America lost the chestnut, its "perfect tree" | Hacker News Reader

America lost the chestnut, its "perfect tree"

theatlantic.com

244 pointsvwoolf176 comments

The issues with the Darling 58 project had some good discussion here two weeks ago[0].

Tangentially: A distillery in Los Angeles, The Obscure, is making a rye whisky aged in American Chestnut barrels, with some of the proceeds going to the American Chestnut Foundation. It's quite good.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38573765

https://shop.theobscure.com/products/rites-of-fall-rye-ameri...

For those wondering.

Also written up in WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/2...

The Chestnut, the Elm, the Ash.

I've lost much of my backyard since 2010 to Emerald Ash Borer. A listful view of industrial warehouses is my daily reminder that change is ever present and unavoidable.

I'm growing a Princeton elm in my front yard that's supposedly resistant to Dutch elm disease. It was a 6 foot twig a year ago, but a single growing season had it shoot up to what must be 12 feet or more with it quadrupling in thickness. Hopefully in 5 years it will be providing nice shade.

They're trying to do the same with the chestnut in finding a suitable hybrid. It's such a shame that we've lost so many of our best trees.

We're having to take down our last surviving Ash tree this winter. I'll surely shed a tear. It will live on in some furniture I've asked a local craftsman to make

I lost a huge ash out by the road about 10 years back.

The only saving graces were:

- It was on the road and the town took it down at no charge.

- With that tree gone, the strip of my front field I was letting grow out grew much more and shields me a lot better from the road than I was before.

In a lot of parts of the countryside that I love, the ash trees have completely obscured all the best views over the past 30 years. It feels awful to say but I can’t wait for ash-die-back to wipe out this generation. We’ll be glad for the timber to use as fuel too, of course.

Oh noes.

I have what I thought was called a Rayford Ash in my yard, on the advice of a tree specialist from the local nursery. But apparently I've been misspelling it?

https://www.moonvalleynurseries.com/raywood-ash

How much is that going to cost? You need to get the tree hauled to a mill if one is close by and cut into lumber that needs to be sorted through to select pieces that are furniture grade and then sent to a craftsman to actually make it. Sounds expensive!

Honestly be grateful it’s gone. They’re crappy trees that are dangerous to have near property and people.

Great for guitars though!

Indeed. New York’s Central Park historically has incorporated a lot of the American Elm.

If you look the park however (particularly among the mall/promenade), many of the trees have undergone severe trimming to try and manage the effects of the elm borer and the diseases they spread (particularly Dutch elm disease).

It’s pretty unfortunate.

Still have a big mature ash tree in my backyard. SoCal. Often wonder how safe it is during Santa Ana wind events, as quite a few limbs are over my roof. It's so stiff compared to other trees.

The problem with ash trees is they fall apart easily. Limbs and branches are brittle and fall down frequently. So they’re dangerous trees. Especially once emerald ash bore takes root.

Ashes are not very good trees to keep on a property with people and structures. If you notice lots of debris it might be worth cutting it down.

Ahh the Chestnut, you can sit in a chestnut home roasting chestnuts on an an open fire burning on Chestnut wood.

It reminds me of the old saying, the axe with the wooden handle was welcomed in the forest because it convinced all the trees that it was one of them.

That's nothing.

You could sit in a bamboo hut wearing clothes made from bamboo, sitting on bamboo furniture, using bamboo chopsticks to eat bamboo out of bamboo bowls.

It's pretty similar.

The American Chestnut was a "cradle to grave" tree - from a baby rocked in a chestnut crib, living in a chestnut house with chestnut furniture and shingled with chestnut bark, warmed by a chestnut fire, entertained by a chestnut fiddle, until finally ending as a body buried in a chestnut casket.

Plus, chestnut nuts were food for you, for your pigs, and for the wild game you hunted.

Mark Shepard is trying to make hazelnut finished pork into a “thing”. I think it was always niche to one tiny demographic but most of us have never heard of it. It’s a lot easier to deal with hazelnut harvesting if the ones you miss turn into ham. So what if you were supposed to harvest yesterday and it’s raining today?

After finding out that bamboo fabric is just rayon, and seeing some videos of how bamboo lumber is created ... I'm not feeling all that positive about bamboo as some kind of green/renewable material. The processing it requires uses a bunch of really nasty chemicals.

There's been some pretty interesting developments in the space of wood fiber clothing without such nasty chemicals:

http://ioncell.fi/

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ra/c5ra1238...

Probably a decade before it makes its way to a price point I can afford.

