July 10, 2018 at 12:21 am









On a quest to save California’s coastal redwoods, man “moves the giants” to Southern Oregon









Arborist David Milarch is on what he calls a spiritual quest to save California’s coastal redwoods, the largest, strongest, oldest, trees on earth.

He believes the fast-growing giants are the best tool we have for fighting climate change.

Growing at a rate of 10 feet per year, redwoods are among the fastest growing species of trees on Earth. An average redwood weighs 1000 tons, meaning it is capable of pulling a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, Milarch says in the video below:

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With 96 percent of them already gone, he’s moving fast to preserve their genetics, so they can be planted around the world, when humanity’s ready to admit we need them to breathe.

Luckily, it’s very hard to kill a redwood no matter how hard you try, Milarch says. When the trees lives are threatened, chopped down for example, they shoot sprouts out of their stumps.

“The exact genetic fingerprint of the tree can be found in those sprouts,” Milarch says.

He and his organization Archangel Ancient Tree Archive found groves of redwood stumps 30-feet in diameter, cut off some of the basal sprouts, and brought them back to Michigan to propagate them.

Their goal of their lab is to figure out how to make a million redwood tree saplings to send all over the world.

For now, they’re planting them in southern Oregon through a program called assisted migration. The location is close enough to their original homes climate-wise, and it’s less likely they’ll get cut down there.

For more on the project and how to help, visit Archangel Ancient Tree Archive.

RELATED: Yosemite Spends $40 Million to Protect 500 Giant Sequoias







