course no one could ever have organic chestnut status. If your trees have GE contamination, you cannot classify your trees as being organic. So I spoke about this in my comments regarding the AFIS petition and I really hope that they do reconsider, because in the draft it looked as though they were going to deregulate the tree. So I hope, with all this new evidence now, they're going to change their mind. They're going to not allow these trees to be released into the wild. It's a very bad idea.

Steve Taylor:

Why do you think SUNY is just holding on now with this application, even though the Darling 58, as demonstrated by the American Chestnut Foundation's own reports and studies, is deficient, why are they pursuing this?

Anne Petermann:

Well listen. Suny, esf, the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, built a lot of their reputation around their work on the genetically engineered American chestnut. They received millions upon millions of dollars for this research. They've got an entire new facility that's dedicated to addressing forest health crises through biotechnology solutions. Quote unquote the GE chestnut is just the beginning.

Anne Petermann:

They want to do this with ash trees. They want to do this with all the different trees that are suffering from introduced pest and pathogens. So they have a lot at stake here, riding on the D58. And if they get that D58 approved by the USDA, then they don't have to worry about getting other future lines of the Darling, genetically-engineered American Chestnuts deregulated because they'll be exempt from regulation under the current, under the old rules. Actually, under the new rules, they basically don't need to be regulated at all. That's another whole line of problems. But yeah, the regulatory systems are kind of a joke. But anyway, if they can get the D58 deregulated, then any future Darling trees could sail through and be put into the forest without any consultation with the USDA or the public.

Steve Taylor:

Dr Davis, do you have an opinion as to why they are just so staunchly standing behind this tree, which has been widely panned by chestnut experts?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Well, I think Ann said it better than I could.

Dr. Donald Davis:

They've invested so much in the tree, they've done so much propaganda promoting the tree and they really want this thing to work in their mind.

Dr. Donald Davis:

What's curious to me and I still haven't quite figured it out because I've been watching these chestnut chats that the American Chestnut Foundation have done since their announcement of abandoning the Darling 58 tree they keep saying that there was a mix-up and that the trees that they were testing and observing in the field were actually Darling 54 trees. But then they're saying that that all the Darling line should be abandoned, or at least the American Chestnut Foundation want to no longer support those lines. But if it really was, if the trees that didn't behave properly in these field tests were truly Darling 54 trees and not Darling 58, why would they then say that? So it's very confusing to me why they even used that argument or even brought up the issue that the problem was not the Darling 58 trees per se but these Darling 54 trees. Very strange sort of stance and one that I'm still not sure why they even brought that issue up. Maybe Anne has some thoughts on that.

Anne Petermann:

Well, what's interesting is how is watching the progression, the evolution of their thinking around the Darling lines of these genetically engineered American Chestnuts. And it was in September in their Chestnut chat that they revealed that there were problems. They didn't understand them, but there were problems, and so they were trying to figure that out. And then later they announced that there had been a mistake, that SUNY ESF had given to the American Chestnut Foundation the wrong GE tree material. They hadn't gotten the D58s that they thought they were getting. They got these D54s which had the gene on the wrong chromosome. That's a lot of minutiae, but the real issue is they really didn't know what was going on and it's over time that they've figured out.

Anne Petermann:

Wait. Okay, so the D54 didn't work, but actually it was the constituent promoter in the Darling line that's causing the problems, because it's this trait in the genetically engineered tree, this blight resistance trait, that is never turned off. So the tree is always expressing every part of the tree is always expressing this blight resistance trait which is causing the tree to have tremendous they call it, looking at the tree as if it has a little fever. It's causing the tree to put a lot of its metabolic energy into this blight resistance when it doesn't need it. So therefore it can't compete in a forest ecosystem because it doesn't have the vigorous growth and so on.

Anne Petermann:

Even if it's not having all of the problems of the D54, where it's just dying of the blight and so forth, it's still just not a good tree for restoration purposes, is the way that they put it. So it's really been interesting to see that they really don't know what the heck they're doing. From September through December and then on. Since then they just keep revealing all of these new things that they're learning, because they really have no idea what's going on when they're genetically engineering these trees. And that's been a real wake up call to us as people concerned about genetically engineering trees, is that the researchers themselves don't really know what they're doing.

