The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet

Amazon.com Review An Interview with the Author Q: How did you meet David Milarch, who is featured in this book? A: In 2001 I wrote a story for the New York Times on Milarch’s plan to make copies, or clones, of some of the biggest trees in the country – the champions. By clones I mean he would take cuttings and root them, the way trees have been copied for centuries. That way, he reasoned, if one of the champions should die, its genetics would live on, since there would be hundreds of genetically identical copies planted in what he called living archival libraries. Not much is known about tree genetics, and so this was a way of preserving champion tree DNA until it could be studied. It was an intriguing idea. Then, after the story came out, I met Milarch in person and he told me the idea to clone these big trees came to him after he had a Near Death Experience – that is, he had died and returned to his body. I was shocked – I had never heard of such a thing. He told me that he was deeply inspired to clone the trees by spirit beings he met during and after his experience. I didn’t know what to think of his story, but all of the scientists I spoke with about his plan to clone trees thought it was spot on, a smart idea. Q: Why did you feel his was an important story to tell? A: Scientists can’t say that trees are in trouble – there isn’t enough data. But privately they think that many trees and forests are in trouble and things will get worse as the climate warms, perhaps much worse. But Milarch can say trees are in trouble from his unique perspective. So his tale became an important and intriguing way to tell this story. And it’s all backed up with interviews with scientists. Q. What happened to your own forest? A few years after I met Milarch the entire 15 acre forest of trees around my house in Montana started dying, and some of the trees were 300 and 400 years old. And they kept dying until they nearly all disappeared, not only on my property, but across swaths of Montana, and across much of the Rocky Mountain West. And it’s far worse in Canada. The beetles that kill trees are thriving because it’s getting much warmer. The ancient bristlecone pines, the oldest trees on the planet, are also dying. If the oldest, toughest trees on the planet, living on mountain tops in the West, are dying, I thought, no tree is safe. What happens in 10 or 20 or 30 years if it gets a few degrees warmer? Yikes! It may happen even sooner. Look what’s happening to the weather this year – temperatures are warmer all over the US, and meteorologists say they haven’t seen anything like it. Telling Milarch’s tale and the story of dying trees became even more urgent after I saw the forest die-off in the West, and in my own backyard. Q. What is Milarch’s plan for these giants he is cloning? A. He hopes someday that people will plant one clone of these champions in the midst of hundreds of other regular trees as a way of beefing up the genetics of forests. Q Why are trees important? Milarch has often said that trees are more important than we know. And as I talked to scientists and read papers they confirmed that notion: we have underestimated the trees, vastly. They are a kind of eco-technology that sustains our lives here on the planet and that humans can’t duplicate. There is a whole range of ecosystem services provided by trees and forests that many people don’t know about. They filter our water and can clean up the nastiest kinds of toxic wastes. They soak up greenhouse gasses to mitigate climate change, protect us from harsh UV rays, and are a heat shield and natural air-conditioner for cities and suburbs. David Milarch talks about them as the filters of the planet. As we all know, when you take the filter out of your aquarium, the fish die. Q: What can we do? As Milarch says, trace back almost every environmental problem far enough and the solution is to plant trees. Trees are hope. But you can’t plant them just anywhere. It’s about strategically planting trees -- the right tree in the right place for the right reasons. The big question we need to figure out is what is the right tree to plant and where. A Look Inside The Man Who Planted Trees Climbing a tree Climbing a tree David standing next to a tree Treetops Review “This is a story of miracles and obsession and love and survival. Told with Jim Robbins’s signature clarity and eye for telling detail, The Man Who Planted Trees is also the most hopeful book I’ve read in years. I kept thinking of the end of Saint Francis’s wonderful prayer, ‘And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.’ ” —Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight “Absorbing, eloquent, and loving . . . While [Jim] Robbins’s tone is urgent, it doesn’t compromise his crystal-clear science. . . . Even the smallest details here are fascinating.” —Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review “The great poet W. S. Merwin once wrote, ‘On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.’ It’s good to see, in this lovely volume, that some folks are getting a head start!” