Hello ,
This week in The Long View: A Field Guide, we profile one of the most fascinating living things on Earth… plus a cartoon of Richard in Private Eye, and the “2269” party that nobody alive today will attend.
The Trembling Giant
By Xander Balwit
A giant lives in the forests of Utah.
Although, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this forest is also a giant. I am not referring to folklore but to the Pando – a group of quaking Aspens in the Fishlake National Forest in southern Utah. What makes this wood so incredible is that it is a single organism, weighing more than 14 million pounds, made up of clones believed to share one massive underground root system. Together, these 47,000 genetically identical Aspens, are known as the “Trembling Giant.”
With a root system estimated to be around 80,000 years old, the trembling giant offers us a unique temporal window. Just a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Rice, a sound artist, and Lance Oditt, the founder of the nonprofit group Friends of Pando, collaborated on a project to listen to what this giant has to say. By inserting a hydrophone inside a hole at the base of one of the branches and lowering it down to touch the roots, Rice and Oditt conducted a series of auditory experiments.
Rice and Oditt recount hearing an eerie and resonant rumbling as if listening to “the sound of millions of leaves in the forest, vibrating the tree and passing down through the branches, down into the Earth.” While scientists researching the Pando have yet to corroborate Rice and Oditt’s finding, it is a compelling approach to understanding the interconnectivity of Pando and its unique status as a vast entity.
Any approach should be welcomed, given that this temporal window may be at risk of closing. The chance to encounter living organisms with such astonishing longevity is rare, and the glimpse they provide into deep time perspectives is precariously in the balance. The Pando is currently thought to be dying. Although the exact reasons are unknown, factors including drought, grazing, and fire suppression may be slowing the rate of regenerative root sprouting. Alarmingly, “new recruits,” young saplings that sprout up from the lateral roots, are not making it to maturity.
I am particularly sympathetic to the view that the Pando provides into deep time because of its connection to fire. Another primordial force and window into our past, fire is a necessary element in many healthy forests. Quaking aspen is considered to be a fire-adapted species because it regenerates prolifically after fire. In the absence of fire, the woods become denser, and less sunlight reaches the aspen seedlings on the forest floor. As they struggle to access the amount of light they need to thrive, shade-tolerant tree species such as conifers, eagerly spring up in their place. Natural fire cycles create a balance between shade and Sun-loving trees.
While aspens are connected to fire through ancient mutualism, I was briefly connected through modern antagonism. In 2021, I worked as a wildland firefighter in Oregon. Over the course of a summer, I worked on blazes that would burn through around 20,000 acres of forest.
Only in recent years, has a renewed look at fire science helped shift firefighting in the US away from the full suppression model that dominated during the 20th Century. While much of what my crew and I did involved extinguishing fire, we also engaged in approaches that allowed the burn to move through selected portions of the forest. This “indirect” approach is not only generally safer but has the added benefit of allowing the conflagration to pass through a landscape that has historically been kept in balance because of the presence of fire. It does this by preventing the accumulation of timber slash, dead and downed trees, new growth, and ladder fuels. And while aspens benefit from fire through how it helps them in a competitive undergrowth, many other species, such as lodgepole pines, also depend on fire to break open their tough cones and release the seeds inside to germinate.
This has been known for a long time. For more than 13,000 years, indigenous tribes across the West Coast had used intentional or controlled burning as a way to renew resources and local food, encourage biodiversity, engage in medicinal and cultural rituals, and prevent the larger and more devastating fires that occur when fuels become too dense. It is largely through the influence and guidance of indigenous practitioners, that there have been efforts toward the intentional reintroduction of fire into landscape management.
On the fire line, I experienced complex emotions with regard to time. It would bring me tremendous amounts of anguish to see trees, lifetimes older than I was, engulfed by flames, and yet, I was aware of the essential role that fire plays in these ecosystems. I was torn between timeviews – the ancient disturbance cycles of nature, and the pressures and forces of contemporary fire management.
Less philosophically, the fire line could be a boring place. At the edge of exhaustion, on our 14th hour of digging, hiking, and carrying heavy bags, we were often charged with holding the line. We would sway back and forth and stare into the woods – sometimes being treated to the sight of a deer fleeing from one side of the path to the other, or a watchful owl, unperturbed by the smokey haze. Time would nearly stand still.
In these moments, while the plodding pace of the forest was closer at hand, still, the 80,000-year-old view of the trembling giant remained out of reach. It is one thing to walk among an old wood and count the rings on a downed tree and another to comprehend it. But whether listening to the leaf-melody composed over the passing millennia or understanding the role of fire in healthy woodland, we can learn a great deal from organisms like the trembling giant.
They give us access to ancient mutualisms. Aspens and fire, fire and human beings, humans and aspens, bridge past and present. Traversing them, we can ask: How can we, current generations, improve our understanding of ecosystem health? How can we address our fractured relationship with fire – one becoming ever more urgent as the climate warms? How can we use our ingenuity to learn about the relationships beneath the soil?
In Latin, Pando means “I spread.” A fitting term, the trembling giant spreads out laterally across space. However, it also spreads out temporally. Its saffron foliage quivering out across time.
Read more about ancient organisms and what we can learn from them: “Which living thing is the best 'mascot' for long-term thinking?”
A cartoon in Private Eye
Richard made an unexpected appearance as a cartoon in the British satirical magazine Private Eye last week…
(The glasses and cardigan are pretty spot on.)
The Long View…as recommended by Davina McCall’s Mum
The British TV presenter Davina McCall co-hosts a podcast called Making the Cut, which makes a series of recommendations about culture, products and so on.
Recently, McCall’s Mum Gabby made an appearance, in which she highlighted the book and talked about the problem of short-termism. (It is, of course, not the first time The Long View has received a Mum-boost.)
Listen to the podcast episode here.
Celebrating The 2269 Project
Every year on the 6 June, Peter Dean and Michael Ogden look to the future – and what they hope will be the greatest party of all time. The 2269 Project, which they co-founded, is an idea for a celebration almost 250 years from now. You and I will never get to attend – but our grandchildren might.
A few years ago, Dean and Ogden designed an invitation to the party in poster form –inspired by Stephen Hawking’s “cocktail party for time-travellers”. If you own one, the idea is that you pass it to the next generation.
In the meantime, however, this week they will be marking the event with an annual 6 June celebration called One Day.
You can learn more about the day and the broader project here.
Would you be willing to review The Long View?
If you’ve read or listened to The Long View, and would recommend it to others, it would be wonderful if you’d consider adding a review to Amazon or Goodreads. (Please let us know if you do, so we can thank you personally!)
The Long View is available for purchase! You can look for a copy at your local book shop or you can get it here from other retailers, as well as the e-book and Audible version (read by Richard!) If you’d like 25% off the cover price and live in the UK, visit the Headline shop, and use this code at checkout: LONGVIEW25
thanks for reading,
best wishes,
Xander and Richard