Yeah the “Bamboo” fabric was fantastic marketing. I’ll still take cotton, thanks.

A lot of people got seriously bamboozled!

After seeing the effort it takes to remove bamboo from where you don't want it, I'm pretty prejudiced against it outside where it's native. Granted, it's no knotweed.

And you can make coffee with bamboo coffee filters.

As I said in here, Jerry and I actually could taste the difference between them and paper filters, in a Triangle Test.

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/google-busts-a-coffee-my...

How long have bamboo clothes been a thing? That’s the rayon process isn’t it? Has that been around more than twenty years? Patagonia will sell you work clothes that are almost half wood fiber cloth now, with a mix of cotton and hemp to finish it out.

You could definitely eat chestnut porridge from a chestnut bowl with a chestnut spoon, so the clothing is the main differentiator and if chestnut were here today, I’m sure they’d be using it for clothing.

I'm not sure how long they've been making them. Mostly I've seen bamboo socks, rather than outerwear, but for the sake of comparison I can't see why it can't be used for non-sock uses.

I have bamboo sheets. They are really comfortable.

I’ve seen shirts. Rayon is a process, not a material. It’s somewhere in the range of satin or silk. This wood fiber I haven’t seen unblended so I don’t know what its consistency is like, but I would guess in the neighborhood of flax. Softer than hemp, rougher than cotton. Whether it’s softer or rougher than linen I could not tell you.

I don't think that's quite right.

Rayon / viscose is basically: you take some cellulosic material (wood pulp, could be bamboo pulp, whatever) and dissolve it in a strong basic solution. You now have cellulose in solution. Then, you shoot it out of tiny holes to make almost 100% cellulose fibers of whatever diameter (the hole size). Then you make this into yarns and weave it into something. You can make it seem like silk, cotton, wool, whatever.

I don't think the feedstock has much to do with it (though lignin-containing vs. not is an issue).

What's 'new' is that someone started making a big deal about bamboo as the feedstock about 15, 20 years ago, as a renewable material. Apparently the rayon process was patented in 1892.

I had long sleeves t-shirt some 13 years ago. Good at wicking sweat, iirc a bit itchy, but couldnt use it in winter since it was cooling me down way too much, when I needed warmth.

The Patagonia duck canvas stuff is incredible! Wear frequently.

And still have a problem with having too much bamboo growing outside...

And then you'd still probably die of starvation or some variation of malnutrition, for lack of the physical capacity to consume the 17 lbs of bamboo a day necessary to sustain 2000 kcal intake.

I'm not even entirely sure that the act of consuming it yields more calories from consumption than consumed in exertion for humans.

Most species that subsist on bamboo are sedentary and spend significant fractions of their time and energy simply masticating.

I guess I should have been clearer; I didn't exactly intend eating it alone.

There's more than enough calories to sustain life in a Thai green curry with bamboo in it ;-)

Couldn't you condense the calories somehow, like making a broth and straining?

I imagine it's going to involve a pulverization or grinding step to increase surface area and availability of whatever has caloric value in the plant matter (the equivalent biological processes all seem to), but I'm sure with the appropriate process you could make a soylent bamboo paste or something yeah.

I guess it depends on the specific type. I'd rather have to remove a bamboo clump than a Thai banana clump (I've done both).

Tree of Heaven is worse still. I tried to clear a small property of it for a couple of seasons, and failed, so I unconsciously take note whenever I see it growing: it's seemingly everywhere.

Never dealt with those, but the worst for me was Brazilian peppertree. I had just one in my backyard and the best I could do over a decade was managing to keep it from spreading.

I have a few that are over a year old now that I noticed and plan to take care of soon.

Can you summarize what you've learned?

The most effective method was to hack into the bark to apply an herbicide, and give it a couple of weeks to make its way into the roots. Dig out as much as you can once the leaves all die. Good luck!

Thanks!

It's more accurately called Tree of Hell that Will Not Die. Toxic sap, spreads wildly, re-sprouts from any root fragments more than about 1cm long.

Please share this story :-)

It's not much of a story - banana plants are ridiculously resilient; so long as it hasn't flowered yet, you can cut off the entire "trunk" and it will have started shooting the new leaves from the stump within a day.

This resilience applies to the part below ground too, and they're full of water, so it's a bit like trying to dig watermelons out of the ground, but if inevitably split one while digging, and you miss a bit it's just going to grow again, and if you take too long between bouts vs the plant (as with bamboo it's unlikely to be a 1-day affair for a reasonable size clump), some of the bits you cut will have broken down and started to rot, so the ground will be soggy and smell horrible.

