American chestnut

in some places where it's eroded away and it's just wide enough for one car to fit through and that was a lot of fun gives me a little palpitation because i'm not i'm not a risk taker but we stopped at a little nature preserve in there and and tim got to check something off

his list yeah where did you find american chestnut yep found american chestnut and it's actually right um the nature preserve we went in is just a half of a mile the three quarters of a mile down um to the west of us here So it's on the exact same road at the end of the road here.

So we have a contact to

email and send the pictures to in case it's a... a stand of a American chestnut they're unaware of.

That'll be, that'll be fun.

Yeah.

[upbeat music] In 1904, somebody noticed a sick tree at the Bronx Zoo.

Within fifty years, the fungus killing it had wiped out about four billion American chestnut trees from Maine all the way down to Georgia.

In 2018, Richard Powers wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, which I loved.

He set it in the early 20th century and made the American chestnut tree the main character.

This fabled tree, which most of us had probably never even heard of at that point, was a tree that fed families and wildlife for generations.

And yet, most of us had never seen one fully grown, and we still might not, unless a small team in Syracuse pulls off a caper.

But last month, for the first time ever, the USDA cleared a forest tree engineered to bring a wild species back, an American chestnut carrying one gene from wheat.

Over the last thirty-seven years of work, there had been progress made and mistakes made, new generations of researchers and partnerships that have ended.

America's weirdest culture war is over a tree.

Trump world hunters and environmentalists want to resurrect the American chestnut.

What they can't agree on is how.

By Kit Shellal, read aloud by Mark Leidorf.

Just as our glorious nation continues to thrive in strength, beauty, affluence, and purpose, the saplings planted today will grow, prosper, and contribute to our way of life.

The trees were extraordinary for several reasons the president chose not to mention.

They were American chestnuts, an iconic species nearly driven to extinction.

Grown in a laboratory in petri dishes full of biochemical ooze, these two were genetically engineered by scientists to defeat the blight that almost wiped out their genus.