Fort Dick, Calif. — Shooting skyward like a jagged knife, the giant stump in a cul-de-sac in this Northern California town is by all appearances dead and gone: ashen gray, hollowed by fire and sheared at about 40 feet by coastal winds or lightning.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A California redwood dwarfs members of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, who are working to replicate the biggest and best of the species, the tallest living things.
A California redwood dwarfs members of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, who are working to replicate the biggest and best of the species, the tallest living things.
But to Michael Taylor, a professional big-tree hunter, there are tantalizing signs of the stump’s potential.
“This snag is partially alive,” he explained, pointing to dozens of green sprouts on the trunk. “It has a lot of energy in it, and it will keep sending these up. They just can’t kill this thing.”
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Tree enthusiasts hope to mass-produce trees like this redwood in Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park in Northern California.
Tree enthusiasts hope to mass-produce trees like this redwood in Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park in Northern California.
It is just those sprouts that lie at the heart of a plan hatched by a group of tree enthusiasts to clone — and then mass-produce — a collection of colossal redwoods, some of which date to before the birth of Jesus and can soar nearly 40 stories, the tallest living things on earth.
“We want to get the biggest, best genetic representations of the species,” said David Milarch, the co-founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. “And make millions and millions and millions of them.”
Mr. Milarch, who preaches his love for all things arboreal with an evangelical zeal, says that his mission is simple, if grandiose: to reforest the land with a variety of the most interesting tree species from around the world, and by extension, halt and reverse climate change.
“Everyone knows the problem, everyone knows the bad news,” said Mr. Milarch, a ruddy, jovial chain-smoker and a sixth-generation arborist. “This is the solution.”
That is debatable, of course. But what is certain is that Mr. Milarch’s approach is unique, if somewhat unorthodox. For while cloning has long been a staple of commercial and casual horticulture, trees, like humans, tend to reproduce most effectively when young.
“In a nursery setting, say something under five or 10 years, it’s really easy,” said Bill Werner, one of the group’s tree propagators. “But as they get older, material doesn’t seem to respond as well. It’s kind of a basic rule of biology — your grandmother doesn’t give birth to children.”
Cloning plants is nowhere near as difficult or sophisticated as cloning animals or other life forms. But it can be delicate work. Mr. Werner and other project propagators use various methods to clone two types of redwoods, coastal and giant sequoia. Those include so-called micropropagation, which basically uses tiny samples of plants, fed with heavy doses of synthetic growth hormones and nursed in a laboratory environment, to create genetically identical plants.
The method has long been used by horticulturalists to propagate plants, particularly finicky flora like orchids. In the case of the redwoods, Mr. Werner used small cuttings of sprouts and other plant material, including some cuttings from the upper reaches of giant sequoias. He slowly coaxed them into growing, and eventually, into growing roots. They were then transplanted to enriched soil, where they have continued to grow, now several inches high or more.
Mr. Milarch believes that this may be the first time that such ancient trees have been cloned in such a fashion. And while that could not be confirmed, William J. Libby, an emeritus professor of forestry and genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, said that Mr. Werner’s work was impressive nonetheless.
“What Bill has done is somewhere between what we thought was difficult and impossible,” said Mr. Libby, a consultant to the Archangel project. “And he moved it from impossible to difficult.”
Mr. Milarch’s efforts to capture the DNA of famous trees, which he has been at for nearly two decades, have raised some eyebrows in tree circles, as has his plan to sell the clones, something he says is necessary to finance his project. (The Archangel project has sought, but not yet been granted, federal nonprofit status, though it is recognized by the State of Michigan, where it is based.)
Connie Millar, a research scientist with the United States Forest Service, said it also did not necessarily track that the biggest, oldest trees had the best genes. “The longest lived trees could just be sitting on top of a water table, or sitting on especially rich soil,” said Ms. Millar, pointing out that the longest lived people are not necessarily the best genetically but rather those who get enough sleep, eat well and take care of themselves.
Scott Steen, the chief executive of American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation group, said he supported Archangel’s efforts to reforest; his organization, after all, has long been planting trees and is currently on a campaign to plant 100 million trees by 2020. And he agreed that the redwoods were “carbon sequestration superstars,” growing fast and soaking up carbon as they do.
But he questioned whether the ancient redwoods were really the best type of tree to be cloning. “They’re not the kind of tree you can plant in your backyard unless you have a really big backyard,” Mr. Steen said. “And you can’t really line a city street with them.”
Ms. Millar echoed that, saying that it would be a better idea to plant “more cosmopolitan” trees than redwoods, able to live in more widespread and challenging areas.
Mr. Milarch says his group has “a global target list” of various trees he intends to clone and plant in a number of regions, and he defended his plan’s logic, saying that while “we are not climate change scientists,” the group had selected trees for “ longevity, survivability and their natural abilities to benefit and repair the environment.”
He added, “If we don’t archive these ancient survivors now, they won’t be available for scientific study in the future.”
Still, some scientists were also curious about whether the replicas would have the same genetic defenses against disease, bugs or environmental changes that evolution had developed in today’s forests.
“You don’t get genetic diversity with clones,” said Sean C. Lahmeyer, a plant conservation specialist at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. “You always want the variation that’s present in a natural population going on through sexual reproduction.”
For those far removed from biology class, redwoods do reproduce sexually, albeit not very sexily. Both the pollen and the ovules — sperm and egg — are contained in a single specimen, though in different parts of the tree. Pollen is usually blown to other trees and fertilizes their ovules. Seeds grow in cones, which themselves are then dispersed by wind, falling to the ground.
Not many manage to grow in that competitive environment, where challenges include disease, water and light. But those that do survive are wondrous.
“Any living being who walks up to a living thing that stands 400 feet in height,” Mr. Milarch said, “you feel pretty darn puny.”
The coastal redwoods can also be devilishly hard to find, hidden in remote areas in a largely rural stretch of Northern California and southern Oregon. (The giant sequoias, which the project also seeks to clone, are native to the western Sierra Nevada.) Botanists are known to be very protective of the exact location of some of the most impressive stands, for fear of sightseers damaging the trees’ habitat. And that is where Mr. Taylor comes in.
A former student at nearby Humboldt State University — “I remember trees more than I remember college” — Mr. Taylor, 44, has been stalking California forests for more than 25 years. He has discovered some whoppers, including the Hyperion, believed to be the tallest tree on the planet at 379 feet, which he found with another tree hunter in 2006.
For this project, Mr. Taylor has been looking both high and low, collecting basal sprouts from the stumps of old redwoods, which were heavily logged in the 20th century. Only about 5 percent of the native old-growth redwoods remain, experts estimate.
And the stumps that remain are often viewed as nuisances, chewing up property and stubbornly difficult to remove. Yet, for Mr. Taylor, they are potential bounty. Mr. Milarch pays him for each of the stumps he finds, including the one at Fort Dick, a town near the Oregon border just north of Crescent City, Calif.
Nicknamed the Big Snag, the stump here is about 25 feet in diameter and has probably been alive for 2,000 years, Mr. Taylor said. Circling its base, he saw dozens of sprouts, green life that might soon be coaxed into a new generation of mighty redwoods.
“This was a huge tree,” Mr. Taylor said. “And maybe it will be again.”
© 2011nytimes.com
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