Also bamboo is not a tree and not protected under any tree laws (that I know of).

IANATL (I am not a tree lawyer) but do browse /r/treelaw for fun

And wipe your ass with bamboo toilet paper.

Or leave it alone, put on a sweater, and build using superadobe.

There are efforts to bring them back! Consider looking for local ones in your area and trying to support them. For example: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/food-drink/tree-farmer-buzz-ferv...

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire Jack Frost nipping at your nose."

I was always struck how nobody roasts chestnuts anymore. Then I learned how some forests in the US had 25% chestnut trees and that blight killed almost all of them. What a fascinating thing that chestnuts were as common as acorns for our grandparents and great-grandparents but are almost non-existent for us.

Street vendors with roasted chestnuts are common all over Europe, especially at Christmas markets

Those are a different type of Asian / Chinese chestnut. Smaller, less flavorful etc etc.

They are a third sort, European chestnuts. They are generally held to be better flavor than the Asian varieties, but not as good as the nearly extinct (but not quite) American Chestnuts.

do the European / Asian versions survive and grow in America? Are they being grown?

This is a good question, and I'm struggling to find a clear answer.

The Asian varieties are generally blight resistant and grow in the US, but they aren't as good for nuts or lumber. The European varieties are slightly less susceptible to blight, but are definitely susceptible. There are European/Asian crosses that are more resistant, but they don't seem to be widely grown here. Maybe they aren't as cold tolerant as the native American varieties, and thus more restricted for where they can be grown?

The parallel question is why Europe doesn't seem to be having as many problems with blight if their trees are susceptible. I think it's partly that the disease just isn't as prevalent yet, and partly that there are some "odd" biological controls being used there that for some reason don't work as well in the US: https://portal.ct.gov/CAES/Fact-Sheets/Plant-Pathology/Prote...

would it be possible to cross the plants the other way? Make the European/Asian ones big and tasty like the American ones. I am sure there are people thinking about this full time and would have much better ideas, but just wondering.

Yes. The American Chestnut Foundation has been working on that for several decades; not quite there yet, but it's probably possible.

More at https://tacf.org/

American chestnuts are actually smaller still than the Chinese variety.

The varieties grown and sold in Europe are larger than the Asian.

I have an American/Chinese F1 hybrid here on my hobby farm and its nuts are smaller than the Chinese. Which aren't very large.

While American chestnuts are often more flavorful, they are almost always smaller than the commercial Chinese and Japanese varieties.

Those shells are no joke either.

When I collect the nuts from around my property even leather mittens don't work. The spikes on them (both Chinese and American) are intense. I don't know how the squirrels can handle it, but they do (though they go after them after the nut has fully open and fallen to the ground. I imagine the spikes are the trees way of discouraging the rodents from taking them until they're fully ripe and fertile)

What the heck you write about, back home we have chestnut trees being up to 500 years old (thats the local record setter in one tiny eastern european country).

No chinese products around, not sure if you actually have any real experience of stuff you comment on.

These are the chestnuts I know, that are sold as street food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanea_sativa

Native in Europe and Asia.

There also is a different kind of chestnut commonly found in parks, along roads, that is not edible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum

"a different kind of chestnut commonly found"

Sometimes called horse chestnut, but not actually a chestnut, completely unrelated. North American native, though I understand it's been introduced into Europe.

My father roasted chestnuts every Christmas. I think it held on longer in Italian-American households.

I was going to do it this year, but couldn't find any locally in time.

Our local grocery store (Publix) sells them for $9/bag. They were quite good this year and peeled easily. I think they are sourced from Italy.

I used to, and almost got some this year until I saw a bundle not much bigger than my fist was $15.99 at the grocery store...

They do seem unusually expensive this year, and I wonder if it's related to the same drought in the western mediterranean that decimated olive crops. Persimmons also seem more rare and expensive this December than in other years and I believe a lot of those are grown in Spain.

Not sure where they're sourced from, but I buy them from Costco every year. They're really a treat when warmed.

