To help stop climate change, volunteers risk their lives atop giant trees

A Michigan organization is trying to spread some of the world’s biggest trees.

At the foot of a giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, two tree experts stepped into harnesses, inched up ropes and headed into the air. Climbing more than 20 stories, they made their way into the dizzying canopy of a tree that has survived thousands of years, enduring drought, wildfire and disease.

There, the experts — known as arborists — clipped off tips of young branches to be hand-delivered across the country, cloned in a lab and eventually planted in a forest in some other part of the world.

The two are among a group of modern-day Johnny Appleseeds who believe California’s giant sequoias (si-KWOY-yuhs) and coastal redwoods are blessed with some of the heartiest genes of any trees on Earth — and that spreading the trees will help reverse climate change, at least in a small way.

“It’s a biological miracle,” said climber Jim Clark, firmly back on the ground and holding a green sprig to his lips as if to kiss it. “This piece of tissue . . . can be rooted, and we have a miniature 3,000-year-old tree.”

The cloning expedition to Camp Nelson, California, a mountain community about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, was led by David Milarch, co-founder of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive.

Milarch said that in the past two decades, his Michigan-based nonprofit group has cloned 170 types of trees and planted more than 300,000 of them in seven countries.

“It’s really a race against time,” Milarch said. “If we start right now, we can go after climate change and reverse it before it’s too late.”

Sequoias growing in the Sierra are among the biggest and oldest trees on Earth, some nearly 300 feet tall and up to 3,000 years old.

Milarch, 66, believes their size and robustness make them ideal for absorbing greenhouse gases that drive climate change on the planet.

Todd Dawson, a professor of integrated biology at the University of California at Berkeley, isn’t sure. He admires Archangel’s creative efforts but says it’s unclear whether the towering trees have superior genes or whether they were simply lucky not to meet the fate of a logger’s saw.

Chances are slim, he said, that cloning and planting a limited number of trees will cool the warming planet. He favors more sweeping approaches such as curbing the use of fossil fuels and protecting vast rainforests.

“You’re going to have to plant a lot of trees to combat global warming,” Dawson said.

About a dozen expert tree climbers volunteered for Archangel’s expedition in May. After gathering samples from sequoias and redwoods — a taller, thinner cousin of the giant sequoia — the team wrapped the clippings in damp newspaper, placed them inside ice-filled duffel bags and sent them on their way to Archangel’s lab in Copemish, a village in northwestern Michigan.

There, Clark and another tree specialist planted about 3,000 tiny clippings indoors in small jars and containers. The samples grow beneath purplish lights under humidity and temperatures designed to encourage root growth. Cloning ancient trees is tricky business, lab workers say, and many samples don’t survive.

Later this year, Archangel’s team will head west to plant up to 1,000 sequoia and redwood saplings in a cool, damp region of Oregon where the trees will have the best chance to grow.

Bill Werner, a plant consultant based in Monterey, California, who has worked with Archangel, says that in the face of global warming, it’s easy to dismiss the efforts of a “renegade” group that relies heavily on donations and volunteers.

“That’s not fair,” Werner said. “It may be a drop in the bucket, but at least somebody’s doing something.”