Can cloning save planet Earth?

Imagine you are walking through a forest where the trees are as tall as 30 story buildings with trunks as wide as the length of a car. Seems magnificent, right?

While walking through this forest, you stumble upon some of the tallest trees imaginable. Redwood trees. Redwood trees are among the tallest trees on Earth. They absorb much of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere, and they absorb more carbon than any other tree species. Redwoods are incredibly important not only to the climate, but the future. 

David Milarch is a founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. The mission of the Tree Archive is cloning giant redwood trees and then replanting them, in hopes of combating climate change.

Eight thousand different species of trees are currently on the endangered species list. Trees are vanishing every day for many reasons – one of the biggest ones being climate change. Sea levels are rising and warming unimaginable amounts because of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. 

Considering that trees are one of the most vital organisms to our ecosystems, could the idea of tree cloning be a reasonable way to potentially combat climate change? 

The very large decrease in the number of trees in our ecosystems doesn’t only have a direct affect on us, but it has many secondary outcomes as well. The decline in trees also affects the population of birds, and produces much less oxygen into our climate.  

David Milarch stated that, “98 percent of all the old growth forests in the United States have been cut down. We’re only passing along two percent of the old growth forests to future generations.” 

What is climate change? 

Climate change is the increase in temperatures due to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and right now climate change is increasing at rapid speeds. As stated by NASA, “increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.” 

Industrialized societies emit greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that trap and contain heat in the atmosphere, they have been rising at unprecedented levels.

The rapid increase in levels of greenhouse gases has caused the Earth’s surface to rise by 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit in less than half a century. Our oceans have absorbed much of this heat; 2,300 feet of the ocean’s surface waters have warmed more than 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years. 

These numbers might not seem so big, but truth be told, they are. The U.S. Global Change Research Program wrote, “climate change affects human health and wellbeing through more extreme weather events and wildfires, decreased air quality, and diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water. Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century, a trend that would diminish the security of America’s food supply.” 

According to Scientific American, “scientists project that fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions will hit a record high of 37.1 billion metric tons by the end of this year.” 

There have already been so many horrifying outcomes from the increase in temperature in the climate, and that increase all comes from the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Fires have always taken place in California year round, but they are happening now more than ever. According to Russell Brandom, “fire season has grown wilder and more destructive as the planet warms.”

From all of these fries and natural disasters, climate change doesn’t only affect us directly, but it affects the lives of trees too. The climate has an essential role in the health of a forest. Even a slight change in the climate will increase fires, droughts, and pest outbreaks in forests.

To reduce the amount of carbon in the air, reusable energy sources, such as windmills and solar panels, could solve this dilemma, but there are more options to be considered.  

Trees play such an important role in carbon capture, and some scientists see cloning then replanting trees in contained environments as an intervention point to prevent further climate change and damage. Could this really be? 

The Importance of Plants and Trees

The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have skyrocketed, and the main organisms that can absorb all this carbon, are plants and trees. 

According to The Royal Parks, one reason why trees are so important is because, “As the biggest plants on the planet, they give us oxygen, store carbon, stabilize the soil and give life to the world’s wildlife.” 

Trees are also vital to our environment because they not only absorb carbon dioxide, but they produce oxygen into the air. One acre of forest can absorb up to six tons of carbon and produce almost four tons of oxygen. 

Although there has been this enormous increase in carbon levels, there has also been such a large decline in the number of trees. According to The Understory, there are approximately “3.5 billion to 7 billion trees cut down each year.” Trees have the ability to absorb carbon, so we need to maintain them. 

The increase in carbon emissions and decrease in trees doesn’t only affect us, but many other organisms, including birds. Birds happen to be incredibly important to our ecosystems, more than you might think. However, birds cannot survive without plants and trees. 

Why are birds so important? 

Birds are also incredibly important to the Earth for multiple reasons. For one, they are beautiful. In an interview with Beth Bergman addressed this in an interview. According to Bergman, “if something is beautiful it makes people happy, that counts.” The beauty of birds makes people happy, which also brings tourism and birders to places like Central Park, especially in the fall during migration season. 

Now you may be wondering how there is a connection between tourism and solutions for bringing back the tree populations, but there is a pretty big one. Tourism plays an important role in maintaining a healthy economy, and birds are a main tourist attraction. This connects to the need for trees because many birds rely on trees, so more trees means more birds. 

This increase in money can help stabilize whole cities. According to Barry Yeoman, a writer for Audubon, the sites at Kew Park “generated $26 million and created 283 jobs in 2011. Because birders arrive before the lake’s summer tourists, local restaurants and hotels have bulked up their springtime payrolls.” This shows how the beauty of birds alone is incredibly important. 

Bergman also said, “some birds pick up the germs from flowers and trees and plants as they travel, like hummingbirds,  and those bits and pieces are transported like pollination to another area, so those seeds and bits will take on a new life.” This means that birds contribute to the process of replanting plants and trees, which has a huge benefit on our environment. This replanting process provides more carbon capture and oxygen producing organisms.   

Birds are vanishing, and without them we lose all the benefits that they bring. In order to keep birds alive, they all need food, a place to rest, somewhere for them to breed, and they need protection. The lives of birds really depend on the environment. 

Although trees have an incredibly important role in sustaining bird populations, birds benefit the tree populations too. According to Science Daily,  birds protect trees by reducing the amount of harmful insects that eat leaves. 

