PLANTED A LONG-BEAKED WILLOW TREE TODAY, JOYFUL : 2/4: 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

⏱️ 9 minutes

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PLANTED A LONG-BEAKED WILLOW TREE TODAY, JOYFUL : 2/4: 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 CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel, speaking to Jim Robbins, the New York Times correspondent, but also the author of The Man Who Planted Trees, a story of Lost Groves, The Science of Trees, and a plan.
0:15.5	This book is 10 years new, because over these last 10 years since I first spoke to Jim about his book,
0:22.2	there's been a lot of attention to the ecosystem of the planet, sometimes called global
0:27.4	warming, but in any event we can all see it changing profoundly in some fashion. And at the same time,
0:33.9	we account for what it's doing to our lives, to commerce, to trade, but are we looking at what it's doing to what we take for granted, the trees around us?
0:43.7	Jim, the story I remember vividly many years ago, and I don't know whether it's accurate or not, it was a wonderful anecdote, is that when the ships first came to America, I'm thinking probably the 17th, 16th, 17th century
0:57.3	early on, that the forest on the East Coast was so vast that you could pick it up, smell it,
1:05.0	150 miles at sea. I don't know if it's true or not, but you tell a story about how a squirrel
1:09.6	could go from, what about the kiddery to Florida, with never touching the ground.
1:16.7	Where did those trees go? What happened to them? Where are they today, Jim?
1:21.2	Yeah, the squirrel traveled from the east coast all the way to the Mississippi River without touching the ground.
1:28.1	Those trees became, those forests became houses.
1:33.5	Those forests became ships.
1:36.1	They became farm fields.
1:37.9	They were uprooted and cleared.
1:42.9	And God knows how many, what size these trees were when they were cut down and probably a lot bigger than the trees out there today. Of course, I don't remember the year, but there was a chestnut blight that came from Asia and killed millions of
2:02.9	chestnut trees all the way from the north down to town south. And so there's been a lot of
2:10.3	that have taken out the forest, a lot of reforestation, but still a lot of areas that have been deforested.
2:20.5	And maybe one of the reasons there are floods on the Mississippi and other places,
2:24.1	because there are no trees to take up the water when it rains or when it snows.
2:29.8	And flooding gets worse than it would have been.
2:35.0	Also, change to the climate.
	...

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