the, the, when i was a little boy growing up in the us state of pennsylvania, we had thousands and thousands of chestnut trees in the area. we used to throw the chestnuts at each other for fun, and our parents would gather them and roast them as a snack. but then disease struck the american chestnut populations. i haven't seen a chestnut tree in decades. they're almost all gone. scientists now say that they've come up with a plan to revive the american chest, not through genetic engineering, to something that might sound like a great idea. but is it? it's never been done before, and we have literally no idea what it will do to other trees as its pollen is spread by the wins. bees and other insects are we saving the american chestnut for our we do mean other species. i'm john kerry onto welcome to the whistle blowers

the . 2 2 2 2 scientists have been working for years to revive the american chestnut, a large tree that once covered the eastern part of the country and provided food for humans and animals. the like. the tree usually lived for hundreds of years and made up an important part of the eastern american tree canopy. but beginning in the early 20th century, the tree was affected by something called chestnut blight. a fungal disease that came from the invasive japanese chestnut beginning in 19 o 4 and spanning the entirety of the 20th century. it is estimated that the blake killed between 4 and 6000000000 american chestnut trees. now only stumps and root systems remain. they produce young saplings which are almost immediately infected with chestnut light and then they die it. there are now only between 60800 american

chestnut trees that survive. and they're all in the northern part of the state of michigan. several groups of scientists are working to revive the american, just not including a group at the state university of new york college of environmental science and forestry. those scientists had the idea to insert the oxalate oxidation gene from weight into the dna of the american chest. not to degrade the oxalic acid produced by chestnut light. in 2021. these scientists asked the government permission to introduce the newly genetically modified trees into the wild. that's great, right. well, no, actually, it's not great. first, we have no idea what the environmental impact will be of producing a genetically modified tree in nature. it's never been done before. and even if we had an idea of what would happen, we still don't know what would happen. 5100,

even 200 years from now. remember, these trees live for centuries. and perhaps most disturbingly the same. scientists recently made a very serious mistake. instead of using something called d 58 to pollinate trees in their research plots, they accidentally use something called the 54, which has o x. so dna in a different part of its genome. almost all of the thousands of test trees are d. $54.00 is not the $58.00. and again, we have literally no idea what the effect will be. we're happy to welcome a guest today who is an expert on this important environmental issue. and peterman is executive director of the global justice ecology project, which she co founded in 2003. she's also the co founder and international coordinator of the campaign to stop g e trees. and thanks so much for being with us . thanks so much for having me. i john. wow. and there are many issues that i know

nothing about. and then 5 minutes after starting to look into them become a true believer like i did on this issue. so, and let's start with the nature of this problem. tell us about the american chestnut about its coverage a century ago about what happened to it and why its destruction has been almost complete. sure. yeah, the american, just not was a tree. as you mentioned earlier, that dominated the canopy of the eastern united states, an estimated one and 4 trees in many places. were these huge american chests that some of which were 15 feet in diameter or more. um they were, you know, they provided a lot of the food for wild life. they provided a lot of the food for humans, especially an appalachian who sold the chest, not to use them for their, their pigs and other wildlife, sorry livestock. and then as you mentioned, around 1900,

these get these jeopardy is just nuts, were imported into new york city, and they had this light on them this, this chest, the light is it's been known which rapidly spread because it has, it's all a fungus with very small scores, but the scores rapidly spread throughout the chestnut forests and all but a few were, were killed by this plate. although at the same time, i have to admit that there was a response to the light people trying to save the wood that was left if you will. right. so they, there was a huge logging campaign that happened. so people were both trying to create a firebreak of sorts to stop the spread of the fungus and they were also trying to salvage log, i guess you could say um and take out the trees before they were killed. so, so it's hard to know how many trees were killed by the white and how many trees were killed by this over logging response to the light. but either way that the

chestnut population was, was quite decimated. although there are an estimated, there are some millions left in the forest and there are even large surviving americans. just not that another group known as the american chestnut cooperators foundation is using to try to read wild american chestnuts with some blight resistance. when did the work actually begin to try to save the american chestnut? when was it that the people realized, oh my god, this is, this is worse than we thought it's getting out of hand. and what did that work entail wasn't just cutting down to, to make something of a firewall to try to save those trees. it didn't always include genetic modification. of course. no, no genetic modification has only been added to the mix and the last few decades. prior to that, people used all kinds of different techniques. you know, when science, the science of the problem was quite young. people were experimenting, they really didn't know what to do. they were quite desperate because of the, the,

the rapid pace of the spread of the disease and how burial into it was to the american chestnut. um, so a lot of different experimental measures were taken and from, from everything from breeding the surviving american chestnuts that were left to interbreeding. the american chestnuts with light resistance, chinese chestnuts. i'm using the hybrids and seeing if they would survive and a variety of other other tactics. but the one that probably got the most attention up until the genetic engineering took in, took, took over, was the hybridization between the american chest that's and the chinese chestnut. so there's been decades of work on that as well. what exactly is genetic modification in this context and why do scientists spend so much time working on it rather than focusing on something like hybridization, or trying to attack the fungus that is spread by the japanese chestnut?

