How to Persist
Grow but don't change.
Hi, friends.
How are we doing?
Last time I wrote about making it through stressful periods, with advice taken from a cuttlefish that had been gently harassed by researchers for about a week. Now I’m thinking about what to do when we’re facing a bad period that’s, uh, longer. And less gentle.
So if you’re here, thank you. It’s nice to think about writing and nature together.
Feel free to say hello in the comments, by the way. I think they’re turned on? I still barely know how Substack works. We’re doing our best here. On the evening of November 6 I spent four and a half hours in the emergency room with a kid who couldn’t stop vomiting. (Relatable!)
What I’ve Been Working On
I’m writing a couple of things now that I hope to be able to share next time.
Meanwhile, I finished my project of painting one autumn leaf for every day in October:
I also made my kids’ Halloween costumes, including a tutu for a witch and a stuffed carrot for a bunny to keep in her pocket. Tragically, the carrot is now lost under a leaf pile somewhere. After a month of me picking up fallen foliage, I guess the sidewalk demanded an offering.
Dear Inkfish
Not to put too fine a point on it, but everything is terrible.
The worst people I can imagine are gaining power. I’m terrified that the damage they’ll do to my country and to the entire planet won’t be undone in the lifetimes of my children, or their children, or possibly ever.
Also, more than half of the people around me think this is…fine?
How am I supposed to go on?
—Trying Not to Despair
You know what’s crazy? I got this exact question from 69 million people this week.
I know I said the advice here would come from the animal world, but since this is a heavy topic, I’m turning to the heaviest living thing I know. Likely the heaviest on Earth. It’s a tree.
To the human eye, it looks like about 47,000 trees. But they’re all clones that share an interconnected root system. They’ve all grown out of one long-ago seedling.
Scientists consider this entire grove of quaking aspens, which covers about 106 acres in Utah, to be one individual. It’s called Pando, Latin for “I spread.”
It spreads but it doesn’t say much, so researchers who wanted to learn more of its story recently sampled leaves, bark and roots from around the grove. This let them study Pando’s DNA and compare it to other aspen trees nearby.
From these bits of tissue, the researchers were able to (very) roughly estimate Pando’s age. In the scientists’ most conservative estimates, the tree is 16,000 years old. That’s more than three times as old as Stonehenge. A more generous estimate puts the tree at more like 80,000.
What has contributed to its staying power? The scientists found a possible clue in the tree’s genes.
Even though all of Pando’s trunks are clones, their genes aren’t perfectly identical. That’s because cells—anyone’s cells—are at risk of making mistakes each time they divide and rewrite their genetic information. These typos can be harmless. Or they can lead to, say, cancer. Mistakes happen, but it’s best for an organism to minimize them.
Because errors accumulate as we age, the researchers expected trunks that were closer together in the grove to be more similar genetically. Trunks that were farther apart, like people in a game of Telephone passing a message a long way, should have more genetic differences.
This was true—sort of. The signal was surprisingly weak. In other words, as Pando has spread its roots and sprouted new trunks and grown to an almost incomprehensible size, its DNA has barely changed.
The tree seems to have a trick, the scientists wrote, for limiting the buildup and spread of mutations as it grows. It has stayed true to itself.
Look: I don’t want to stretch this metaphor too far. I don’t believe a tree knows what it’s doing.
But it’s a biological truth that life’s imperative is to persist.
Pando has surely lived through hard times. It protected its identity and refused to be static, and now it’s grown so great that no herd of deer, or drought, or forest fire has been able to bring it down for millennia.
What’s the equivalent for us?
Our conflicts and trials are meaningless to this life form that’s existed for perhaps half as long as the entire human species. But maybe there’s something for us in the idea of guarding who we are while refusing to shrink. In living expansively until we reach a hilltop with a new view. In seeking out the sunshine.