Big Living Things

The largest plant in the world stretches for tens of thousands of soccer fields under the waters of Western Australia. Each tender shoot of seagrass is genetically identical. Spanish mackerel and snappers glide through these waters. So, too, does the great hammerhead.

Thousands of miles away, the densest organism sways in the breeze of a Southwestern wind. It’s an aspen with thousands of individual trees. Each tree is genetically identical. Mountain bluebirds call to each other, their azure bodies bright against the yellow aspen leaves. Each chirp is an expression of need we’ll never fully know.

Beneath the cracked soil of Eastern Oregon’s high desert grasslands, a network of fungus binds the living world together. It, too, communicates with the tender grass shoots, the gnarled junipers, the wind-scarred pines that only grow branches leeward beside the cold mountain lakes.

Life is both young and old. Fragile and resilient. The preservation of systems tens of thousands of years old appears noble. But life was never meant to remain that static. Corrections will be made. We will intervene with a heavy hand, and ultimately constrain nature into our construction of the wild. We render it decidedly unwild.

This is not to say conservation is a fool’s errand. It does work. But as long as the prominence of comfort and security override harmony, the work of Chief Seattle, Muir, Carson, Kimmerer, and countless others will amount to a Sisyphean feat.