American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (review)

American Chestnut is Susan Freinkel’s engrossing and compelling story of this native American species’ remarkable survival and ongoing comeback from what seemed to be its inevitable extinction. Once widespread across eastern forests, the ecologically vital and economically valuable American chestnut was virtually wiped out in a single human generation. Humans were responsible for the American chestnut’s rapid demise. Paradoxically, as Freinkel shows, people may also be responsible for bringing the species back from the dead.

The American chestnut’s virtual extinction began as the twentieth century opened, when people accidentally introduced an exotic fungus from Asia into North America. Like this continent’s indigenous peoples—who died by the millions because they were not immune to smallpox and other European pathogens—the American chestnut possessed no immunity to this invasive fungus. Trees began dying in great numbers, first in the urban northeast. Despite efforts to stop “chestnut blight,” a “death wave” rolled over the eastern forests, eventually killing more than four billion chestnut trees.

By the time the Depression ended, the mighty American chestnut was nearly extinct. Regional and local ecosystems were devastated, including human communities located in the Southern Appalachians. Rural highlanders had come to rely heavily upon the species’ nutritious nuts, hardwood lumber, and other economic values. Indeed, this nearly “perfect tree” had become an integral part of American culture: “The chestnut was in many ways the quintessential American tree: adaptable, resilient, and fiercely competitive” (16). Suddenly it was gone.

Freinkel’s narrative about the American chestnut’s near extinction encompasses the book’s first half. Although this story of environmental destruction is depressingly familiar, Freinkel’s quick-paced narrative and eye for specific, dramatic details are quite engrossing. Interwoven with the chestnut’s story is the story of how people responded to this shocking ecological and cultural catastrophe, individually and collectively.

Although the book’s dust jacket proclaims that “the heart” of Freinkel’s story “is the cast of unconventional characters who have fought for a century to bring the tree back” from virtual extinction, characters are not at all the heart of this book. In the second half of American Chestnut, Freinkel expends several thousand words as she attempts to bring to life several key “characters” who are involved in ongoing attempts to restore the American chestnut to eastern forests. Although she succeeds in bringing these people’s restoration efforts to life, none stands out as a particularly memorable character. The cast of characters inhabiting this story is actually fairly forgettable.

But the absence of vivid characters in American Chestnut doesn’t really seem to matter. Freinkel’s strengths are in storytelling, not characterization, and in the clarity of her smooth-flowing sentences. Her lucid descriptions of the essential differences between traditional plant breeding and high tech bioengineering—as part of two juxtaposed, thought-provoking chapters exploring the complex practical, philosophical, and ethical issues involved in restoration ecology—are alone worth the price of admission.

In the end, what matters in this book are not characters, but the actions that different people are taking to restore the American chestnut to health and abundance. As Freinkel describes them, most of these actions have to do with attempts to transfer the natural protective immunity of Asian chestnut trees to American chestnuts trees, or to hybrid, “backcrossed” American/Asian chestnuts, giving the species immunity to the fungus that nearly extirpated it. The real heart of this story is Freinkel’s exploration of the powerful affective bond that humans have to the rest of the natural world, and of the bond that some humans have to a specific tree that they love with great passion.

Can the American chestnut be restored to health and abundance, overcoming mass death and possible extinction? It could happen. It may not. No one knows for sure—yet. Freinkel shows us that the bonds between humans and a specific indigenous American tree are very much alive. She also suggests that the still evolving relationship...