This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa, witnessing MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport.
Defends her PFL world title. One last time. Unforgettable and got you, Margaret. To an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena.
For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter.
Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Fill your tank and fill yourself with new experiences. With old friends, new ones, and the next generation ready to ride.
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Harley-Davidson Motorcycles. Ride. Whether it's help with hormone therapy, weight management, or sexual health, every woman should have access to affordable prescription medication and personalized care that understands the whole woman. Join me, Dr. Doug Lucas, clinical lead of hormone optimization and longevity at LifeMD, along with other leading experts on the podcast.
Here's something good on women's health and longevity. To learn more, go to lifeemd.com slash iHeart. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Few lyrics signal Christmas more than roasted chestnuts, but by the time the words were penned in 1945, Those days were already gone. the American chestnut tree had vanished, and in its place Nostalgia for the plant grew.
Let's get into the story. You almost hear the nostalgia sometimes when you think about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. It's interesting too, because there's another Christmas song. At the fireplace while we watch the chestnut fire. That's the chestnuts.
Because if you don't score a chestnut and you put it in the fire, it will And you can still go to New York City today and buy chestnuts on the street at Christmas time. But it is nostalgia. It's not real anymore. What we had was about four billion chestnut trees, and within about fifty years. Everything was gone.
Street corner New York chestnuts quickly became Chinese ones. That was Michael Gergen, CEO of the American Chestnut Foundation, or TACF for short. When we lost the chestnut, we lost this relationship with forests, life, the American experience. all of it. Go.
All sorts of wildlife were reliant on the tree. Turkey, deer, bear, Native Americans managed that tree.
So there was a system that was very much designed so that there was constantly chestnuts, so there was constantly wildlife for them to hunt. The Haudenosaunee tribe in New York even called the tree a cousin. It was so important to their life. Uh When European colonization came in, it provided a lot of opportunities. Chestnut was absolutely important for that winter food supply.
You know, it was often called the bread tree. And one region in America would seize on those opportunities like no other. In Appalachia, it was just a part of life. In addition to being a tree that provided food for human beings, particularly in poorer communities, the chestnut harvest actually made up a significant portion of income for folks. Kids would talk about selling nuts to folks on train cars and being able to produce a tremendous amount of income for their family.
And the nuts, they were quite a bit of feed for animals as well, ogs in particular. The tannin industry is the one that was really interesting.
So the ability to take tannins from the chestnut and actually use it in leather treatment was really, really influential for a very long period of time. And that's one of the reasons why it was great for fencing, construction, because of that high tannin concentration. It doesn't rot. All the treated pine that you see now, you could just use chestnut. You wouldn't have to treat it.
You can still find chestnut in a lot of places. They called it the cradle-to-grave species in Appalachia because it was literally a cradle and literally a grave for people, but it provided a whole lot of life in between. But that way of life was about to come crashing down. Dissatisfied with the American chestnut's wild nature and small fruit. Orchard growers began importing the Chinese chestnut.
a cousin from Asia, specifically bred for agricultural use. What they didn't know was that they were also importing a stowaway. Chestnut blight. The Chinese chestnut was immune to the disease. but its American cousin would have no such luxury.
1904, a forester at the Bronx Zoo noticed The Chinese Blight. In one of his handwritten notes he said And this would be Devastating. And he was absolutely right. Spreading by both wind and rain, it rapidly tore through the American chestnut population. In a single year it could advance roughly twenty miles.
There were a couple of attempts by the Department of Agriculture to actually solve the problem directly. and they fail. People could only watch as tumorous cankers strangled the life from their ancient trees. But that would be assuming that they even had the luxury to watch. Hey, host.
of unemployed citizens. Face the grim problem of a gist. and an equally great number toil with little return. Yeah. Only a foolish optimist.
Rendered nice and The depression takes Appalachia, and think about that for a moment. If you lost your winter food, lost some income from wood, from tannins, Appalachia pretty much emptied out. But not all hope was lost. Not every tree was killed by the first wave of disease. A scattered few survived long enough for their seeds to be grown in carefully protected orchards.
once a staple of American life. The American chestnut was now on hospice. Government gave up on it. That's when volunteers came together and said, we're not ready to give up. I was gonna Mm-hmm.
