A Sequoia Forest Grows in Detroit

A Sequoia Forest Grows in Detroit

Behind David Milarch’s desk in a large warehouse in rural Michigan grows the future of climate change solutions. Thousands of infant sequoia and coastal redwood saplings, each the size of a thumb, sprout beneath grey foil and growing lamps in bus-size greenhouses. In the next room are their juvenile siblings, five to eight inches tall: sequoias, coastal redwoods, oaks and a hundred other tree species form the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive (AATA), a living library of the world’s mightiest trees. These are not just any saplings — they all are descendants of so-called champion trees, specimens of exceptional size, age and resilience. 

And the man behind this forest of the future is not just any tree grower. At 75, David Milarch is trying to save the world’s last old-growth forests from extinction — by using their DNA to help reverse climate change. The need, Milarch notes, is urgent: “Ninety-eight percent of the old-growth forest has been logged,” he explains, lighting another cigarette as soon as the old one is finished. “We have to save the remaining two percent. If you were down to the last two percent of your life savings or your gas tank, wouldn’t you do everything you could to make it go further?”

Among his living treasures are saplings cloned from the Amos Alonzo Stagg Tree, one of the world’s tallest sequoias at 243 feet tall; the 3,000-year-old Waterfall, which had the largest ground perimeter of any known sequoia, 140 feet, before it burned down in 2020; and the largest coast redwood ever known, the Fieldbrook Stump in England, which measures 32 feet across and was cut down in 1860. “But there was still life in it 15 years ago, and so we cloned it,” Milarch says.

Cloning these giants is challenging. It involves scaling the trees to the high points where the newest growth sprouts, snipping off the most vital tips, and then coaxing them to root in a mix of soil and specialized hormones. While arborists believed it was impossible to clone redwoods older than 80 years because of their diminished vitality, Milarch proved them wrong. With his sons, Jared and Jesse, Milarch has spent the last decades scouring the globe for “super trees” — the oldest, strongest survivors of a changing planet. “The big old-timers have proven their genetic mettle,” he told New York Times reporter Jim Robbins for the book The Man Who Planted Trees. “They are survivors.” 

So is Milarch. He, his sons, his father and grandfather are all life-long tree growers, but not your typical tree huggers. Milarch resembles a hardy oak himself at six foot three, with a strong back and hands that have done hard physical work since he was eight. He was a hard-charging gang member, founder of the Detroit Blatz gang, infamous for his wrestling prowess, and an alcoholic, until he nearly died. In 1992, he decided to quit cold turkey, locked himself into a room and went into renal failure. “I went across for real,” he says. He animatedly tells the story, his big calloused hands painting the picture: He went through a tunnel of light and was greeted by angels. An archangel told him he couldn’t stay and had to return back to his body because he had work to do. Suddenly sitting up, Milarch scared “the hell out of” his wife and mother who were sitting by his bed and thought him dead. 

Since his near-death experience, he claims the archangels have been his guiding light and steered him on his new mission: saving ancient trees and by extension, the planet.

“These trees were there a thousand years before Jesus walked the earth,” he says, his awe evident. But his goal isn’t just to preserve trees on his 150-acre farm in Copemish. He wants to reforest the world. Scientists call this “assisted migration”; Milarch calls it his calling. “We have geographic amnesia,” Milarch diagnoses, because centuries of logging the largest and strongest trees left their straggly descendants. “We drive around and think the trees we see are normal. No, no, it’s not normal. It’s death.”

His spiritual convictions might raise eyebrows, but science backs many of his efforts. Old growth forests absorb significantly more CO2 than young trees. The one percent largest trees hold 50 percent of the carbon stored in forests. The ancient giants also support complex ecosystems, from soil microbes to pollinators, birds and mammals — many of which cannot thrive without these towering habitats. Additionally, they help clean the air and soil. Though his initiative is a small, family-run nonprofit, Milarch’s vision is ambitious and global: “I think it could reverse climate change.”

While the sequoias are threatened by fires and drought in California, they find safer homes in wetter climates. Therefore, Milarch sends his saplings and tissue cultures to places all over the world, including New Zealand; Australia; France; British Columbia, Canada; and Wales. In the U.S., his coast redwoods thrive in Central Florida, his sequoias in Oregon. His champion red ash clones grow at the Pentagon, and he personally planted a clone of Methuselah, the oldest bristlecone pine in the world at over 4,800 years old, at the Charles University in Prague where Einstein once lectured. At the request of Queen Elizabeth II, he cloned her favorite thousand-year-old oak. His saplings now grow in 55 U.S. cities and on Indigenous land.

But the project closest to his heart is also geographically closest: Detroit, where he grew up.

The city, once the booming heart of the American auto industry, has suffered population loss, disinvestment and environmental neglect. It is now home to 225 giant sequoias Milarch donated over the last decade, some already 10 feet tall. “They grow like weeds,” Milarch marvels. “They love it there.” On four contiguous city lots, the nonprofit Arboretum Detroit planted the saplings to improve air quality, reduce urban heat, bring shade and beautify one of the city’s most environmentally burdened neighborhoods. “It’s the worst environmental area of the whole greater Detroit area; the asthma rates are twice the rest of Detroit,” Milarch says. “It’s a nightmare, and it’s perfect for the message we have for that project and for the rest of the world because every major city has areas like that.”

Unlike with other tree planting initiatives, Milarch puts plans in place to nurture the saplings for generations to come. To make this possible, he and Arboretum Detroit work with schools. Recently, a class of eighth graders came to “tree school” at his family ranch in Copemish. Milarch put a rope on the ground in a circle, 118 feet long like the sequoia the saplings came from. The kids clasped hands and formed a circle the size of the tree’s original diameter. “Wow,” they gasped. That “wow” is exactly the moment Milarch aims for. 

“We empower the kids. We teach them, we give them the materials, and we check in on them,” Milarch explains. “We’re propagating the propagators. That’s the paradigm shift.” Each child gets to name a sapling, “because kids need to connect with nature,” Milarch says. And later on, when the kids face hardship, Milarch points out, “they can always run to their tree and get some solace.”

For him, trees are “sentient beings”: “They understand us, they recognize us, they have feelings and are intelligent. They feel pain and scream when you put a saw to them.”

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And still, he dreams bigger. Milarch’s vision is bold: Making millions of super-trees available to replenish the world’s old-growth forests. “Because you can make a million trees out of two or three jars of tissue culture in a year,” he says. “We can reforest the whole planet with the strongest, toughest, oldest trees. It’s the best shot we got at solving climate change.”

His goal is as audacious as the trees are tall: to harness the energy of young people, the tools of modern science and the wisdom of ancient forests to save our planet — one tree, one city at a time.