Nature is savage.
See these aspens? Lying low on the hill, under the burnt-out pines, a smudge of kelly green above the blond fall grass.
These young trees have grown prodigiously since the East Troublesome Fire, the second-largest forest fire in Colorado history, which raged in October and November 2020. The year we just couldn’t catch a break.
This photograph was taken in September of 2024. So these shoots of aspen are no older than four years and yet they’re nearly five feet tall.
Compare this rapid growth to the squat, five-foot pines that have been inching upward since the beetle-kill blight of the early 2000s.
Five feet in 20 years for the pines. Five feet in four years for the aspen.
Let’s use this as an analogy for resilience, and ask why one species is so generative compared to the other.
Let’s follow the journey of an extraordinarily lucky pine tree seed: this seed fell from a miraculously surviving mature pine tree a few months after a devastating beetle kill. It was fortunately blown onto hospitable soil where it was able to germinate. Now let’s examine the hurdles this seed still has to overcome:
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- Lack of roots: the seed will spend the next few years developing a root system before it’s able to begin upward growth.
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- Inefficient growth: in the meantime, more adaptable plants like shrubs, grasses, will soak up surrounding nutrients and begin to appropriate sunlight necessary for the pine’s growth.
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- Lack of symbiosis: the seed must struggle alone, engaged in a life-or-death fight for resources with everything around it (including its fellow pines!). If it does not dominate those around it, it will surely be dominated, subordinated, and more likely to die.
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- Dependency on surroundings: post-blight factors like the new carpet of fallen trees, drought, and temperature extremes will make our little seedling’s plight more desperate than ever.
No wonder it took two decades for those pine trees to reach five feet.
Next let’s observe the circumstances of an individual aspen after the East Troublesome Fire. Psych! Individual aspens don’t exist! Aspen forests are actually a single organism: each shoot of aspen is part of the larger self, trussed together under the Earth by a vast, resilient root system.
Because of its roots, aspens have a nutrient pipeline allowing them to thrive even in scorched earth. How will you survive the wildfires and the blight?
Since the fire was above-ground, the aspen root system went relatively unharmed. The newly barren landscape allows aspen saplings access to unprecedented levels of sunlight and space, fostering rapid new growth.
Because of its root system, each new shoot of aspen emerges from the Earth with a fully developed nutrient pipeline which can dispatch necessary sustenance from rich soil to barren places where aspens would not otherwise thrive.
And thrive they do, for hundreds of years. The growth you see here, this small green smudge on the hillside, is not from a new organism. It is simply the newest growth that emerged after one of Colorado’s most devastating wildfires.
The resilience, breadth, and strength of the aspen tree is sourced from its roots.
How will you survive the wildfires and the blight?