TACF is no longer supporting development of D58 American chestnut trees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38573765 - Dec 2023 (58 comments)

The American chestnut tree is coming back. Who is it for? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576771 - Sept 2023 (4 comments)

American chestnut tree in Centreville is the 'holy grail' for conservationists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32621570 - Aug 2022 (155 comments)

American chestnut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30333498 - Feb 2022 (73 comments)

The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441593 - March 2021 (85 comments)

The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363660 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Blight wiped out the American chestnut. Scientists are close to bringing it back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846891 - Dec 2019 (2 comments)

American chestnut poised for return to America's forests - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855137 - March 2017 (1 comment)

American chestnut trees are “technically extinct” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478910 - Jan 2017 (120 comments)

> An estimated 430 million of the trees can still be found in the forests of the American East. But more than 80 percent of these trees never grow past an inch or so in diameter.

It sounds so solvable. It must be hard to keep the wind-borne fungus spores from spreading. Guessing this fungus is everywhere.

Maybe one day we can have a CRISPR solution that’ll bring them back?

We're losing chestnut trees in Turkey fast as well.

Causes:

- Phytophthora cambivora (ink disease)

- also by: P. cinnamomi, P. plurivora and P. cryptogea

- Cryphonectria parasitica (chestnut blight)

- gall wasp (Dryocosmus kuriphilus)

In Kastamonu and Sinop, modest success reported against blight in treated areas but I don't think the spread is easy to contain.

Need to note, blight suspected to have set foot in Turkey in 70s, started to become significant in 90s and now we're losing most. Chestnut has suddenly become hard to reach this year by additional effect of Gall wasp.

The Understory by Richard Powers is a beautiful novel that tells a part of the story of the chestnut tree and certainly deepened my appreciation for it.

I believe it’s the Overstory?

Yes, The Overstory. The writing is great and Powers seems to have done a tremendous amount of beautifully presented background research (none of which he wants to leave out). But, somewhere in the middle, the book's focus shifts from its interesting characters to a strident narrative about our impending doom.

My review of Richard Powers: reading him is like reading a Yale-educated version of Nicholas Sparks.

Oh wait is that the reason I can never find chestnuts here in Canada in grocery stores?

No, that's because of consumer preferences. You can't find durian in your store either but not because durian is dying out. In stores in the US, chestnuts always pop up around Thanksgiving or Christmas and are absent the rest of the year.

Consumer preference around food is largely steeped in tradition – i.e. people generally eat what they grew up eating. It is quite possible that a tradition was lost over the generations due to the species decline. In other words, the grocery store might be full of them today if they had remained abundant.

That said, chestnut trees were only ever common in the depths of Southern Ontario. And a quick search suggests that some grocery stores in that region do carry chestnuts, so it seems the tradition has remained alive to some degree.

Actually, consumer preferences around food is based on marketing and availability. Most of the food people eat today changed after WW2, due to changes in the food distribution chain, and the forces of advertising. We don't eat much of what we did 100 years ago. People today buy what's in the grocery store, and what's in the grocery store is there based on what sells, which is based on what a given industry has convinced us to buy and what can be shipped to us for cheap without going bad. Some foods are a local specialty or tradition, but most are less than a century old.

It's equally likely that the chestnut's availability in Southern Ontario is merely a byproduct of being easy to store and ship a nut all over the Americas. Grocery store owners may offer it merely because they want to provide a variety of nuts, with almost nobody buying them. Grocery stores often stock items that don't make them any money and are rarely bought, because it contributes to the consumer interest in supermarkets that "have everything", even if consumers only typically purchase 5% of the selection in the store.

> In the first half of the 20th century, a fungal disease called blight, inadvertently imported from Asia on trade ships, wiped out nearly all of the trees.

Global trade is destroying biodiversity across the entire planet. Most of us don't even realize all the ways in which our lives are made poorer by decreased biodiversity, which is why these kinds of articles are so good. But we're all acutely aware of not having the latest gadget. I wish more environmentalists talked about this.

Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone, while global trade does.

Global trade killed bananas? Without it you would not know bananas exists.

Would you rather ban all unprocessed food imports and eat only local fruits and vegetables? Limited by season, soil, water and probably overpriced

> Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone, while global trade does.

Biodiversity is an intrinsic aspect of ecosystem stability. The earth's functioning ecosystem is literally necessary for life on earth. All that "free" value in the form of plants and animals that produce our food, photosynthesizing organisms that produce air, decomposers that produce soil, etc is the result of coevolution of diverse organisms. When that system becomes unstanble or unbalanced then mass extinction follows.

The human economic ecosystem is built on top of a functioning biosphere. You can't just replace what the biosphere provides with industry or trade.

I get what you are saying. But I will say that a lot of local foods disappeared because of the global trade. There are TONS of edible plants and trees that we don’t even consider because we buy one of the 3 types of lettuce sold. This is not because they are bad tasting, actually in some cases superior to their store bought alternative. It is just that nobody knows about them.