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet “Inspiring . . . Robbins lucidly summarizes the importance and value of trees to planet Earth and all humanity.” — The Ecologist “ ‘Imagine a world without trees,’ writes journalist Jim Robbins. It’s nearly impossible after reading The Man Who Planted Trees, in which Robbins weaves science and spirituality as he explores the bounty these plants offer the planet.” — Audubon “Scientists can be confined by their own thinking—they know what they know. It’s amazing for one layman to come up with the idea of saving champion trees as a meaningful way to address the issues of biodiversity and climate change. This could be a grassroots solution to a global problem. A few million people selecting and planting the right trees for the right places could really make a difference.” —Ramakrishna Nemani, earth scientist “When a veteran science reporter meets an unlikely mystic to whom otherworldly spirits have given a mission—to save the DNA of the world’s champion trees—you know you’re in for a good story. Jim Robbins takes us along on a journey full of discovery, passion, and urgency and shows how one man’s near-death experience may help the world’s forests survive theirs.” —Dayton Duncan, author of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea “This provocative and stimulating look at an emerging aspect of environmental study should serve as a clarion call to those concerned with the fate of the world’s forests as well as of the stately shade trees in their own backyards.” — Booklist About the Author Jim Robbins is a frequent contributor to the science section of The New York Times . He has written for Smithsonian, Audubon, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times, Scientific American, The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Psychology Today, Gourmet, and Condé Nast Traveler . He lives in Helena, Montana. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Champion Tree The original book titled The Man Who Planted Trees is aslim volume, just four thousand words; in fact, it was first published as astory in Vogue magazine in 1954. Written as a fable by a Frenchman named JeanGiono, the story has tapped a deep well in the human imagination, and since itspublication in book form, it has sold close to half a million copies. Speakingin the first person, its unnamed narrator describes hiking through the FrenchAlps in 1910, enjoying the wilderness. As he passes through a desolate, parchedmountain valley where crumbling buildings testify to a vanished settlement, hecomes across a middle-aged shepherd taking his flock out to pasture. Theshepherd has one hundred acorns with him, and he plants them as he cares forhis sheep. It turns out that the shepherd has planted more than a hundredthousand trees on this barren, wind-ravaged landscape. Six years later, after surviving the front lines of WorldWar I, the narrator returns to the shepherd’s hut. He is surprised to see smalltrees “spread out as far as the eye could reach. Creation seemed to have comeabout in a sort of chain reaction. . . . I saw water flowing in brooks that hadbeen dry since the memory of man. . . . The wind, too, scattered seeds. As thewater reappeared so too there reappeared willows, rushes, meadows, gardens,flowers and a certain purpose in being alive.” As the years go by, the trees grow taller and the forestin the valley grows thicker, and a dying ecosystem is transformed into athriving one. When the narrator returns for a third time, toward the end of thestory, more than ten thousand people are living in the flourishing valley. Everything was changed. Even the air. Instead of theharsh dry winds that used to attack me, a gentle breeze was blowing, laden withscents. A sound like water came from the mountains: it was the wind in theforest. Most amazing of all, I saw that a fountain had been built, that itflowed freely and—what touched me most—that someone had planted a linden besideit, a linden that must have been four years old, already in full leaf, theincontestable symbol of resurrection. Some experts say The Man Who Planted Trees is wishfulthinking, that reforestation cannot effect the kind of transformation imaginedin the book, bringing a barren landscape back to life and bringing harmony tothe people who live there. Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time,was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-dayenvironmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read manydozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, mythinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single mostimportant ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planetback together. Take the growing number of emerging infectious diseases.Their connection to the natural world is one of the most revelatory things Idiscovered about how little we understand the role of forests. I learned thatthere is a surprising single cause that connects a range of viral diseasesincluding hantavirus, HIV, Ebola, SARS, swine flu, and West Nile virus withbacterial diseases including malaria and Lyme disease. Rather than just being ahealth issue, these deadly diseases are, at root, an ecological problem. To put it in a nutshell, the teams of scientistsresearching the origins of disease say that pathogens don’t just mysteriouslyappear and find their way into human populations; they are the direct result ofthe damage people have done, and continue to do, to the natural world, and theyare preventable. “Any emerging disease in the last thirty or forty years hascome about as a result of encroachment into forest,” says Dr. Peter