sure, well there is actually an attempt to deal with the fungus itself in a process called hypo burial and swear, actually trying to make the fungus itself less less variant. and so that is another area that is being looked at. although it's, you know, it's another area that's, that's hasn't had a lot of success. so. 5 right, the hybridization has had a lot of success, but the problem is they're great orchard trees. they're great for producing unable chestnuts, but they're not great for putting into for us, for a whole variety of reasons. one of which is they just don't compete, they're very short trees are very, you know, kind of stocky, but they don't grow tall. and so they can't compete with native trees in the forest . and what's the role of government and all of this is government. a neutral observer or is it pushing a solution involving genetic modification? the government is not so much pushing the genetic modification process as it is

permitting it kind of looking the other way and, and letting it go in a way that's not responsive. busy and actually there was a study on the use of genetic engineering in forest restoration or protecting of for protection. and for us that the national academy of sciences did in 2018. and what they found was that the regulatory agencies with united states are completely on equipped to deal with something like genetically engineered trees. they have no experience. this is a, you know, understanding how genetic engineering will impact trees, will take decades, right? you have to let the full life cycle of the tree take place. you have to have let the tree have off spring and see what happens to them. it's a very long process and get the government's not interested in dealing with that long process. the companies aren't interested in dealing with that long process. the researchers aren't interested in dealing with that long process. so they really just uh, expedite the process and make it very unsafe. tell us

a little bit too about cooperation between scientists, between universities or environmental centers. is there cooperation, or are we, are we stove piping these efforts to try to save this tree? there is definitely cooperation among the universities and some of the n g o is the american chestnut foundation, for example, has been at a very close partnership with the state university of new york's environmental, excuse me, college of environmental science and forestry. in the development of this genetically engineered american chestnut tree with a lot of corporate support. so, so don't leave out the corporate support. e s f in in not sunni has gotten a lot of money from and technical support both money and technical support from monsanto. from arbor gen, from duke energy, you know, there's been a lot of corporate backing of this genetically engineered american, just not both because it's a, it's

a way to get the public more excited about the idea of genetically engineered trees . because it's not supposedly a, you know, a tree for industry, but a tree for forest restoration. and in that it, because it's, it's that it allows the doors to be opened to all of these corporate controlled and corporate design trees, if you will, for plantations, for timber, for bio mass, for even biofuels. okay. we're going to take a short break. and when we come back, we are going to continue our conversation with and peterman about the threat, said genetically modified trees, couldn't cause to the environment as well as the possibility that the american chestnut can actually be revived. stay tuned. won't be right back. 2 2 the

the the welcome back to the whistle blowers.

i'm john kerry onto we're speaking with an peterman, she's the executive director of the global justice ecology project, which she co founded in 2003. she's also the co founder and international coordinator of the campaign to stop g trees. and thanks again for being with us since good to have you. a. thank you so much. and can you explain to us what the process of genetic modification is for trees? it seems like it has to be done in a completely closed environment, which of course, is a good thing. but then, is it just all released into the environment? does not defeat the purpose. the genetic engineering of trees is following on the tradition of genetically engineering crops and many of the same traits that are being engineered and the trees are things that have been done in crops since about the eighty's. and so, yeah, it's, it's all, it's all done in a lab and it involves various techniques for inserting. in the case of the american

chestnut, inserting jeans from a completely unrelated speech, sees a grass barley into into the genetically engineered, excuse me, into the america, chose not to create that genetically engineered americans just not so very, very process of genetic modification is very disruptive to the genome, so they're going in there and they're using either a bacterium in this case, or in some cases literally did a coded little bullet. so if they fire into the cell, and they hope that it land somewhere useful in the, in the genome on the, in the, excuse me, i'm one of the chromosomes so that they can then have a product that can be tested out, but can be replicated that could be eventually put out into the field. so in the case of the g. e chests, not in around 2017, they had some, some, uh, american chests, not siblings. that were to the point that they could put them outside of the

