Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Hello.
What I'm about to present tonight
is only important to those of you
that need to drink clean water and breath fresh air.
All the rest really don't need to pay attention.
It's an honor to be here tonight, and it's an honor to present to you,
and I've come with some messages of hope,
and I've come with some disturbing information also
about what we need to do, all of us all together.
We all find ourselves, at the beginning of this millenium,
facing environmental challenges of enormous proportion.
What are we going to do to solve them?
And for the last 20 years,
our group has been crossing this country and other countries
searching for the largest, oldest living things on earth;
things that are many thousands of years old.
Some were a thousand years old when Jesus walked the earth.
Older than Stonehenge.
Older than the great pyramids,
and they've survived the entire Industrial Age.
And of course what I'm talking about is the earth's ancient trees.
Our group has been searching these trees
for over 20 years,
and I'm happy to say that we've found about 100 species that we've worked on,
some with stacked carbon
better than most species of trees on earth.
The mission of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive,
our group,
is to propogate, which means grow,
archive, which means save,
and help reforest the earth
with the clones of the largest, oldest living trees on earth of many species,
for the most positive environmental benefits for earth.
This has never been done before.
And how do we do that?
That's probably the question we have the most is
"How do you clone those old, forest giants,
those trees that are thousands of years old?"
Well, that's an angel oak here in this country.
The slide before this was a 3,000-year-old giant sequoia,
here in California.
And that was my son Jake that was climbing this tree;
he's one of our climbers.
That's the size trees that we're looking for around the globe.
But how do you clone these old trees?
Number one, we have to find them, and that's not always easy.
Number two, after we find them, we ask our climbers to go out,
ascend the trees,
look for tissue and material from near the top of the trees,
bring it back down.
Then we send it to our propogation facilities around the world.
And with luck, a lot of luck,
because most of these trees have never been able to be cloned before,
the tissue will form root,
and voila, we have an exact genetic copy of the parent tree;
it is that tree.
So what do you do those trees?
We're building archival living libraries around the world
where these world's first clones of these trees can be safeguarded;
studied for future use;
and also some of the clones that we are using,
we're going to use those to interbreed with a fragmented forest
that's left here on earth.
Now here are some stats that are a little disturbing:
Here in the United States, 98% of our old-growth forest is gone.
It's been cut down.
98%.
Globally, 78% of our ancient forests, old-growth forests, have been cut down.
We have robbed our children and our grandchildren
of their natural inheritance.
Okay.
So what do we do?
What should we do?
Well,
for the last 6,000 years,
people have been cutting down the great forests of the earth,
and most of the forests of earth have been cut down several times.
Initially when loggers go in,
the look for the largest, straightest, oldest, best trees
and they leave the crooked, inferior trees, or the junk.
Well, when you do that to a forest a number of times -
that cycle, three or four times,
which most of our forests that are remaining, that's what happened -
we have left the junk, of the junk, of the junk, of the junk.
Genetically, what sort of a base does that leave
to rebuild forest systems
with strong immune systems -
forests that can withstand the climate change
and the challenges that we're facing today?
Well, I'm happy to say,
there's enough ancient trees, or old-growth trees, left
that we can get a very good cross genetic representation
of the world's trees
that our scientists tell us are the most important,
that stack the carbon the fastest,
phytoremediate out of our soils and our airs the toxins and the poisons.
And science and technology is such
that we can make millions and millions of these trees available to the world
so that we can do what?
We can rebuild the ecosystems that we've lost.
But let's talk about something that's near and dear to the hearts of most of us:
Let's talk money.
Let's talk big money.
Let's talk your money.
What's the true value of a tree?
Is a tree merely 2 by 4s,
or is it merely something pretty to look at in our yards?
Well that information, those stats that we've gathered,
they've shown that one tree, planted, in over a 50-year period,
brings the value of that tree to you and your family
or your community or your park or your schools,
$162,000.
So, if we had to hire the machines, or rent the machines,
to do what that one tree would do,
in 50 years, you would have saved $162,000.
Now I ask you, who can afford not to plant trees?
What if you planted ten of those trees?
Now I'd like to ask you to think bigger, think globally, think a lot bigger
about the values of trees.
What do trees do for us?
What can't trees do for us after we take them down?
Two of the trees that we're working on here in California
for these reasons of CO2, which is carbon sequestration -
science tells us that we have an abundance of carbon in our atmosphere,
in fact way too much -
that carbon, they believe, is a contributor to climate change,
the planet warming up, melting our glaciers,
choking our children,
is going to raise real havoc in the next 50 years,
that's what some scientists are saying.
Well, here's some good news:
Here in California,
two of the trees that we're working on are giant sequoias and coast redwoods.
A mature coast redwood can weigh up to 1,000 tons.
In dry weight, that tree is 40% carbon.
Giant sequoias are equivalent in volume
and can do the same job:
stack carbon faster, absorb it out of the atmosphere
faster than most any species of tree on earth.
And where will they grow?
They can grow virtually everywhere around the planet.
They grow well in many, many countries.
So what we're proposing is to clone the world's oldest and largest trees
and make millions and millions of these available to the world
to plant as carbon sinks -
to pull the excess carbon out of the air -
store it safely,
and start to go after this nemesis that we call climate change.
By the way, that same tree, coast redwood that can weigh up to 1,000 tons,
is equal in size to nine blue whales, the largest mammals on earth.
It's pretty big.
That's a lot of carbon.
How many of you have heard of the moon tree?
Could you raise your hand?
Anybody heard of the moon tree? A few.
Well back in 1971, Stuart Roosa, a NASA astronaut,
was allowed to take something on his moon mission that he wanted to take.
So he decided to take a handful or a small bag of tree seeds,
thank goodness.
He took them to the moon, circled the moon, they returned,
they planted them, they grew,
and the picture you see right now is Dr. Bill Libby, Ph.D., tree geneticist,
one of the great redwood minds of the world,
standing next to one of your moon trees he got as a seedling,
and he lives right across the bay here, in San Francisco,
and that tree is 60 feet tall and 18 inches in diameter.
They grow tremendously fast,
absorbing the carbon, stacking the carbon, and what do they produce?
Voila, the oxygen that we all need to survive.
So, thank you, NASA.
You kind of helped kick-start this project off over 40 years ago
in your efforts, and I applaud you.
One thing I'd like to talk to you about tonight
is at the beginning of this talk,
I alluded to this talk would only be of interest
to those of you that need to drink clean water and breath fresh air.
Well, there's an analogy that I'd like to share with you called "The Aquarium."
Now all of you here, I would like you to imagine
the most beautiful aquarium that you've ever seen in your life.
You can close your eyes if you need to.
And imagine that beautiful water, the sparkling water,
the beautiful color of the fish,
the beautiful plants that are growing there,
but unknown to you, someone unplugged the filter.
You're busy and you left the area, going about your work,
and returned in seven to ten days.
What would you find in your beautiful aquarium,
in seven to ten days after the filter has been unplugged?
What will the water look like?
How about the health of the fish?
What will the plants look like?
My friends, when we deforested this planet,
we cut down the natural filter system that we must replace,
or guess who's the fish?
We're all the fish.
I would like to close today - they say I'm out of time -
with an old Chinese proverb that probably most of you have heard,
is that when is the best time to plant a tree?
Well, 30 years ago.
When's the second best time to plant a tree?
That's today.
We have a saying at Archangel Ancient Tree Archive
that we say to each other, sincerely:
that we're all working for our grandchildren.
And, my friends,
we invite you to do the same.
And I thank you for your time.
(Applause)