Daszak,director of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based international NGO that ispioneering the field of conservation medicine. “Three hundred and thirty newdiseases have emerged since 1940, and it’s a big problem.” Most of thesediseases are zoonotic, which means they originate in wildlife, whether in batsor deer or ticks, which then infect people who live near the forest. It’sbelieved, for example, that the human immunodeficiency (HIV) virus crossed thespecies barrier from monkeys to humans when a bushmeat hunter killed achimpanzee, caught the virus from the animal, and brought the disease out ofthe jungle and into the world of humans. Fragmenting forests by buildingsubdivisons in the oak forests of Long Island or logging in the mahoghanyforests of Brazil degrades the ecosystems and exacerbates disease transmissionto humans. So this book is not just about planting trees. It isabout the state and the likely fate of the world’s forests as the planetjourneys into a possibly disastrous century of soaring temperatures. Preciselywhat such rapid warming is doing, and will do, to the forests is unknown, butmore virulent pests and diseases, drought, climate extremes, high winds, and anincrease in solar radiation will likely take a steep toll on the forests. We are beyond known limits,and traveling farther beyond them every day. What will happen to the trees and forests? There is noformal predictive model because trees and forests have been poorly studied;there are no long-term data, and the world’s forests are extremely varied andcomplicated. Despite the lack of data, it doesn’t take an ecologist to imaginewhat could happen. Apparently, though, it takes a journey into another realm tocome up with an idea about what might be done to save our oldest trees in theevent the changes become catastrophic. My journey into the world of trees started in 2001, whenI read an article about an organization called the Champion Tree Project. Atthe time, the group’s goal was to clone the champion of each of the 826 speciesof trees in the United States, make hundreds or thousands of copies, and plantthe offspring in “living archival libraries” around the country to preserve thetrees’ DNA. A “champion” is a tree that has the highest combined score of threemeasurements: height, crown size, and diameter at breast height. The project’scofounder, David Milarch, a shade tree nurseryman from Copemish, Michigan, avillage near Traverse City, said he eventually hoped to both sell and give awaythe baby trees cloned from the giants. “Clones,” in this case, arehuman-assisted copies of trees made by taking cuttings of a tree and growingthem—an old and widely used horticultural technique for growing plants. Unlikea seedling, which may have only 50 percent of the genetics of its parent, aclone of a tree is a 100 percent genetic duplicate of its parent. I have always been drawn to big old trees, and the ideaof making new trees with the genes of champions was compelling. I proposed astory to The New York Times science section about the idea, got the assignment,and drove to Big Timber, Montana, not far from my home, to visit MartinFlanagan, a lanky working cowboy and tree lover who helped gather materials forMilarch’s Champion Tree Project in the West. On a bluebird day in May, Flanagandrove me down along the Yellowstone River, bank-full and the color of chocolatemilk, as the spring sun melted snow in the mountains. He showed me severallarge trees, including a towering narrow-leaf cottonwood. “This is the one Iplan to nominate for state champ,” he said excitedly, spanking the tree withhis hand. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” There wasn’t much to the Champion Tree organization, Ifound out. It was mostly a good idea with a tiny budget, with Milarch andoccasionally one of his teenage sons working out of his home in Michigan;Flanagan working part time in Montana, driving around in a beat?up pickup truckgathering cuttings; and Terry Mock, from Palm Beach, Florida, who was thedirector. Over the next week I interviewed Milarch several times byphone, and he talked to me about the need to clone champion trees. “Thegenetics of the biggest trees is disappearing. Someone’s got to clone them andkeep a record. No one knows what they mean. Let’s protect them so they can bestudied in case they are important. A tree that lives a thousand years mightknow something about survival.” I also interviewed several scientists whoagreed that researchers don’t know the role that genetics plays in thelongevity and survivability of trees; it simply hasn’t been assessed.Environmental conditions, including soil and moisture, are obviously criticalas well. Two identical clones planted twenty feet apart might grow fardifferently. Almost all of them said, however, that in the absence of study,it’s Botany 101 that genetics is a critical part of what’s essential to along-lived tree. If you want to plant a tree and walk away and have it live, itmakes sense to plant a tree that is the genetically fittest you can find. Thebig old-timers have proven their genetic mettle; they are survivors. Or asGeneral George Cates, former chairman of the National Tree Trust, put it to me,“You can bet Wilt Chamberlain’s parents weren’t five foot one and five foottwo.” Dr. Frank Gouin, a plant physiologist and the retiredchairman of the horticulture department at the University of