Pando, the tree
“Pando” is the name of the world’s oldest and largest organism, a quaking aspen that extends over 100 acres in southern Utah.
Above ground, Pando appears to be a grove of individual trees, but underground the trees are interconnected by a single and vast root system and are genetically identical. It is one tree.
Pando Populus is a new platform for public scholarship and civic engagement that has taken its name from Pando, the tree. The 2015 conference “Seizing an Alternative” is the Pando Populus inaugural event.
More about Pando
Pando was given its name by the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor botanist Burton Barnes. Scientists disagree about Pando’s age, but estimates vary between 12,000 and 80,000 years old, a time span which minimally goes back to the end of the last ice age, and maximally to the emergence of modern humans from Africa.
Among the different strategies adopted by living organisms to survive in difficult circumstances, Pando does especially well in competition with other organisms in the midst of life-threatening natural disasters like fires, landslides, and floods. Other organisms, struggling to survive in the context of radically deprived nutritional resources, can’t compete with Pando, which receives nutrition and support from the whole of its extensive root system.
Despite surviving countless natural disasters, however, Pando is now under threat from human activities–from an exploding deer and elk population (due to the elimination of predators), from misplaced development, and by the impending prospect of radical climate change.
Marvelous in its beauty, astounding in its age and extent, Pando is a fitting image our common life together, now under threat, and our ability to endure.
For further information on Pando Populus, visit: PandoPopulus.com.
For further information on Pando the tree, see:
1. Pando on Wikipedia
2. City Weekly
3. Discover Magazine.com
4. Plants and Prejudice (be sure to listen to the sound clip at the end of the article)
5. “The Clonal Growth Habit of American Aspens” by Burton V. Barnes, Ecology, Vol. 47, #3 (May, 1966), pp. 439–447. Published by the Ecological Society of America.
Artwork copyright © Tucker Nichols 2014