There is benefits, but there is also cons.

I live in California and benefit greatly from incredible local produce, but someone in Alabama does not. Trade has allowed everyone to enjoy the best of each region, while giving up some of their own.

I’d say the bigger issue is the commodification of corn syrup and reductionism of product for addiction rather than trade itself.

Alabama has a long growing season, a ton of arable land and more average rainfall than nearly anywhere in California. Not as warm in winter as California sure, but I’m not sure it’s the best example

I hate this type of “I read a fact” and applied it wrong comment.

Please point me to alabamas vast wine country or nuts or avacados. Just because Alabama theoretically has potential doesn’t mean it has everything California does.

I didn’t read a fact. I live about 25 miles from Alabama, and I’m well aware of the local produce I can get.

Good grief.

Alabama Ag is alive and well. Not everything is avocadoes or California nuts.

https://farmflavor.com/alabama-agriculture/

Sorry I offended Alabamans with facts about differential trade volume…

> Just because Alabama theoretically has potential doesn’t mean it has everything California does.

No one was saying that other than you.

I hate this type of "wrong" comment. Alabama obviously produces a ton of crops as do most of the states. After googling for 2 seconds, I even found Alabama is 2nd in the country as far as peanut production.

> I live in California and benefit greatly from incredible local produce

Without more qualifiers, that misses the point. Most local crops are still big ag varieties. The "local" crops you buy are likely the same ones sold in grocery stores anywhere in the US because so many things are grown in California.

But there are some things that can only be grown locally, because they aren't suited to shipping or because they have short shelf lives. And there are lots of varieties that are not on big ag's buy list, so large operations are very unlikely to grow them.

Even corn (which you mention) and soybeans need to be certain varieties to be turned into everything from high fructose corn syrup to the "shrimp shapes" made of soy I remember from grade school. They are part of the problem the GP is talking about, not the problem instead . . .

Big ag forces out diversity in crops and, frankly, forces a blander palate on the populace, who doesn't know better anymore.

Please save yourself further effort here-- the person you're replyng to isn't interested in cultivating and improving any kind of accurate mental model of the world.

Global trade killed all uniqueness of culture? We don't even know what we're missing.

> Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone

Jfc. Plants aren't just for food. Lots of medicines are derived from plants. As indigenous people dwindle from the planet, their knowledge of useful plants disappears and their potential becomes lost on us.

Medicine we have now is orders of magnitude better than what indigenous people could ever dream of.

GP was not talking about herbal remedies. Many modern medicines are derived from or inspired by plants.

https://www.thoughtco.com/drugs-and-medicine-made-from-plant...

He specifically mentioned dwindling indigenous people and their somehow unique knowledge.

The plant derived medicines come from plants known to indigenous people to have activity. If there's no indigenous knowledge available there's no way to study the plants and make modern medicines.

Of course you can still study plants and make medicines. That's exactly what your indigenous people supposedly did in the past, didn't they?

And if they did it then there's absolutely no reason to think that modern pharma can't produce the same knowledge. And the whole assumption that there is a body of invaluable knowledge somewhere, held by indigenous people but somehow unavailable to modern science is very strange.

> We don't even know what we're missing.

The plants that are being neglected aren't unknown, they are just not as useful

> Jfc. Plants aren't just for food.

Nobody said they were. Stop inventing strawman arguments

> indigenous people dwindle from the planet, their knowledge of useful plants disappears and their potential becomes lost on us.

Source required. What important plant knowledge is being lost?

We literally do not know what we lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putumayo_genocide

When rubber industrialists wiped out the people living in the area, those that remained lost generational knowledge. Ethnobotanists like Shultes explored the Amazon afterwards.

There's even a movie made on the subject of exploring the Amazon for medicines with Sean Connery, Medicine Man. Also, the more recent Embrace of the Serpent.

When you personally are sick do you go to a doctor or to a shaman?

> Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone

Just a bonkers nonsense statement, I am stunned by this perspective. Do you think you could live in an antiseptic paper envelope? Biodiversity doesn't "benefit" anyone so much as it comprises, entirely, the world from which we're inextricable.

Absolutely bonkers modernist anthropocentrism.

>Biodiversity doesn't "benefit" anyone so much as it comprises, entirely, the world from which we're inextricable.

Is it though? There's been several extinction events that wiped out the biodiversity of the planet and they were all natural too. We might be inextricable from the world but we can and do manipulate it to our benefit.

