Jared Westbrook
Appearances
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
My name is Jared Westbrook. I work for the American Chestnut Foundation.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
So we've planted hundreds of thousands of trees at this farm, and now we're selecting the 1% most resistant trees.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
So there's a lot more genes involved. And as you do more crossing to American chestnut, you get trees that are less blight tolerant.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
But we can't go out to the forest and treat 400 million trees with this virus every year. So it's too labor-intensive for large-scale restoration, but it works for our breeding efforts.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
It messes with people's idea of what is natural or what is nature. And we're doing an interventionist approach to a problem that humans caused in terms of bringing in introduced pathogens that the native species are naive to and they're susceptible to.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
It would be very difficult to try to resurrect all of the species that have gone extinct as a result of human intervention. But if we were selective about choosing keystone species that have a large ecological effect, I think that is where the intervention is justified.