Alumni/Pacesetters |
President's
Letter
From the Alumni
Director
On Campus
Applause
The Bulldogs of
Grand Rapids
Among the Crowns
of Trees
Playing Monopoly...
With Real Money
House of Steinberg
Bulldog Bites
Behind the Mask
Paid to Play
The Future Memory
of These Days
Red Wing Face Off
Class Notes
In Memoriam
Alumni Events
Relaxing on his back porch with a panoramic view of the forest around
Copemish (an Ojibway word meaning “big beech tree”) in northwest
Michigan, David Milarch (AS’68) holds what appears to be a large
test tube spouting an unremarkable-looking pine seedling.
Except that the tiny plant is the offspring from a tree that
is 4,768 years old.
David
Milarch holds a seedling grown from Methuselah – the
world’s oldest-living tree.
“The genes of the parent tree are 2,500 years older than the Mayan civilization,” Milarch
says. “When Christ walked the earth it was already more than 2,700 years
old. What could this tree’s DNA unravel for us in terms of longevity?”
That’s just one of the mysteries Milarch hopes to uncover
in his quest to help clone the world’s oldest, largest and most historically
important trees. Listening to him talk while holding a seedling of Methuselah,
a bristlecone
pine that is the oldest living thing on the planet, you have to think he’s
on his way to finding some answers.
The Urban Forest
Milarch is founder of the Champion Tree Project, which works to preserve
the genetic health and diversity of the world’s trees by cloning
the largest-known specimens of their kind.
He points out that the average lifespan of nursery trees planted
in an urban environment today is less than a dozen years. He thinks the kind
of longevity
exhibited by Methuselah can and should be reproduced.
“Species that were nurseries’ bread and butter trees 15 years ago
are almost impossible to grow at all now,” he says. “Elms, birches
and lots of different kinds of maples. When you sell your trees to cities and
see them all die, you ask why. It’s like creating art just to destroy
it.”
To address these concerns, one of CTP’s divisions is Sustainable Urban
Forestry that re-introduces champion trees into the urban ecosystem while emphasizing
state-of-the-art biotechnology. Milarch’s own background is uniquely
suited for such a project.
Born and raised in Livonia, Milarch is nonetheless the fourth
generation to work the family homestead in Copemish.
“After WWII my father, Edward, moved to Detroit for a job,” he explains. “I
followed my sister to Ferris, then I moved back to Detroit because I had the
opportunity to take a job at Ford Motor Company.” Then in the mid-1970s
he moved to Copemish, buying the family tree nursery business.
Today, Milarch has come full circle in respect to his time spent
living and working in metro Detroit. The CTP is collaborating with architect
William
McDonough to
reforest the Rouge River watershed with clones of champion trees.
“McDonough wrote a book called Cradle to Cradle. He’s
the greatest environmental genius alive,” Milarch says. “He’s
got the answers to the big picture. He’s so right on the money that the
Chinese government has mandated eight hours of ‘Cradle to Cradle’ philosophy
be taught to every middle school student every year.”
Family Tree
 |
| Milarch stands in a field of cloned ash trees near his home in Copemish. |
“Jared and Jake literally climbed the first seven champion trees in this area,” says Milarch. “A champion tree is the measured largest of its species in the United States. Jared and Jake—they were in middle school then—climbed to the top of these big trees and snipped off the buds.”
The bud and stem of those 6-12 inch cuttings of new growth were stripped of their leaves, put on ice and shipped off to Oregon in styrofoam containers.
About a year later Milarch got a call from Schmidt’s, the biggest shade tree producing nursery in the country, asking for every bud they could get from those first seven trees. In just a year, the grafted buds from those cuttings were eight feet tall. In an industry where perhaps one tree for every 5-7,000 tested is nursery-grade quality, five of the first seven champion trees made the grade.
A week later, Milarch and his two sons got every bud they could.
Jared also collected the genetic material from Methuselah, and is one of only about 50 people who know the exact location of the tree. It took top clearance from federal officials for him to make the visit. Methuselah is growing in a stand of bristlecone pine in California living more than 10,000 feet above sea level in rugged desert conditions.
“It was like talking to your grandfather,” Jared says, describing his encounter with the planet’s oldest living tree. “There just seemed to be some kind of presence or wisdom to that tree. The whole grove is amazing. The average age of the bristlecone pines there is about 2,000 years.”