Mary- land, is a friend of the project and spoke to me insupport of the notion of cloning. He had cloned a big tree himself, thelegendary 460-year-old Wye Oak on Maryland’s eastern shore. “These trees arelike people who have smoked all their lives and drank all their lives and arestill kicking,” Gouin said. “Let’s study them.” And the way to perpetuate andstudy them, he said, is just the way Champion Tree proposes. My story about Champion Tree ran on the front of theScience Times section on July 10, 2001, with several color photographs ofvarious champions, and over the next few days other media picked up the story.After a flurry of interviews, including eleven minutes on the Today show,Milarch, flabbergasted at the reach of the Times, called me. “It put us on themap, big time,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough.” He said he wanted to cometo Montana to meet me and give me a gift of a champion green ash tree as athank-you. Though I loved the idea of a champion of my own, professional ethicsprevented me from accepting the gift. “Let’s plant one on the Montana capitolgrounds instead,” he suggested. Fine, I said, a gift to thestate. With the attacks of 9/11, the tree planting wouldn’t comeuntil the following year. On a warm, sunny June day, David Milarch came to myoffice in downtown Helena and introduced himself with a big hand. He is ajovial bear of a man, six foot three with broad shoulders and big arms. Helooks like a lumberjack and was dressed like a farmer, in a short-sleevedsnap-button shirt, jeans, and a plastic foam farm cap that said OLYMPICS 2002,and he carried a hard-shelled briefcase. There is a bit of Viking in him, notonly in his outgoing personality and swagger but in his ruddy complexion,though the hair that is left is white. A small strip of wispy white bearddidn’t cover his ample chin. A belly spilled over his belt. Milarch has the charm gene, and I liked him right away. Aborn storyteller, he laughs loudly and frequently, and he has a flair for thedramatic and a fondness for announcing things rather than just saying them. Heis an expert in the use of compliments, but pours it on a little too thick sometimes.As we talked he flipped open his briefcase and pulled out a crumpled pack ofMarlboro Lights, put one in his mouth, and, in a practiced move, lit acigarette with one hand by leaving the match attached to the book, folding itover, and lighting it with his thumb. Over lunch, I expected a chat about the science of bigtree genetics. I was wrong. As we sat down at a local restaurant, Milarch begana story. In 1991, he told me, he died and went to heaven. Literally. A seriousdrinker, he had quit cold turkey. The sudden withdrawal of alcohol causedkidney and liver failure, and a friend had to carry him to the emergency room,where a doctor managed to stabilize him. The next night, his wife and hismother beside him, he felt himself rise. Not his body, he said, but hisawareness—he could look down from the top of the room and see himself lyingthere. It was a full-blown near-death experience, a phenomenon also known asdisambiguation, something, at the time, I’d never heard of. His consciousness,he said, left the room and soon passed through brilliant white light—“It waslike a goddamn blowtorch!” he told me. On the “other side” he was told itwasn’t his time, that he still had work to do on earth, and he needed to goback. When his awareness returned to his body, he sat up in bed, shocking hiswife and mother, who thought he was dead. The experience changed him—afterward he felt more aliveand more present—and he understood, for the first time, he said, the importanceof unconditional love. He appreciated his children and family more, and had adeeper connection to music and art. He felt more intuitive and more spiritual,even more electric, so charged that he couldn’t wear a wristwatch or use acomputer—they were affected by his body’s electrical properties, which had beenenhanced somehow. He wasn’t perfect; there was still some of the old Davidthere. But it existed along with this new part of him. Months later, still adjusting to this new life, he wasvisited in the early morning hours by light beings, who roused him. The bigtrees were dying, they told him, it was going to get much worse, and they hadan assignment for him. In the morning he told his kids that the family had amission—to begin a project to clone the champion of every tree species in thecountry and plant them far and wide. They were a farm family in the middle ofwhat many call nowhere, a world away from environmental groups and fund-raisingand politics and science. But the Milarchs were hopeful, naïvely so, and unawareof the obstacles that confronted them. Lunch came and I was quietly incredulous. Was I reallyhearing this? I thought he was joking or spinning a yarn, but he said it allwith a straight face. It was, to say the least, the most unusual origin of a sciencestory I’d ever heard. I’d had no inkling of any of it during phone interviews.It didn’t diminish the science, as far as I was concerned, because all thescientists I’d interviewed for the story said cloning trees to save genetics isa scientifically sound idea. Where people sourced their inspiration didn’tmatter if the science passed the test. Still, it was curious. And thischain-smoking tree farmer who liberally deployed the F-bomb didn’t fit the moldof the typical New Ager. Read more