REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, LOS ANGELES -- Pando, a tree that has been living for about 80,000 years, was chosen as the symbol of the 10th International Whitehead Conference and the 9th Ecological Civilization International Forum, because it teaches the human society how to be sustainable.
With the theme of "Seizing an Alternative Toward an Ecological Civilization," the June 4-7 conference in Pomona College in Claremont of Southern California will gather some 1,500 scholars and environmentalists including Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva and China's Sheri Xiaoyi Liao.
The website of the conference said "We have taken its name to identify a new movement inspired by the ecological relations that interconnect us all, Pando Populus ('populus' is the genus for aspen). 'Seizing an Alternative' is the Pando Populus inaugural conference."
Pando in Latin means "I spread." It was found in 1990s near the Lake Fish in Utah. After doing DNA and other tests, scientists found that some 106 acres of quaking aspen trees share the same single root system.
Above ground, Pando appears to be a grove of more than 40,000 individual trees, but underground, the trees are interconnected by the only vast root system. The individual stems are genetically identical. Thus in the fact, as a single living organism, it is the largest and the oldest tree in the world.
John Cobb, Jr., a philosopher and theologist who founded the Center for Process Study in 1970s which is the organizer of the conference this year, said that Pando gives the human society at least three lessons.
"When we see the aspen grove, we are looking at a lot of individual trees," he talked about the first lesson, "Sometime they cooperative, but most of the time they compete as trees compete each other to get sunshine."
"But when we learned that Pando, and any aspen grove, is not separate individual trees, all of the trees depend on all the other trees, and they all support and are supported by a common root system, that makes people think, what looks like separate individuals may not be separate individuals."
"The system where many things looked as individual are actually united, that has enabled Pando to live 80,000 years. That means it has survived all kinds of changes, climate, ecology, so force and so on, more than any other living things. So the connectiveness has enormous survival value. That is the second lesson we could learn from Pando," he further elaborated.
China is the first country that declared the construction of ecological civilization as one of its focus. The Chinese Communist Part put the goal into its constitution in 2012.
The 90-year-old Cobb, who wrote "Is It Too Late? An Ecology of Theology" in 1970, continuously urged the human society during the past 40 years to take action in response of the climate change and environment damage that threaten the survival of human society.
"We learned a third thing that in spite of that Pando is able to survive such a long time, it still requires a natural environment," Cobb said, "We have interrupted the natural environment of Pando in several ways. The one that is interesting and significant is that we killed all the predators, wolfs namely, so the deer population is not controlled. The deer get almost all the young aspen shoots to avoid starvation. So over decades there have been no new trees."
"The human insensitivity to the natural processes and ecological understanding, the imposing of what is immediate convenient for us, is killing Pando," said Cobb.
"There are many many people who do want a change, and who have good ideas about changing. But they tend to work in a very fragmented way. So I want to make people work together to make change," said Cobb, "There are many conferences dealing with specific issues. To show that they all belong together, and to support each other, we have to bring people who are working on different issues together."
"As a man of 90-year-old, I have no other wishes. The last thing I want to do is organizing this conference," Cobb added.
Pando's story triggered a lot of reflection among people in the past years. And a regeneration project is undergoing to keep this old tree live longer.
"People are learning lessons from Pando," said Janet Burns, a forest department volunteer who provided related information at the nearby Fish Lake Lodge.
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