I don't understand what is the problem with anthropocentrism. Given the chance, I'd prefer more biodiversity for sure, but if it's objectively bad for human beings I think human interests should come first. It's just that the current cycle of overproduction and global warming isn't benefiting humans either. That's not the fault of human-centered thinking, it's the fault of profit-centered short-term thinking.

How biodiversity in some areas of US will benefit people in Chile?

But global trade is helping them to become richer by selling avocados to americans. Growing an avocado is devastating to local biome, but I bet people would rather destroy it than live in poverty.

I have never seen an edible chestnut tree and really don't care about how many species of them are all over the world.

I'm not talking about antiseptic envelope, it is not related to biodiversity. It is sad that biodiversity is decreasing, but we can live with smaller amount of species on the planet.

Will you fill the difference if there will be 20 instead of 60 species of ash tree?

Biodiversity is a word which divorced from its consequences, which can be positive, negative, both or neither.

It can result in “health” via symbiotic relationships, just as much as it can result suffering, war and hardship via the introduction of pests and diseases.

The point is it’s daft throw around biodiversity as some kind of absolute idea of virtue. It is not equitable with “goodness”.

Seeing humans as anything but yet another species on the face of earth is anthropocentrism by definition.

Some species help to transmit diseases over long distances. Some diseases cause extinction of some species. Nothing is new on the face of earth.

If you think that humans have some sort of a mission to preserve biodiversity then it's just arrogance, nothing more.

Ha! I find it enduringly funny that you mention arrogance here, since your comment is a perfect example of how human arrogance often gets in the way of correct analysis.

If you think that it's optimal problem-solving for humans to just ignore any and all evidence that they would be healthier if they interacted differently with their environment at scale, that's just arrogance.

It's absolutely nothing more, although I predict you'll keep assigning primacy to your gut feelings because engaging in thorough analysis would involve admitting you were wrong, which would make you feel bad.

I obviously don't mind doing thorough analysis. But this analysis can be done correctly only if you define the end goal, what you are trying to optimize.

If the goal is the prosperity of humanity then I'm all for it. However, if that's the case two things must be noted beforehand:

1) This is an anthropocentric approach. The parent comment seemed to imply that anthropocentrism is bad for some reason, so it might be an issue on your end too.

2) Prosperity of humanity as a goal is at odds with biodiversity. I don't regret the extermination of smallpox for one thing. I also appreciate for example that we largely replaced natural ecosystems with agricultural monocultures that yield more tons of food per square kilometer. This is great, we won't be able to sustain 8 billions of humans otherwise.

If you agree with these points then this means that we agree on principle. The rest are implementation details that can be figured out. E.g. your question of whether "would be healthier if they interacted differently with their environment at scale" -- probably yes, there are many things that can be improved.

> Prosperity of humanity as a goal is at odds with biodiversity.

I roundly refute this frankly riduculous assertion. It shows a grave lack of understanding of the actual mechanisms that maintain the natural world in a state fit for human habitation.

Humans have been crushing biodiversity for more than two thousands years now and yet the homo sapiens is thriving by all objective measures like population count, habitat width and dispensable energy per capita.

You may argue that at some point we have to stop and I agree. However this doesn't contradict the fact that up until now reducing biodiversity (e.g. by replacing forests with monoculture field crops) worked out extremely well.

For more details, see:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=biodiversity+and+human+...

If you look closely this is a troll account.

> Biodiversity does not directly benefit everyone

my mitochondria, and gut flora, politely disagree

This has to be bait.

It is wild to me how it seems like every blight or environmental disease or pest I hear about comes from Asia, Chestnut blight, Bark beetles, wildly invasive tree species where I live, carp, Burmese Pythons, that orange disease like 10 years ago, COVID, bird flu, etc.

Not making any kind of statement really, just that the only type of invasive species I know of from NOT Asia is climbing ivy

It’s definitely curious, but makes more sense when you realized that problems that spread from “the west” to Asia have no reason to be brought up, or even talked about in our languages.

“Eastern Filbert Blight” is a fungal disease native to North America, and our native hazelnuts are able to tolerate it. European hazelnuts are typically used in agriculture (for multiple good reasons) however these are basically wiped out by EFB without constant copper sprays, as they never evolved with the arms race against this pathogen. While I hear about it a lot here in Oregon, where we have a lot of European hazelnut variety orchards, I never hear much about what it’s doing in say England, or Turkey.