Steve Taylor:

Yeah, that's an interesting point because from my understanding and I interviewed some individuals at the American Chestnut Foundation Public Relations Officer and Conservation Officer and they did not learn of this error themselves. They didn't discover it themselves, nor did they learn it from SUNY ESF. They learned it from a third party and I think let's just characterize their position on this as being a bit vexed by that. That's all I'm gonna say on that. But it does really underscore how these are Human beings.

Steve Taylor:

There are people doing conservation work, they're scientists, but they are human beings and I've always felt this hard push for the Darling 58 before all the evidence was in, was a bit careerist, was a bit opportunistic, was a bit of a propaganda for GE that they were picking an iconic tree to promote the use of GE and conservation, to sort of tweak the regulatory process to make the next approval that much easier. Then you mentioned, dr Powell, that you, dr Davis, that you had actually sent an email to Dr Powell. He was, I think, the lead researcher who tragically died of cancer shortly before this error was discovered and I almost thought that maybe there was some push to have this approved before his illness took him. Any thoughts on that, dr Davis about careerism, about this push and how it comports with doing actual science.

Dr. Donald Davis:

Well, as I mentioned earlier, true science needs reliability and validity, and most of the experiments involving GE trees have been done on trees that are very young. They're like one time studies, what I call like one-off studies. Okay, we're gonna measure the oxides levels in pollen. So they look at a pollen sample and measure them and say, oh, they look pretty low to me, without thinking about the accumulative effects that the oxalic oxidase enzyme might have on the ecosystem. They put some oxalic oxidase on the mycelium of mushrooms and said, oh, we're now three months later. We looked at the mycelium and we don't see extraordinary levels. But again, if you were to look at the accumulative effects of the oxalic oxidase in the forest over many, many years, you might get a different result. So yeah, I think that if people are trying to promote the organization they're trying to promote their career, they really need to show that they're getting results quickly and within the next funding cycle. So I think there's a lot of those kind of pressures going on with these guys.

Dr. Donald Davis:

But I wish more folks had read my book, because when you read my book you find out that people have been fighting this fungus crafter, nectar of fungus now for well more than a century and no one's beat it yet and it's gonna be very difficult to beat that fungus.

Dr. Donald Davis:

It's a difficult battle and for these people who claim, oh, I have the magic bullet, you have to be a little bit skeptical. When people claim that they've solved them the fungus problem, that doesn't mean that, you know, eventually we can have just not trees back in the forest. But even so, as I sort of ended my book, I talk about this idea that even if we came up with a magic bullet, it's gonna take at least a millennium you know, 10 centuries before the trees have actually reestablished themselves in the eastern deciduous forests. So people need to start thinking more long term and stop thinking about these, you know, quick fixes, short term kind of solutions to the plight problem, at least I think. If they do, then they'll have a much more realistic and kind of a sane approach to chestnut restoration.

Steve Taylor:

And there's really no holes in the forest where the chestnuts left. The forests themselves have sort of moved on in a way to oak hickory and the whole soil composition and everything is a bit different.

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yeah, sure, there's lots happened in the forest, and to just simply, you know, think that you can plant some chestnut trees and they're going to reestablish themselves is again sort of looking at the problem much too optimistically, I think, than what the reality is.

Steve Taylor:

And they've always said it was just one gene. Is they so much underplayed the significance of that? It's just one gene, but then why do you have all these variants? And obviously there's more to it than just that, you know, throwing a gene at a tree or just inserting it like a nail. I mean there's a lot more. I think they over simplified it and played the we are the scientist hand, and now we're seeing that, I mean, they were the scientists, but they were researching the wrong tree for I don't know how many years, many years before they found out that they were doing field trials on the wrong tree. You know, mistakes do happen, right, but there seems to be a bit of hubris where they're just not backing off. So, anne, what do people do if they are concerned about the current petition to deregulate the Darling 58?

