Solidarity

Photo and Drawing by Ellen Schroeder



This past May, I spent some vacation time in Colorado, hiking amongst the Rocky Mountains. During my time there, I was moved by the aspen trees— their unique white and lime green coloring, their scars from animals that covered the lower trunks, their branches at the top that reached for the heavens in such a stunning way. But I was also fascinated by the fact that they always came together—in groves scattered over the hillside—never alone, never too beautiful to be seen with others. And indeed, those groves are really one organism underground. We look at aspens and see individual trees, when they are all connected in a web of solidarity with one another.

"We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality." Martin Luther King, Jr.

From Wikipedia: "All of the aspens (including the White Poplar) typically grow in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling, and spreading by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 meters from the parent tree. Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived. In some cases, this is for thousands of years, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off above ground. For this reason it is considered to be an indicator of ancient woodlands. One such colony in Utah, given the nickname of "Pando", is claimed to be 80,000 years old, making it possibly the oldest living colony of aspens. Some aspen colonies become very large with time, spreading about a meter per year, eventually covering many hectares. They are able to survive forest fires, since the roots are below the heat of the fire, with new sprouts growing after the fire burns out."