Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For most Americans, the loss of a tree might pass unnoticed. For Rex Mann, it changed the course of his life. As a boy growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Mann listened to his father — once a moonshiner, later a Baptist lay minister — describe the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) not in botanical terms, but as kin. The tree was food, lumber, income, shelter. It was culture. Its demise, caused by a blight introduced to the United States in 1904, reduced a foundation species to scattered root sprouts. By the time Mann was born in 1944, most chestnuts were already dead. But their ghosts still stood — gray, silent, and imposing — in the forests where he would make his career. Mann joined the U.S. Forest Service in 1967 after graduating from North Carolina State University. He spent more than four decades in the field, first in Virginia, later in Georgia, Arkansas and Kentucky. A natural leader and no stranger to wildfire, he directed large-scale fire response operations in Florida and Montana. His contributions earned him recognition in the White House Rose Garden, but retirement didn’t temper his sense of purpose. Instead, he devoted his remaining years to resurrecting the tree that had haunted his youth. In 2000, Mann co-founded the Kentucky chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, eventually serving as a board member emeritus. A self-described “chestnut evangelist,”…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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