Incidentally, while an EFB resistant series of hazelnut cultivars was developed in response by Oregon State University, containing the Gasaway gene, there is now version of EFB that can fully overcome that resistance and is rapidly spreading here in Oregon, though it’s likely on the east coast as well.

OSU is working on new resistant varieties, but nothing will be released until there are multiple modes of resistance (at least 3), otherwise a new EFB strain will just get selected for again.

Rather than trying to create EFB resistant European varieties (Corylus avellana), another approach is to concentrate on developing naturally-resistant American varieties (Corylus americana) with larger nuts. Since these varieties are also more cold tolerant, the hope is that this will allow a hazelnut industry in the North East. More info here: https://znutty.com/pages/about-hazelnuts (not associated, just following their work).

That to me seems like the wrong way to think about it. Of course most invasive species would come from Asia, because there was already free-flowing contact between North and South America, and there was already hundreds of years of contact between Europe and the Americas. East Asia was the place that was isolated from the Americas for the longest period of time.

I think a more interesting question is what kinds of organisms are treated as highly problematic invasive species in Asia from the Americas. That is, shouldn't we expect Asian species to be susceptible to novel American pathogens?

For example, it's famously known that diseases like small pox wiped out many Native American populations because they had no previous exposure to the disease. Perhaps less known is that it's widely hypothesized that a virulent strain of syphilis wrecked havoc in Europe after being brought back by sailors fro the Americas.

Asia is not the only continent that's not connected by land with America.

Obviously not. But my point was that contact between America and Asia, in significant volume, happened significantly later than contact with Europe (and, by extension, North Africa, as there was always tons of contact between Europe and North Africa).

And yes, places that have been truly isolated from the Americas until relatively recently are also are places where novel invasive species and pathogens come from (e.g. HIV, Ebola).

I suppose that depends on if you consider ice to be land. Technically it is connected and there is record of travel between Russia and Alaska.

How is Africa connected with America? How is Europe connected? Even if you count ancient ice connection, Asia is more connected than they either of those. Wtf are you talking about

> Wtf are you talking about.

I request you to review and reword your comment, hyperhopper.

I suggest you find something more substantial to complain about.

This is hackernews, respond to the core of my comment. From the guidelines:

> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

(Also, ironically by commenting on the post you disable editing, so you made your own request impossible)

As soon as you are able to post something non-flippantly, then I will be able to respond likewise.

I agreed with your post and could expand upon it, but your attitude does not allow for it.

My comment was a soft ball for you to improve rather than doubling down, and for us then to move forward. I do see that my comment ironically broke guidelines too. We can both be better.

There is an aphid which attacks grape vines that originated in North America. It's the reason that much of the European wine varieties has to be grafted onto American root to survive.

This is a great, interesting example. From the Wikipedia page on Phylloxera:

> In France alone, total wine production fell from 84.5 million hectolitres in 1875 to only 23.4 million hectolitres in 1889. Some estimates hold that between two-thirds and nine-tenths of all European vineyards were destroyed.

Little known fact: we lost the grape used to produce mustard before Phylloxera.

Can you explain? I don't understand, as mustard is made from the mustard plant, not grapes.

Mustard grains are soaked in wine vinegar nowadays.

Before phylloxera, a grape that gives a wine with high acidity was used.

It went extinct.

correction: mustard flour, not grains.

Dijon

A lot of the European ones have been here so long people don't really call them invasive but they still are. Some common ones like honeybees, wild horses, pigs (boar), rats, mice, feral cats.

Also earthworms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_A...

Acclimatisation societies were part of European colonization efforts, often to make the rest of the world more Europe-like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatisation_society

> The appeal of acclimatisation societies in colonies, particularly Australia and New Zealand,[12] was the belief that the local fauna was in some way deficient or impoverished. There was also an element of nostalgia in the desire of European colonists to see familiar species.[13] An Australian settler, J. Martin, complained in 1830 that the "trees retained their leaves and shed their bark instead, the swans were black, the eagles white, the bees were stingless, some mammals had pockets, others laid eggs, it was warmest on the hills..." It was there that the desire to make the land feel more like England was strongest.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Schieffelin

> Eugene Schieffelin ... became chairman of the American Acclimatization Society and joined their efforts to introduce non-native species to North America for economic and cultural reasons. His 1890 release of European starlings in Central Park resulted in the first successful starling nesting in North America to be observed by naturalists.

Here's more about his organization, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Acclimatization_Socie...

