Grandfathers and Grandmothers

Dragon Mood? -- thinking in the vein of the "Clock of the Long Now"

Living in a "retired" Christmas tree forest, with mature pines towering overhead, rocking to and fro in a breeze, I have come to realize how much I love trees. They feel like spiritual creatures to me, "grandfathers and grandmothers," if you will, that are old, protective, silent; and yet, they have great wisdom to impart.

So, you may better understand my latching onto this article from the N.Y. Times about trees:

"Last summer, on the site of 35 former hat factories where toxic mercury was once used to cure pelts, city officials in Danbury, Conn., deployed a futuristic weapon: 160 Eastern cottonwoods.

Dr. Richard Meagher, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, genetically engineered the trees to extract mercury from the soil, store it without being harmed, convert it to a less toxic form of mercury and release it into the air.

It was one of two dozen proposals Dr. Meagher has submitted to various agencies over two decades for engineering trees to soak up chemicals from contaminated soil. For years, no one would pay him to try. "I got called a charlatan," he said. "People didn't believe a plant could do this."

He will begin to assess the experiment's success this fall. But his is not the only such experiment with trees.

In laboratories around the country, researchers are using detailed knowledge of tree genes and recombinant DNA technology to alter the genetic workings of forest trees, hoping to tweak their reproductive cycles, growth rate and chemical makeup, to change their ability to store carbon, resist disease and absorb toxins.

The research is controversial. Environmentalists and others say that because of the large distances tree pollen can travel, altered genes will migrate to natural populations, leading to damage to ecosystems and other unforeseen consequences.

Dr. Jim Diamond, a retired pediatrician who is chairman of the Sierra Club's national genetic engineering committee, sees trees as a bastion of the natural world.
"It's quite possible the stands of trees that are left will be domesticated new varieties of trees and the natural varieties will cease to exist," he said. "Where do you draw the line?"

Dr. Meagher's toxic-avenger trees are intended to remove heavy metals from contaminated soils in places where other forms of cleanup are prohibitively expensive. Because mercury is an element, it cannot be broken down into harmless substances; the Danbury trees release the diluted mercury into the atmosphere, where it dissipates and falls back to earth after a few years.

...

Dr. [Steven] Strauss [a professor of forest science at Oregon State University,] is also trying to use genetic engineering to address climate change. He wants to create trees that would store more carbon in their root systems - "sequestering" it from the atmosphere, thereby cutting atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas. In a project sponsored by the Department of Energy, Dr. Strauss and colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are modifying tree architecture and cell wall chemistry to increase the amount of carbon stored below ground.

Much of the research relies on basic tree genetics - made easier by the sequencing of the poplar tree genome, a major effort in forest biotechnology whose results are to be made public this month. Scientists can now study classes of genes that affect absorption of sugars and carbohydrates, which in turn can change the chemical processes that affect the rates at which trees rot and release stored carbon.

"In the U.S., there are about 40 million acres of excess, surplus or idle agricultural land," said Jerry Tuskan, a researcher at Oak Ridge, who led the effort to sequence the poplar genome. "If we could economically capture those and deploy fast-growing trees bred and created for carbon sequestration over a 10-year period, we could reach 25 percent of the Kyoto prescription for the U.S." The Kyoto treaty, never signed by the United States, calls for reductions in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

The aboveground portion of the trees would be harvested every 10 years and used for ethanol, which Dr. Tuskan believes would offset the use of petroleum and, by extension, carbon dioxide emissions.

In another forest biotechnology project that has been making strides, researchers are using genetic engineering to produce a disease-resistant strain of American chestnut, a tree that once dominated Eastern forests but was decimated by the mid-20th century by a fungus introduced from Asia. The American chestnut project has proved among the least controversial, in part because the tree's demise was caused by human intervention.
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There is something little-girl comforting to me about the thought of trees, whether adolescent cottonwoods or grandfather-or-grandmother pines fixing our stupid human errors, transforming our messes into something good for the earth.