greenhouse outside of the lab. and out into the environment and it was only 3 years later, only 3 years after being in the field. but they asked the government for permission to release these things into our wild forest with no. um, uh with no, uh, no, with no requirements for monitoring or regulating them anymore. so they could, you know, once they run into the forest, there would be no way to track them no way to know where they'd gone. and if something went wrong, which it did, there would have been no way to call them back. so it was a really a disaster waiting to happen, which is one of the reasons that we were so actively opposing it and why we rallied so many people to oppose it with us. one of the important issues and you've, this is, this is a great segue into the next question. one of the important issues that you raised in your talks is that the life span of these trees can be hundreds of years. so if we study the trees for 10 years, or even 20 years, we still have literally no idea what the long term effects will be of releasing

them into the environment. what is it? do you think we should be afraid of here is it that they may come to dominate other species? is it that they may, they may harm other species or overtake them? is it that they may spread disease that we haven't thought of yet to another species? as well, in the case of trees, trees are not like cropped plants, which you've pointed out in the show per, you know, before they are species that live for potentially centuries. um, you know, decades if not centuries and they interact with other species in a forest eco system. already we know that we know very little about forest eco system c o, the michael rises, fungus communities, and how they interact with the trees and how the trees communicate with each other . and you know, all of these really incredibly complicated interactions. and now you're going to be putting into this, so this eco system,

a tree that's never existed before. a tree that has a trans jean from barley that has, that does things that trees have never done before. and pretending to know that to understand that you know what will happen and literally it is the genetic engineering causes unpredictable impacts. and the fact that they are unpredictable in a crop plan is bad enough. but when you have these unpredictable impacts in a tree that you've now released into the forest to spread these unpredictable impacts in a way that can be reversed, is obviously a disaster waiting to happen. and should we expect there to be some sort of a, a change in the chest, not itself. could this potentially have an effect on animals that would need the chestnuts? it could have a lot of different effects. um, so the, the, the, in the uh, the genetically engineered plate that was engineered into the american chest not did in fact have a,

a very significant impact on that tree. not when it was younger. now when they were asking the usda to deregulate it, but later on 7 years later, in fact, it suddenly started turning brown and it was dying if it was growing very slowly, 20 percent slowly, the non engineer trip, just not. it wasn't even was a resistant to the place that it was engineered to um, to resist. oh, so what, what ended up happening was the america, just not foundations found out that, oops, you know, we actually have the wrong g, e, a tree here. as you mentioned, the day, 54, not the day, 58, but then later they, they explained that in fact, the way that the any of that darling lined the d stands for darling, the rate of any of that darling line had been transformed. it was bound to have this impact because the promoter quarter quote that they used to turn the gene on, made sure that the gene was on all the time. and so that ended up having a tremendous metabolic effect on the tree that caused it to die in large numbers,

or turn brown or be stunted. so in fact, it's the genetic modification was very destructive to the tree itself, not to mention all of the other species. and just getting back to what you were asking about what the impacts would be on those other spaces. we really don't know in the petition by there this researchers from soon the south. they said that they had done experiments to see what the impacts would be on pollinators. but in fact, they didn't have any poll in from the tree that they were asking for deregulation, but the 58. so they used non transgenic pollen, which they mixed with o x. so terrified from barley. and they said that that's the same thing if you mix up the barley and the barley o x. so and the in the pollen from a non transgenic tree, it's the same thing as if it was the engineer. so, you know, they weren't even using the same material and they re saying using that to say this

is safer, pollinators, and obviously all of us are very concerned about what's happening to pollinators worldwide with the, you know, the major declines in population. this could be another male and their costs. oh my goodness and i want to dig down a little deeper into this lab error that occurred in 2021. the media are saying that it was such a significant mistake that it set the research back by decades. so can you explain what happened? this difference between the 54 and the 58, and what? what's the effect of that mistake either in the short term visa, visa set back or over the long term? sure, yeah. so sometime around 2016, the researchers from the americans just not foundation, received not a g tree material from the state university of new york. and it was supposed to be the d 58. okay. which was the, the,

the transgenic events. they called of events. but they had settled on as being the best chance for resisting the white uh, you know, for the american chests not to resist this, just not the light. and so that, that itself turned over this material to p i c f to propagate it to cross it with, while american chest knots and do various experiments with it and see where it proved the best and so forth. and what ended up happening is last december, a t, a c f announced that they had been given the wrong material way back in 2016. so for, for 7 years they were using the wrong material and didn't even know it. so they had been given these d $54.00 trees, which have the same o x, so gene would insert it on a different chromosome and it turns out the fact that it was on the wrong chromosome made it more least sold to the trees. oh my god. and so they didn't know about it for 7 years. and what really has been the, the thing that's stood out for me from all of this is that it showed that the

researchers really didn't know what they were doing this entire time. they even, but researchers themselves, i said, well, it was a learning process and we didn't really have them it, you know, the equipment to know what was going on at the time. and you know, it wasn't until after a start, they started to die that we really looked into it and then figured it out and, and blah, blah, blah, blah. it, if you don't want to me that says ok, we, you weren't you asked in 2020 to release these trees into the forest and regulated on monitor. and you didn't even know what was going on. and it wasn't for 3 more years that the trees started going belly up that you finally figured out, oh hey, maybe these are the best idea. um, you know, and that does not inspire confidence. you know, these people say that they know what they're doing and you know, we can trust them. but clearly that's not the case. how do these scientists report to at the end of the day, is there some sort of environmental oversight? is, is this the department of agriculture and the environmental protection agency?

