“When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. The second best time? Today.”—Chinese proverb

One day, David Milarch, a Michigan nurseryman derailed by alcoholism, had a near-death experience from which he emerged with the conviction that human life was in jeopardy because trees were dying. The solution, he understood, was to clone the champion trees of the world—the largest, the hardiest, the ones that had survived millennia and were most resilient to climate change—and create a kind of Noah’s ark of tree genetics. Twenty years later, his team had successfully cloned some of the world’s oldest trees including giant redwoods and sequoias, and grown seedlings from the oldest tree in the world, the bristlecone pine Methuselah. Milarch’s absorbing story, masterfully told by New York Times journalist Jim Robbins, is a moving account of one man’s mission to protect the forests that are essential to human survival.