Restoring the Chestnut

by Bob Cornett

The Lexington Herald-Leader's outdoor reporter, Andy Mead, summed up the essence of the Chestnut project in the opening sentence of a story last October: " In a remote corner of Eastern Kentucky, an almost vanished tree species is bringing generations together."

Bringing generations together -- that is indeed what is happening on Linefork Creek in Letcher County, right at the base of Pine Mountain. The children are involved -- they attend Kingdom Come Elementary School, a tiny school with fewer than 100 students in kindergarten through the eighth grade -- and so are the adults in the community. The children do such things as use their school's equipment to conduct videotaped interviews with elderly people who remember when the American Chestnut was king of the forest. And the children and adults -- including members of the volunteer fire department and the sportsmens club -- work together in searching the forests for Chestnut sprouts that still come up from the roots of long-dead trees. And the generations, working together, will be pollinating the blooms on sprouts with blight-resistant pollen; these processes will eventually provide blight-resistant seed stock to repopulate the forests with trees that are indistinguishable from the original American Chestnut. While lots of institutions are helping with this project, none are in control of it; this is a community endeavor, more akin to old-fashioned barnraisings than to the kinds of projects that are managed by institutions. The project, although still in its early stages, has clearly touched the hearts of lots of people; and the people -- adults and children, together -- are enthusiastically doing work that very much matters to the people in their community.

I won't elaborate further about the Chestnut restoration itself -- you can learn all about that from the American Chestnut Foundation. I do, however, need for you to know something about the process by which this project has evolved on Linefork; what is happening there could happen just about anywhere.

The project on Linefork started, as do nearly all such initiatives, with but the germ of an idea. A member of the Kentucky Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation happened to attend a "homecoming" at the Kingdom Come school, and he suggested to a few people, including the school principal, that the community and school might want to participate in the project to restore the Chestnut. A few weeks later, a knowledgeable forest manager found a living Chestnut tree in the area, a tree that, although it had grown from a sprout, had survived for 20 or more years past the time at which sprouts ordinarily die from the blight. Then somebody found another living tree, and then another. Linefork now has three trees that it didn't know about, plus almost unlimited numbers of sprouts. The basic ingredients for seed stock thus are clearly available.

Somebody suggested that a festival would be nice -- probably the first Chestnut restoration festival ever held anywhere. There was no money for such a festival, but somebody said that the Kentucky Arts Council had a small program, with a little money, that was intended to use the arts to build community connections. There was no matching money for an Arts Council grant, but some contributions showed up. There was no legal and administrative structure to administer a grant, but the volunteer firemen had a structure that would suffice.

To make a long story short, Linefork held its Chestnut festival. The Kingdom Come school was the location, and the children provided much of the entertainment. The children, among other things, performed a play they had written about the Chestnut tree, and they sang a song they had composed -- a song that welcomes back the Chestnut.

As a result of the Chestnut festival -- plus Andy Mead's article in the Lexington paper, an article in the Whitesburg "Mountain Eagle", lots of informal discussion about Chestnuts and Linefork, and more -- lots of people have come to realize that something special is happening. Professional foresters, as an important illustration, see the project on Linefork as an excellent example of the kind of "stewardship ethic" that is needed in order to sustain healthy forests. Wildlife officials realize that the people on Linefork are evolving the kind of long-range viewpoint that is necessary in order to provide sustainable habitat for wildlife. A recent development is that people interested in reforesting strip mine sites -- included are foresters, state and federal surface mine regulators, and coal company officials -- realize that the Linefork connection of adults and children provides the kind of active community involvement that is needed throughout the coal fields. Reinforcing the entire effort is the vlunteer involvement of some highly respected retired educators from the area: their involvement, in addition to providing expert experience, sends a strong and positive message about the educational value of the project.

An intangible, but highly important development, is that the "agrarian" philosophy of the Kentucky writer and farmer, Wendell Berry, is providing conceptual underpinnings for sustainable forestry. More than half of Kentucky's land is in forests and, yet, we Kentuckians have tended to take the forests for granted. Mr. Berry, who has become the most respected agrarian voice in the nation, makes a highly convincing case that sustainable forestry, based upon a sound stewardship ethic -- the kind of ethic that is evolving on Linefork -- can be a highly important and permanent economic resource for the people in rural communities. Having Wendell Berry on "our side" is a very big deal. (To allay any doubts that Mr. Berry might not understand about children and learning, I quote a few lines from his famous novel, "Jayber Crow". These lines are about a granddaddy, Athey, and his young grandson, Jimmy: " Wherever Athey went, Jimmy could go with him. Whatever Athey did, Jimmy could help him do. And Athey didn'tjust pretend to be helped, either. He gave the boy real jobs to do, and paid him in pennies and nickels for his work. He showed him things that needed to be picked up and carried and put down. He let him gather the eggs, each one perfect, out of the straw of the nests, and put them into a basket. He showed him how to shell corn for the hens. When Athey plowed his little crops or his garden, Jimmy would be on the old mule's back, guiding him between the rows and turning him at the row ends, saving Athey the need to bother with the lines." You will agree, I believe, that Wendell Berry very much understands about grandparents and children's learning.)

I call attention, before concluding, to one other important development. A group of educators, including some retired educators, plus community people, have scheduled a conference in Berea to develop techniques to measure the learning byproduct of the Chestnut project. The objective, ultimately, is to involve the communities in determining how well the students are learning from their participation in the Chestnut project; and to involve the student-adult partnership in measuring how well the community is learning about such things as sustainable forestry. This evaluation project, which has been inspired largely by Faye King, is technically difficult but it has the support of some heavy hitters in the field of education. Professor John Goodlad, as an important example, has met with Ms. King and is seeking ways to link his organization with the Chestnut project.

Conclusion

I am entirely confident that large numbers of communities and schools will, following Linefork's example, soon be actively involved in Chestnut restoration projects. And I am entirely confident, also, that the top-down hierarchies cannot -- and will not even try -- to stop these projects. There are no politicians, bureaucrats, or anybody else who would dare to look the Grandma Kings in the eye and tell them that the children are but standardized commodities. When the elected officials see knowledgeable grandparents (and retired teachers) standing beside the children and their teachers, those officials will, without any question whatever, come and stand with them. And where the people and politicians go, the bureaucrats are sure to follow.

We citizens will ultimately prevail -- we will restore children's learning to the communities where the children are cherished as individuals. We can prevail because projects such as the Chestnut restoration -- projects that really need doing -- are everywhere; and we will prevail because people who care about the children and their communities are also everywhere. We will not prevail by noon tomorrow, however. The barriers that separate the schools from the communities have been built over a very long period of time, and they cannot be taken down quickly -- but they must come down if we are to do right by the kids.

Bob Cornett
328 Midway Rd.
Georgetown, KY 40324

(859) 846-4995

E-mail: onechildatatime@Hotmail.com