Hope

When regarding the missions in restoring the Chestnut tree, there were sentiments held by both Sara and Savannah when discussing the future of the Chestnut in Appalachia. When Savannah was asked what feeling the Chestnut gives her, she responded by saying:

Hopeful honestly, because it’s really hopeful, because seeing all these people work together so hard on, just for, just this one tree, this one species of tree.”

Savannah,
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Sara had a slightly different type of hope and it was placed in the specific plans of the American Chestnut Foundation’s plans for developing a specific Blight-resistant Chestnut tree. She has a “strong, strong hope that will be even better than the transgenic on its own or the backcross trees on its own” (Sara).

In this way, hope can be held in a pluralistic way among members of the Chestnut community in the future of the Chestnut tree and Human-Chestnut relations that could arise. These seeds of hope among Appalachians are interesting points of investigation for political ecologists as the critical field usually tends to not offer solutions to wicked problems found in the Anthropocene (Robbins, 2011; Bennett, 2019).