Yeah. That's where the American Chestnut Foundation comes in. a volunteer organization with one expressed aim. Producing an American chestnut capable of surviving in the wild. If you ask everybody who's working on bringing this tree back, they'll talk about it as there's something that was lost from this landscape.
It's a good idea to try to bring it back because it's the right thing to do. There are days I honestly am in awe of what they're capable of. Because these are folks who've been working for 40 years just trying to keep chestnuts alive. Yeah. That work means pollinating individual flowers by hand in the heat of summer.
Trucking water during droughts. And infecting each meticulously grown tree with the most virulent strain of blight to ensure only the fittest survive to parent the next generation. But that's only the groundwork. You know, we've got really terrific academics who are supporting us. We've got foresters, we've got state departments of forestry across the country.
Sometimes, you know, they'll volunteer after hours to help us out.
Sometimes they give us equipment to use. I even have one member who was a career diplomat and you know, he really experienced the culture of chestnut in China and went back to university to get a PhD in natural resources so that he could help us study the American chestnut. But despite so much commitment, success has been far from guaranteed. The original plan was to breed in just 1/16th Chinese chestnut to have a more resistant tree. We got there, but we did too much.
Bottom line. That was devastating when you realized that it wasn't going to work. We really had a lot of hope in the transgenic process. There was a major growth penalty. That means that the tree is not going to get tall in the forest.
That's the whole reason that we're breeding these things. You know, so that was devastating. The most important thing is to not turn those things into the heartbreak that they are, but into the learning that they really are. I think the beauty of a continuous improvement program like we've got for Chestnut is: we're not going to make any promises, but we are going to deliver, and we're delivering right now. That's something I couldn't have said with confidence 10 years ago.
Enter Recurrent Genomic Selection. A statistical process that greatly increases the precision of breeding programs by predicting the traits of potential offspring. Often used for things such as increasing meat production or milk volume, it is now bringing the species back from the brink of extinction. What I'm incredibly hopeful about is that the amount of resistance that we're already experiencing in this first generation of trees. At the end of 20 years, we'll have that third generation far more resistant.
Those are going to last well beyond my lifetime, and I'm so excited about getting those trees on the landscape. You know, you can celebrate the United States for lots of different reasons, but I go back and I look at some of the early writings of Alex de Tocqueville. He was a Frenchman who came over to the U.S. and sort of wrote about what the country was like. And one of the things that he found really remarkable was that ordinary Americans would just come together to solve extraordinary problems.
And that's really epitomized in the spirit of the American Chestnut Foundation. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own James Jowski. And a special thanks to Michael Gergen for sharing the story of the chestnut tree. Appalachia itself thrived on the bounty of chestnut trees from the chestnuts themselves to the tree itself and its properties for things like fence posts and so many other great uses. And then came the Chinese blight.
and in steps the American Chestnut Foundation. to try and solve the problem. And that is, as Tocqueville said, one of the great things about this country. We gather together voluntarily and solve all kinds of problems the government isn't equipped to do or may not be inclined to do. The story of the chestnut tree.
on our American stories. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa. Witness an MMA Legends final fight. Chris Cyborg, one of the greatest in history. She's an absolute pioneer in the sport.
Defends her PFL world title. One last time. An unforgettable and an unforgettable career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info/slash tampa.
Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs.
Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Upgrade to elite checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 4% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with early pay. Don't settle. Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit America's ChristianCU.com forward slash iHeart.
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IceCube's Big Three season has come down to this. The Big Three Championship is coming to Charlotte, who will be crowned the Big Three Season 9 Champion. Plus the Big Three All-Star Game, the biggest names in the game, all on one court one more time. Two games of the most physical, competitive, and non-stop three-on-three action. The game played the way you love.
Watch live Saturday on CBS at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. Yeah.
