4/4: The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet, by Jim Robbins.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Planted-Trees-Science/dp/0812981294/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Twenty years ago, David Milarch, a northern Michigan nurseryman with a penchant for hard living, had a vision: angels came to tell him that the Earth was in trouble. Its trees were dying and, without them, human life was in jeopardy. The solution, they told him, was to clone the champion trees of the world—the largest, the hardiest, the ones that had survived millennia and were most resilient to climate change—and create a kind of Noah’s ark of tree genetics. Without knowing if the message had any basis in science, or why he’d been chosen for this task, Milarch began his mission of cloning the world’s great trees. Many scientists and tree experts told him it couldn’t be done, but, twenty years later, his team has successfully cloned some of the world’s oldest trees—among them giant redwoods and sequoias. They have also grown seedlings from the oldest tree in the world, the bristlecone pine Methuselah.
When the New York Times journalist Jim Robbins came upon Milarch’s story, he was fascinated but had his doubts. Yet, over several years, listening to Milarch and talking to scientists, he came to realize that there is so much we do not yet know about trees: how they die, how they communicate, the myriad crucial ways they filter water and air and otherwise support life on Earth. It became clear that as the planet changes, trees and forest are essential to assuring its survival.
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| 0:29.4 | This is CBS Island the World, I'm John Bachelor with Jim Robbins to the New York Times, |
| 0:37.0 | author of The Man Who Planted Trees, The Story of Lost Groves, The Science of Trees, |
| 0:41.0 | and a Plan to save the planet. |
| 0:43.0 | Ten years since I spoke with Jim about his book and in these ten years we've been educated |
| 0:48.0 | about the damage to our ecosystem where we live with climate change. However, that damage is |
| 0:55.2 | accelerated in the giants among us. And I'm thinking of the Sequoias and the |
| 1:00.3 | Redwoods. There is underway in a method to not clone to reproduce the Redwoods and the Sequoias. |
| 1:11.0 | And Jim's going to update us on where that project is now and where they can be moved safely. |
| 1:17.0 | Is there one zone in America? I understand they're in a small piece. I think in your original telling it was something like a |
| 1:25.0 | thousand eight thousand square miles I don't remember exact detail but in California |
| 1:30.0 | is there is there a friendly territory for the Sequoise and Redwoods everywhere, Tim? |
| 1:35.0 | Well, what the emphasis has been on what's called assisted migration is to move trees like the Sequoias and the |
| 1:46.4 | Redwoods north because as it gets hotter and of course the last seven years have been the hottest on record on the planet. |
| 1:56.0 | As it gets hotter, trees can't migrate on their own or only very slowly. |
| 2:00.0 | And so assisted migration is happening in places now. |
| 2:04.0 | And this is one of them. They're moving the Sequoias and Redwoods North into Oregon, where things are cooler, at least for now. But one of the things that has happened in the last, well, last year was it got really hot and fires broke out in California and burned Sequoias. |
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