...The peddler now speaks to the countess
who's pretending to care for him,
Saying "Name me someone who's not a parasite,
and I'll go out and say a prayer for him..."
-Bob Dylan "Visions of Joanna," 1966.
Excepting the development of the mass produced automobile - which wins hands down - the greatest environmental disaster on the North American continent was not the dangerous fossil fuel accident spill in Prince Edward Sound nor was it the much ballyhooed and inflated accident at Three Mile Island. It's not even close. The greatest environmental disaster of all time in North America was first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in 1904 by a poor fellow named Herbert Merkel. What Merkel noticed was that all of the magnificent Chestnut trees at the zoo were dying.
This was all Commodore Perry's fault.
In 1854, Commodore Perry sailed into Toyko bay and "opened" Japan to the West, even though Japan had no interest whatsoever in "opening" on its own. Nevertheless Japan was "opened," at the point of a gun. This is not generally understood, but this "opening" was the opening salvo of what would become known as "World War II." One contributing factor involved whaling, ironically enough - Japan, with Norway is one of two countries in the world that still engages in this dubious "harvest" - because American sailors out hunting for biofuels - whale oil - were sometimes shipwrecked on Japanese shores, whereupon they were not repatriated to their home country. This oil business got worse, of course. Commodore Perry went on a quest to make Japanese shores safe for shipwrecked whalers, among other things. It is widely understood that the Second World War was both the world's only nuclear war and also one of a series of dangerous fossil fuel wars that have continued from the 20th century into the 21st. Make no mistake about it. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was motivated by oil, although by this time oil and whales were not as closely related as they had been during the age of wonderful biofuels.
What comes around goes around.
One of the things that Commodore Perry's sailors noticed when they were "opening" Japan was that the Japanese chestnut, the fruit, was bigger than the (more flavorful) American Chestnut, even though the Japanese trees themselves were relatively weeny when compared to the magnificient American Chestnut, a tree so large and strong that it was called the "redwood of the east." Still it didn't seem right that the Japanese should have bigger nuts than the Americans, so the Japanese Chestnut was brought to America.
The American Chestnut was the most densely populated tree in the Eastern forest - in part because it was an alleopath. Although the tree was huge, on a molecular level it had a very big problem with its genetics. It had not evolved resistence to a parasite that was commonly found in Asian trees - as weeny as they were - Cryphonnectria Parasitica.
At the time, most American fenceposts, and much American furniture was made from Chestnuts, and the collection of wild chestnuts was a huge industry practiced by people who had very little else.
Since the Japanese trees had evolved such resistance - and were almost all infected with this parasite - the importation of the tree from Japan lead, predictably enough, to a huge plague of Chestnut blight. By 1950 the American Chestnut which had dominated the American forest up until that time was nearly extinct. Fortuitously, much of the gene stock of the American Chestnut has been saved through an agressive program of cross breeding and from a few isolated pockets of trees that were isolated from the rest of the Chestnut forest. (Sadly one of these survivor trees, in Michigan, was felled by vandals.)
The impact of this disaster was huge, but you seldom hear of it anymore.
Interestingly enough, the same sort of thing was underway in Europe - the European Chestnut also had no resistence, and almost all of the Chestnut trees in Italy were dead from blight, when a brilliant French plant physiologist named Jean Grente deduced the cause of the infection and with fierce aplomb imported a parasite on the parsite, an "organism" that lives on the border between inanimate and animate, the virus like particle that caused "hypovirulence." Noting the similarity to the American outbreak, Grente imported this "organism" to France, saving France's chestnut trees.
Grente is one of those heros you never hear about.
Anyway, this tale might seem like ancient history, but it's not. This sort of thing is still happening.
This short stupid diary is not about much, because I've reached a point where, like an anti-nuke, I couldn't care less, but I am here to note that this sort of thing has not stopped.
I have some bizarre private quests - like the quest to establish how much of the world's protein has been industrially manufactured. Interestingly enough, I stopped writing that series when I started to weep while thinking of a grove of California pin oaks and my wife, but that's none of your business.
Recently - to my surprise - a form of so called renewable energy - biofuels reached an exajoule scale in the United States, where 100 exajoules of energy are consumed each year. For sometime I've been thinking about Sweden's plan to grind up forests to make motor fuel, and so I've wondered to myself how fast and completely carbon dioxide is absorbed by trees. So I've got to wondering. Specifically, I have wondered how many trees a car owner would need to plant each year to make trips to Walmart - a company famously greenwashed by Amoral Lovins - carbon neutral.
For this reason I've been leafing (pun intended) through the journal Tree Physiology - fascinating reading - trying to figure out stuff about carbon flows.
It's a useless exercise, really.
I fell upon this article: "Improving disease resistance of butternut (Juglans cinerea), a threatened fine hardwood: a case for single-tree selection through genetic improvement and deployment†"
Um. (Michler et al, Tree Physiology 26, 121–128 (2005).)
This review focuses on approaches for the development of canker-resistant butternut (Juglans cinerea L.). Butternut, also known as white walnut or oilnut, is a fine hardwood species in the family Juglandaceae, section Trachycaryon (Manning 1978), or more appropriately, section Cardiocaryon (Fjellstrom and Parfitt 1994). Butternut hybridizes with J. regia L. (Dioscaryon) and species in the section Cardiocaryon, but not with J. nigra L. (Rhysocaryon). Two hybrids of J. cinerea are recognized: J. cinerea × J. regia = J. × quadrangulata (Carr.) Rehd. and J. cinerea × J. ailantifolia Carriére = J. × bixbyi Rehd. (USDA NRCS 2004b). Native to North America, from NewBrunswick to Georgia, and west to Minnesota and Arkansas, butternut is not an abundant species (Schultz 2003) and is seldom found in pure stands, but rather in association with four northern and central mixed mesophytic forest cover types: sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.)–basswood (Tilia americana L.), yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera L.)–white oak (Quercus alba L.)–northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.), beech (Fagus sylvatica L.)–sugar maple, and river birch (Betula nigra L.)–sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus L.) (Rink 1990).A relatively slow-growing tree, butternut attains a mean height of 12 to 18 m, a mean diameter of 30–61 cm and seldom exceeds 75 years of age (Rink 1990). Butternut is shadeintolerant and is considered to be one of the most winter hardy of the Juglans species...
Plus ca change...
Interestingly enough, both Juglans species and Castaneda species (Chestnuts) are alleopaths. I have both species on my property, including a rare American Chestnut - and they are fighting it out to the death. (I will kill and burn every Juglans if the Castaneda is threatened though.)
Recently several species of tree on my property were killed by a falling branch of a Branford pear - and the Chestnut was damaged. Damn!
This was a great victory though for renewble energy, since it will allow me to burn wood this winter instead of dangerous natural gas. I will produce about 6 to 10 grams an hour of particulate pollution when I do this - but I reason that dangerous natural gas waste is more dangerous than particulates from so called renewable wood heating. An interesting side light to this matter involves the fact that more than a million people each year are thought to be killed by wood burning, but I couldn't care less and burn wood anyway.
It's romantic.
I would be in tears if I had to burn Chestnut wood though.
The Juglans species on my property are not, by the way, are not butternuts, but black walnuts, a tree highly prized by furniture makers.
It was really fun to find out about them when they killed all of my tomato plants.
They're on notice. They're threatened because I am threatening them. They'd better watch out or they'll end up as dining room furniture.
{Edited June 28, 2008 to fix Admiral/Commodore Dewey/Perry Confusion}