This proves how much we really need birds to protect our environment. To prevent bird species from further extinction, we need to sustain the population of trees. We have lost many of both trees and birds over the past few years, so we need solutions for bringing them back. 

One solution for increasing the amount of birds and trees in the environment would be to stop cutting trees down, but could the tree cloning process a reasonable way to bring back trees and help stabilize the population of birds? 

Tree and plant cloning process

When you first think about cloning, you probably think about what it would be like to clone yourself, your family members, and even your pets. You may also think of Dolly the sheep. Dolly the sheep was the first mammal clone born in 1997, and is one of the greatest scientific achievements to this day. 

However, Dolly was, and still is, very controversial. This is because the idea of cloning a mammal is something that not many people can understand, and not many people find it ethical. 

Judy Jones’ article in the British Medical Journal, Jones writes that cloning may cause long-term health defects in mammals. The majority of cloned mammals have died shortly after birth, this is part of why most of the public eye is against cloning. 

However, do these same ethics apply when cloning plants and trees? Every organism has DNA even if it is not a mammal. This means that trees and flowers have DNA, so you can clone them as well. 

Dr. David Slaymaker, a professor at William Paterson University, specializes in molecular plant ecology and pathogen interactions. According to him, there are multiple ways of cloning one plant or tree organism, he would put one of the methods into the cuttings category. Dr. Slaymaker said that in order to do this, “you cut a branch off of a tree, your favorite apple tree, you cause the branch to form roots, you plant that and now you get an apple tree that produces exactly the same type of apples as the original tree.” 

In an interview with David Milarch, he explained that the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive uses that same process. He stated, “we climb to the very tops of these trees, thirty to thirty five stories up, and out to the end of the branches. We cut off several small pieces, about six inches to one foot long, which doesn’t hurt the tree at all. Then we bring them down and we overnight them to our lab and with redwoods, we do cuttings.” 

David Milarch said that almost all 50,000 species of trees on Earth are self-coning. This means that when cloning trees, all we are really doing is mimicking what they do themselves. As stated above, redwood trees are one of the most important trees to the environment, but they only need to reproduce themselves every one thousand to three thousand years. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive wants to help speed up that process.

You can also clone plants and trees by in vitro cloning. Dr. Slaymaker suggests, “you can take a really small piece of leaf like five millimeters by five millimeters, and put it into a plate. That little piece of leaf can eventually, under the right conditions, produce twenty shoots of stems and leaves. Then, you can take those twenty shoots and put them in a medium that will make roots. You then have those twenty plantlets. Once you plant them, you then have twenty clones that are genetically identical to the plant you took the little piece of leaf out of.”

Both cuttings and in vitro are the two most common ways of tree and plant cloning. There is a lot of variation in the amount of time that these processes take. Some trees are easy and fast to clone, while others are really difficult and can take a much longer time. Cuttings normally takes about a month to get the plants rooted, while in vitro can take from three months to a year depending on the species. 

It is necessary that trees are replanted and that we help to speed up that process, especially because the most beneficial trees take so long to reproduce and clone themselves. Cloning plants and trees is not unethical, it does not harm the organisms in any way. Although cloning these types of organisms is safe, is tree cloning really a useful way to save the planet?

So, can cloning really save planet Earth?

As previously explained, trees are one of the utmost important organisms on the planet. In an interview,Dr. David Slaymaker said, “cloning would be useful to climate change if there were specific types of a plant that were particularly good at carbon capture and storage.” 

Redwood trees just so happen to be incredibly good at carbon capture, and the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is cloning and replanting those specific trees. Cloning and replanting them in a safe environment is really useful to climate change, but going through that same process with smaller plants doesn’t have as good of an outcome. 

In an article by Earth Talk the company wrote, “trees process significantly more [carbon dioxide] than smaller plants due to their large size and extensive root structures.” Trees have a much larger impact on the environment, so unlike tree cloning, it wouldn’t be worth it to clone smaller plants. 

Trees and birds rely on each other, and an increase in redwoods may cause an increase in birds too. Over 160 bird species have gone extinct since 1500, which really is a lot. Another question is, could bird cloning be another possibility as a step towards saving the planet? The answer is, most likely not. 

The process of bird cloning is highly more complicated, which is one of the reasons why birds have never been cloned before. Firstly, according to Revive and Restore, less genomic research has been done on birds than mammals. This means that scientists don’t know much about the cellular pathways of birds. 

Secondly, birds don’t have a uterus which has an effect on the cloning process. “The problem here is that you have to keep stimulating cell division for many generations, up to several hundred and even a few thousand cells before the embryo will develop on its own without assistance.” This takes an incredibly long time, and an increase in trees can bring back bird populations which means that cloning birds is really not reasonable.  

An increase in trees alone can stabilize bird populations for many reasons. For one, when trees are cloned, there will be an increase in safer habitats. The increase in safer habitats will allow birds a place to rest, breed, and be protected from predators. 

A college student at Columbia University believes that tree cloning is a reasonable way to combat climate change. This is because the outcomes of tree cloning are only positive, and tree cloning has a large impact on the environment. 

Cloning trees is absolutely one way to prevent an increase in climate change, but tree cloning can’t save the Earth all by itself. In order for climate change to really be halted, trees must not be cut down as often, and everyone needs to begin to use renewable energy sources. 

According to the former president of France, Francois Hollande, “We have a single mission: to protect and hand on the planet to the next generation.”