> In 1864 the commissioners of Central Park had introduced Java sparrows, house sparrows, chaffinches and blackbirds into the park. The European sparrows were reported to have "multiplied amazingly". They quickly became one of the most common birds in New York, though the others did not seem to do as well. After the society's founding, such efforts were redoubled. The group's annual meeting held at the Great New York Aquarium in 1877[4] reported that the release of 50 pairs of English skylarks into Central Park had only been a partial success, since most had flown across the East River to take up residence at Newtown and Canarsie in Brooklyn. At the meeting, the recent release of European starlings, Japanese finches and pheasants into the park were noted. The meeting adjourned with the group resolved to introduce more chaffinches, skylarks, European robins and tits—"birds which were useful to the farmer and contributed to the beauty of the groves and fields"—in the city.[5]

The potato blight of the Irish famine came from south America, and the phylloxera that destroyed the french wine at the beginning of the 20th century came from north America.

Potatoes themselves came from South America, so I don't know if that should really count.

In the UK our native squirrels are red, but they're almost extinct because North American grey squirrels out-compete them.

We have some native red squirrels in parts of America, too. Not like yours, though. Ours are big and fat, slow, and terrible decision makers. They get run over at incredible rates. The greys seem (barely) smarter.

At least your airgunners get some fun. I didn't realize your reds were nearing extinction.

I'm really surprised we haven't figured out better ways of manipulating these invasive populations. Everything seems ineffective, and sometimes disastrous.

One of the most invasive species is the domestic house cat. It has exterminated many species of animals and kills untold billions of animals each year.

It was domesticated in the Near East, so technically from Asia, I guess?

You mentioned Burmese pythons, which are invasive in the Everglades and Florida in general. Do you know about the Australian plant species Melaleuca quinquenervia? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melaleuca_quinquenervia :

> Its unchecked expansion in South Florida is one of the most serious threats to the integrity of the native ecosystem.[25] This tree takes over sawgrass marshes in the Everglades turning the area into a swamp.[26] Melaleuca causes severe ecological impacts, including displacing native species, modification of hydrology, alteration of soil resources, reducing native habitat value and changing the fire regime.[27]

Quite a few invasive species, like the Australian pines, were deliberately introduced to South Florida to try and tame the Everglades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasive_species_in_th...

Does the reverse also happen? Are there North American species devastating parts of Asia?

Off the top of my head, Marmokrebs, the north american crayfish capable of asexual reproduction, is invasive in China, Taiwan, and Japan, although more prevalent in Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbled_crayfish

Cajun here, I'd just like to interject that those taste great

Looking through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasive_species_in_As...

> Lantana camara (common lantana) is a species of flowering plant within the verbena family (Verbenaceae), native to the American tropics ... it was brought to Europe by Dutch explorers and cultivated widely, soon spreading further into Asia and Oceania where it has established itself as a notorious weed, ... L. camara is listed in the IUCN's “List of the world's 100 worst invasive species”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantana_camara

The list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_of_the_World's_Worst_Invas... includes

> Cecropia peltata - Invasive in Malaysia, Africa, and Pacific Islands. Native to tropical Central and South America

> Chromolaena odorata - Invasive in tropical Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Native to Neotropics.

> Euglandina rosea - Invasive in Indian and Pacific Ocean islands. Native to the southeastern United States.

> Leucaena leucocephala - Native to Central America, invasive throughout other tropical regions.

> Lithobates catesbeianus (American bullfrog) - Invasive in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Western Europe, and East Asia. Native to eastern North America.

> Micropterus salmoides (widemouth bass) - Invasive worldwide. Native to the eastern United States

> Mikania micrantha - Invasive in the Pacific. Native to Neotropics. ["Pacific" here includes "Nepal, covering more than 20% of the Chitwan National Park", says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikania_micrantha]

I stopped at this point. There may be a few I missed or didn't get to.

That is because the history of contact between NA and Europe is older than Asia and Europe. A lot of invasives from Europe are endemic to NA.

Common Tumbleweed, Zebra Mussel, English Ivy, all the different lawn grasses, cats, wild pigs etc. are all European invasives that are now part of the NA ecosystem.

I wonder how much of that is due to the climate of the area, vs messaging (maybe when it's not from Asia, an origin is not mentioned?)

Kind of like how Spanish flu originated in the US

Are you saying that biodiversity is more important than global trade? How much biodiversity do we "need"?

>How much biodiversity do we "need"?

Clearly a non-zero amount, but not all. And therein lies the subtlety that cannot be handled by internet forums. And probably not by people at all, other than some politically unpalatable way of putting dollar amounts on externalities.

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?

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