In addition to his own family, Milarch has close and long-standing ties to the Ferris family. The link between the two is Milarch’s wife, Kerry (EHS’04, AS’76), whose father is Thomas Cook, former dean of the School of Education and now a member of CTP’s board. Carrie’s sisters Kelly and Kammy both graduated from Ferris, as did her mother, and a grandfather who went to Ferris Institute to learn Morse code for his job with the railroad. On Milarch’s side of the family, the husband of the sister he followed to Ferris graduated as a Bulldog, as did their son.
Milarch credits his father-in-law with helping to stay close to the Ferris community, which has benefited his research.
“Tom has been my source of information and inspiration for the last 25 years,” Milarch says. “Whenever we had pressing questions, he would always be able to plug me in, usually through the Ferris library, to the greatest scientific minds that would lead to the places we were going, but hadn’t been yet. If it wasn’t for him and the resources at Ferris, I don’t think we’d be where we are today.”
Cloning History
One
of the places the CTP regularly finds itself today is in the news thanks
to some high-profile projects that have garnered global attention,
even
though the organization has no media relations department.
“It’s a daily occurrence for media from somewhere around the world
to want a story about what we’re doing,” says Milarch. “That
started after we did the Today Show live with Katie Couric at Mount
Vernon.”
The Today Show was reporting on Milarch’s involvement
in helping save the forest around Mount Vernon - especially his work in cloning
13 trees planted
under the direct supervision of George Washington.
Milarch and
son Jared display trees that became part of a memorial for victims
of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Milarch was invited to Mount Vernon and after surveying the grounds,
he and CTP’s
Executive Director, Terry Mock, learned that the cause of mature trees dying
stemmed from the estate having shrunk from 8,000 acres in Washington’s
time to 400 today. A robust deer population with limited food resources was eating
not only young growth, but acorns and seeds before they’d even
had a chance to take root.
It was Mt. Vernon’s long-time director of horticulture
who pointed out that there were trees planted by Washington and pleaded with
Milarch
to clone
them.
“He stopped the golf cart we were riding in and asked, ‘Is there
any way of cloning one of those so we can tell the world we saved the trees George
Washington
planted?’” Milarch recalls.
Milarch’s personal promise to help clone the trees led
not only to the establishment of the Historic Botany arm of CTP, but to coverage
from the BBC,
CNN, National Geographic, the New York Times, USA Today and many others.
And then there are the memorials.
Milarch helped plant clones of champion trees in New York City
in memory of firefighters who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, and
at the Pentagon on the
first year anniversary of the attack. Both were extraordinarily emotional
events. At the Pentagon, Milarch spoke to the crowd, which included
surviving family
members from more than a hundred different countries, after remarks
by Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, and Deputy Secretary
of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz. Milarch asked if any of the family members would like
to help plant
the champion tree.
“They didn’t know I was going to do that,” says Milarch. “The
whole group stood up and wanted to put dirt in the hole. It took an
hour and a half. There was this little girl about four years old with long blonde
hair
in a little blue dress who came up with her dad. She picked up the
dirt, looked at me and said, ‘This is for my mom.’ I’ll never
get over that.”
The CTP has also cloned trees planted by Thomas Jefferson
and Teddy Roosevelt, preserved genetic samples of the historic Wye Oak
just months
before
it was toppled in a storm, and last August and September gathered samples
from historically
important trees along the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The
Tree of Knowledge
“Do you like to watch the apples bloom in the spring? Or the sugar maples
turn color in the fall? Or spruce covered with snow in winter? Trees symbolize
many things. When you see their mass elimination, it’s disturbing
on many levels.”
Milarch ruminates while walking along a row of cloned ash trees planted
just a few hundred yards from the original farmhouse his great-grandfather
built
in 1901. Despite his enthusiasm for strides he’s helping to make in preserving
genetic biodiversity in trees, he’s concerned that only about two percent
of this country’s old-growth forest remains for future generations.
“Why have we let the oldest and largest things on the planet die?” he
muses. “The great cedars of Lebanon? The primeval forest of Iraq? For 15-20,000
years in North America, the forest was the native peoples’ drugstore. What
do these old growth trees hold potentially for cures for diseases? No one knows.
If you don’t preserve those genetics, you’ve thrown away
the last dinosaur egg.”
The medicinal property of trees and plants is just one aspect of their
importance (over and over Milarch refers to trees as “the lungs of the Earth”),
although one that has been a part of recorded history since at least 2,700 B.C.
That’s when a Chinese treatise on pharmacology, the Peng-Tzao-Kan-Mu, was
published – at about the time Methuselah was little more than
a sapling.
For more information about the CTP, visit www.championtreeproject.org.