Anne Petermann:

Sure. Let me just get back one second to what you just were saying, though, about the whole one gene, one trait argument that was put out in such, you know, so many different times and so many different ways and, you know, got picked up by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and National Geographic, and blah, blah, blah all of these, all of these major outlets that were promoting this, this big lie, if you will. You know, and how simple this thing was. It was going to just one gene from wheat was going to we eat wheat all the time and you know this is going to save the American chestnut, this iconic majestic tree.

Anne Petermann:

But the reality is that it's about the genetic engineering process, whether it's CRISPR or gene editing or transgenics. It's really about the fact that you are messing around with, you know, dna and you're snipping it apart, or you're adding things that have never been in there before. You're doing things to genes that have not, that aren't natural, and because of that, you don't know what's going to happen. Dr Ricardo Steinbrecher has a report that she's put out, that she's revising right now, about the risks of genetically engineered trees and how you really can't know because of the mutations that happen inside the genome when you do this kind of genetic engineering the unpredictable impacts, the gene silencing when the gene is turned off, for nobody knows exactly why all of these different things, that it's not just about the fact that this one genetically engineered tree didn't work out the way they thought or they got the wrong genetically engineered tree material in the first place. It's the whole package. You cannot genetically engineered trees and pretend to understand what's going to happen just to the tree, not to mention the entire forest ecosystem.

Anne Petermann:

So, yeah, it's really important that people get involved in this and make a big deal to get the USDA to stop, to stop this petition, in particular, the D58 petition that is still pending, that they could still approve this faulty, damaged tree, which is important to make that precedent, but it's also important to stop future lines of all genetically engineered trees, and so I would encourage people to go to the website for the campaign, which is stopgetreesorg, and there's a take action button there and that will have the latest action alerts that people can endorse to either send a letter, an email to SUNY ESF asking them to withdraw the petition to the USDA, or you can sign on to a letter to the USDA asking them to reject this petition. There's many different ways that you can get involved, so I encourage people to go to stopgetreesorg and find the take action button. That's the easiest thing that people can do.

Steve Taylor:

Dr Davis, you said you wish more people had read your book. It's a great book. I have read it. I did an interview with you about it. Would you say a few words about your book, the title, who published it and where to find it?

Dr. Donald Davis:

Yes, the book was published by the University of Georgia Press in November of 2021. But because of COVID, there was a whole lot of promotion of the book early on, although I did give a lecture about the book at the Forest History Society at Duke University. That was well received. The book covers basically 10,000 years of American chestnut history, starting with the first Native Americans that encountered the trees during the sort of late paleo period. It goes all the way into the 1950s and 1960s when you saw the very last living large grows of American chestnut trees, primarily in the Southern Appalachians.

Dr. Donald Davis:

I talk about the importance of the trees on America's culture, on the language, on the building techniques, construction. The Choctaw Indians even considered the chestnut the first living thing brought forth by the Creator. There were all kinds of interesting anecdotes coming from Native American culture regarding the American chestnut. Many Native American groups considered the month of November the chestnut month. They even had a month named after the American chestnut. The book is a history, but I do spend a concluding chapter looking at the issue of genetically modified trees and the possible impact that they could have on the forest. I'm also interested in how we apply all this history to the real world and real world problems.

Steve Taylor:

Where does one find that book?

Dr. Donald Davis:

It's available on all the usual websites. University of Georgia has their own website, so probably if you went to them, it would support a non-profit more than the other sites. Of course, your local library has a copy, so you don't have to purchase it, you can just go to the public library. In fact, I did a recent WorldCat search and WorldCat claims that the book is now found in almost 900 libraries worldwide.

Steve Taylor:

It's a great book the American Chestnut An Environmental History by Dr Donald Davis. Check it out. Dr Donald Davis and Peter Min, thank you for joining us on Breaking Green.

Dr. Donald Davis:

Thank you, steve, I really thank you for having me on and I really enjoyed my time with you and Ann.

Steve Taylor:

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