Post
by Erik Danielsen » Tue Feb 23, 2016 3:16 pm
As transgenic organisms go, I see little reason why anyone should expect negative consequences to these chestnuts. The potential for unforeseen consequences in simply adding a particular gene from a a closely related species that causes a minor chemical change that deters a certain fungus is vastly different than potential consequences of adding genes from bacteria to a widespread crop like corn that cause it to manufacture a powerful insecticide that makes its way into pollen that wind deposits on plant surfaces and in water that are used by a diversity of insects. It's worth examining whether any organisms dependent on american chestnut might be harmed by the change, but with american chestnut nearly gone from our forests, such organisms must be in short supply... and if they are harmed, they would be susceptible to harm from non-transgenic hybrids as well. I am glad that thorough testing is being carried out but I've seen some facebook rants about these transgenic chestnuts that just do not make sense- abstracting all transgenic organisms into a single category defined by fear.
I know some areas recovering from high-grading, good chestnut habitat with sprouts here and there, that could use some transgenic chestnuts. Of course, were I to plant some, we've come back to the subject of native vs. invasive species- the ecology there has been long enough without chestnut as a major component that its sudden presence would alter existing species relationships. I suppose that illustrates here, too, the futility of abstracting certain organisms into a category like "invasive." I do consider the proliferation of human-introduced species that crowd out or kill off members of existing ecosystems to be a negative thing in our current context- not because it is abstractly "bad" but because habitat fragmentation and the much more rapid rate of organism exchange by human vectors (not to mention other stresses like climate change and novel pollutants in our air and water) sets this context apart from what we know must have happened in the past, where interchanges of organisms into novel ecosystems certainly wrought serious changes but did so over much longer timescales. Biodiversity provides ecosystems with resilience, and reducing biodiversity too rapidly on too many fronts is something I worry can end up pushing the productivity of earth's higher life-forms, as a whole, very very hard. If we continue this slide into a disastrous mass extinction from which the biosphere will have to slowly recover, as has happened before in the fossil record, it certainly won't be japanese knotweed's fault. Maybe we can blame Norway Maple... but probably not.