Watch this New York Times video clip in which David Milarch tells us about his plan to use sequoias to deal with one of the most serious problems mankind is facing these days.
Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.
1 Sequoias may be the answer to fight climate change.
2 The workers are on a forest 18 miles south east of Fresno California.
3 The climbers feels sorry for the people who work in an office.
4 The higher the climbers get, the more quality the branches are.
5 They plan to grow three million sequoia trees in a year.
You can check the answers below and read the transcript here.
Giant sequoias whisk in and breathe in CO2, faster, more effectively and start quicker than almost any species of tree on earth, and they might be just the answer that we were looking for, they really make a run at and help reverse climate change.
All clear...
We are here near the top of the Sierra of Nevada Range, 80 miles south east of Fresno California, we are on a private land. It’s an intact giant sequoia forest.
We got it over something, but it’s something we don’t want.
That branch, the branch they have been shooting for is taller than any tree on the east coast of the United States.
That’s a lower branch.
This is just an amazing project. We’re working with David Milarch, we’re out here getting some cuttings from some of the world’s largest giant sequoia trees, you know, just climbing in an amazing beautiful place that very few people have visited.
Archangel Ancient Trees is locating, propagating the largest oldest living things on earth, which of course is trees.
I’m guessing it’s over 250ft tall, and we will try to get to the top, we’re not trying to shoot our initial shot to the top.
This is the hardest part for the climbers, trying to get the fish line set over a branch which is safe.
We started out by going checking out some of these lower limbs. We are out here in sun to see if we can find some good cuttings.
This is the very top, near the echelon of big tree climbing in the world.
I feel bad for the people who have to go to an office, sit at the same desk every day, shuffle around the same papers, you know, this is the thing, this is our office out here, in the trees, every tree is different, you know, every day I different, every job is different.
Ok, just a regular walk in the park, going up, rising up to get a lot of small dough fir around us.
Look at the size of these lateral limbs, four five feet in diameter. This is just amazing.
They have an entire genetic history in their DNA. Over 4,000 years, uninterrupted change. What we need to do is build super growths. 5 acres to 5,000 acres of these growths of trees that do nothing more than offset thousands, in some cases, millions of tones of excess CO2.
Oh, here’s some. Look at that, right there. Stay clear! In coming!
The higher you go on these trees, two hundred feet to three hundred feet, the material just keeps getting better and better because there are different hormones in this material than in the lower branches. If this was a parallel to a male, I would say this is an eighty year old. Some of this stuff is fifty year old.
We gather about 700 cuttings from the Stagg as well as the waterfall giant sequoia, which are two of the healthiest largest sequoias on the planet. They are the champions of champions. We’re going to take those back for a propagation lab and we’re going to take those 750 cuttings of each of these trees, we’re going to turn them into a million trees in about a year for global reforestation every single year.
We would like to pick a dozen countries, give those countries the clones of these trees that we just did as models of carbon sequestering growths of super-trees, country by country, continent by continent. Really make a sincere run at reversing this nemesis that we all face called climate change.
Key:
1T 2F 3T 4T 5F