who do they answer to at the end of the day, i, the release of the genetically engineered american chestnut into the environment requires the permission of the usda a. so it's, it's a, a sub part of, it's a, sorry, a, i'm a part of the agency which is called the animal plant health inspection service. so a 5th has to approve these g trees. they have to go through an environmental assessment and environmental impact statements depending on the species. in this case, an environmental impact statement before they could be right before they could be released to the environment in the case of the chest, not because it's also has this anti fungal property. it needs to be also regulated by the environmental protection agency. that's a whole different set of regulations and rules that they have to deal with because it's also a food. it also needs regulation by the food and drug administration, although that's actually voluntary researchers and going through that. but the but

it's actually voluntary. they don't need to do it, but they say they're doing it. um, so it's, it's very complicated. but the thing that, as i get back to, according to the national academy of sciences, none of these agencies actually have any tools or experience or knowledge and how to judge whether these genetically engineer trees would be safer for us. and that's what really comes down to. but since all of this has happened, the u. s. d a has changed their bio technology regulations. and now they really don't exist. that'd be nice things just on paper, but it's basically, it's almost uh, self reporting, but the industry can now decide if they're genetically engineer, project product should be regulated or not before it goes through the process. so, you know, i don't know how many, right? monsanto is out there. we're going to go, oh yes, please regulate me. um, so it's, it's really gotten much worse and since this and this was not good, but now it's gotten even worse. so where do we stand now?

we, we noted that scientist made this grievous mistake in 2016. the mistake lasted for years. the, the tree doesn't do with the scientists told us it was going to do is the whole process ongoing. is it over? are they starting back from the beginning again? what's this look like as well, in the case of the researchers at sunni yourself in new york, they have decided that they still want these trees to regulated. so even though the petition is for the d, 58 tree, these are in fact not the 58 trees. these are the 54 trees and have all of these problems that we just of been discussing. they still want them to regulated by the us government and the reasons they want to be regulated is because the way the rules work once this tree is regulated, any other tree is using the same genetic construct will be automatically

automatically deregulated. so even if the d 58 would be 54 don't work, maybe the d 59 or the 624. i don't know. maybe one of those will work. so they're still trying to get these, these trees deregulated. but on the other side, the american chestnut foundation, the other major g tree proponents are saying, you know, actually the, the, the darling line, the d line of these trees is not the way we need to be going. and we need to start looking at different ways to genetically engineer the trees. in both cases, we're quite disappointed. you know, here's a great opportunity to learn to say, hey, you know, we try this genetic engineering, say we really didn't know what we were doing it, or did not work at all in the, in the long run. and maybe we should say that genetic engineering is perhaps not the best tool for going into forests and dealing with wild forest ecosystems because we really don't know what's going to happen. and unfortunately,

that's not what's happening. the both, both groups are moving ahead with more genetic engineering of trees and i think that's really unfortunate. and peterman. thank you so much for explaining this to us in these important issues, so often fly under the radar and are not covered in the mainstream media. and this is one of those very critical, crucial long term issues. thanks for educating that, the american cultural anthropologist an author, margaret need once said, quote, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. indeed, it is the only thing that ever has on quote and the environment is where we all meet. it's where we all have a mutual interest. it's the one thing that we all share. we have to get it right for it will be or to months. it's wonderful that scientists want to save the american chestnut. i think it's a great idea, but remember the old proverb, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. thank you to and peterman for

joining us today and for sure expertise and thank you to our viewers for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry onto we'll see you next time. 2 2 the, the russian states never is as tight as one of the most sense community best ingles, all sense enough to progress be the one else calls question about this, even though we will then in the european union,

the kremlin media mission, the state on the russians per day and split the ortiz full neck, even our video agency, roughly all the band on youtube tv services. for what question did you say a request, which is the the office of civil can i give you of most of today? and since you do, you do need some, do you need it before this damage? close the loop just installing the

the soon, luckily for you. so it says the, the the, that the union you want to know what the deal which is which is listed in your most recent one. yes. reach you the.