PLANTED A LONG-BEAKED WILLOW TREE TODAY, JOYFUL : 1/4: The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet, by Jim Robbins. https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Planted-Trees-Science/dp/0812981294/ref=tmm_pap

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 2 June 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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PLANTED A LONG-BEAKED WILLOW TREE TODAY, JOYFUL : 1/4: The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet, by Jim Robbins.

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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0:00.0	This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.
0:07.0	I welcome Jim Robbins, the author of The Man Who Planted Trees, a Story of Lost Grows, The Science of Trees, and a Plan.
0:16.0	This book has been a revelation to me over the years, and it's a pleasure to welcome, Jim,
0:22.1	because we're going to update everything we know about David Millirk, his work at several projects
0:28.9	that have all come together now in the Archangel Project, which you can find online.
0:34.1	There's a website, a very attractive website, called the Ancient Tree Archive.
0:39.4	But this is the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive formally. Jim, congratulations again and good
0:46.0	evening. And 10 years later, we come to your book for revelations about David Milark, his work,
0:53.4	and how the story of trees have been embraced for my reading
0:59.1	in these last 10 years. First, born in 1949, a near-death experience takes him to a mission in life.
1:07.4	What is that NDE and what was that mission as he first conceived it in the late 20th century?
1:14.7	Good evening to you, Jim. Well, thank you, John, and good evening to you. An NDE is an acronym for
1:23.0	near-death experience. And this is a scientifically recognized experience. Obviously, no one,
1:30.2	after you die, no one really knows where you're going, but there's a journal of near-death studies,
1:36.1	and they've looked at people who have claimed to have died and left their body and then come back
1:40.9	and been profoundly transformed. Either they've met angels or they've met people they knew who had passed.
1:49.9	And they came back, many of them came back with a mission.
1:53.7	And a lot of the missions are similar.
1:56.3	And in fact, people think that the planet is in trouble, that we're nearing a crisis, or we're in a crisis,
2:06.2	and they need to do something to help meet the urgency of that crisis, whether it's air pollution or wildlife that's dying or whatever it is.
2:18.5	There are people out there who come back with a warning for the planet and a way to help.
2:25.0	And David Milark's warning is about trees.
	...

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