Planning for the future is something we consider wise and yet often fail to do. Knowing the possibility of future disruptions to normal life, wisdom suggests that we prepare ahead of time.

The State of Florida recommends preparing a “hurricane kit,” with the rationale, “If you prepare your kit ahead of time, you can alleviate a lot of the potential stress of a very chaotic situation.”

California urges its residents to practice earthquake preparedness, with the exhortation, “Anything you do today will be like making a deposit in your survivability savings account for withdrawal in tough times.”

I’ll have to admit that during the few years we lived in Southern California, we neglected to prepare an earthquake “disaster kit,” although at the recommendation of our neighbors, we bought a putty-like substance to help secure tippy breakables from falling off a shelf.

Why would we not make preparations for potential disasters, when historic trends predict their occurrence? One reason stems from the fact that the effort to prepare for contingent future events takes resources we’d rather spend in the present. These resources involve our thought, time, money, effort, and storage space in our current living environment. 

Even saving a portion of our income for future contingencies is a practice easily thwarted by pressing needs of the moment, or by the rationalization that we can “get to that later.” It takes sober discipline and a conscious decision to sacrifice present ease and desires in order to lay aside resources and establish the means to survive a future disruption to our status quo.

Introducing Fireweed

And yet, nature shows a designed preparedness that outshines the level of intelligence and wisdom humans often demonstrate either individually or in community. How can this be? Can nature, devoid of conscious intelligence, show greater wisdom than humans, whose intelligence, according to evolution, supposedly culminated from nature alone?

An example from nature of an “unintelligent” organism, a plant, that has exceled in preparing for future disasters is fireweed.

Fireweed gets its common name in the United States because it’s notoriously associated with fire landscapes. It quickly colonizes disturbed areas, including fire scars, logged land, and oil spills. It was one of the first plants to appear after the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington, and it even took over urban burned ground after London was bombed during World War II (in England, one of its common names is “bombweed”).

A volcanic eruption, a forest fire, even urban warfare demolition — not things that happen every season. How does fireweed flourish so quickly, even after the catastrophic destruction of its normal habitat?

It disperses by thousands of seeds that fly on little silky tufts each fall, but it also spreads underground through a system of stems called rhizomes. When a fire moves through, the rhizomes usually survive the burn and can quickly grow again the following summer.

The photo with fireweed in the foreground at the top of this article was taken by my father, Robert Hedin, at Mount Shuksan in Washington State several years ago. Fireweed exhibits intelligent latent design through its preparations for a resurgence of life, in anticipation of periodic desolations of habitat. Consider, however, the present-moment cost of making such farsighted preparations, such as preparing an overabundance of seeds that are easily dispersed far and wide and in having developed an auxiliary means of proliferation via rhizomes.

Survival of the Fittest?

To ascribe this type of latent design to “survival of the fittest” falls flat. Natural forces don’t possess the wisdom to pay a price now for possible future reward, especially when the payoff for investing in the future may not materialize for multiple generations. The natural forces that govern biochemistry simply push or pull, and that’s it. What we see exemplified in fireweed is the manifestation of a designer exhibiting intelligent, wise, long-term planning.

The ability to practice “delayed gratification” is part of being able to prepare now for future needs. Psychologists have identified delayed gratification as a positive trait in people, associated with maturity, discipline, and even faith and trust. Practicing it correlates critically with success and overall well-being. But it’s also hard to practice, because we tend to have a bias for the present. 

Ironically, evolutionary theory has suggested that our ancestors enhanced their ability to survive by rejecting delayed gratification for the immediate gain of living in the moment. Today, the opposite trend is viewed as beneficial. And then there’s the fireweed, as just one example from nature, that has the wisdom of built-in future preparedness. 

The Diligence of Honeybees

Another example of living things laying up stores to secure future survival was discussed in an earlier article I wrote about intelligent design in honeybees. Nature’s intelligent latent design benefits more than the just organism exhibiting preparedness. The diligence of honeybees allows them to store up about a third more honey than they typically need to survive the winter months. This means that an ordinary hive can produce about 25 pounds of sweet honey for humans to harvest, and still have enough honey stores to sustain the bee colony through the winter.

Likewise, fireweed’s rapid rebound after habitat destruction does more than sustain its own species.

Where there’s fireweed, there’s wildlife.  Bears chow on the tender young shoots in June and deer browse the flowery stalks. Moose, caribou, muskrat, and hares also forage on fireweed…. Fireweed attracts pollinators too, including native bumblebees and various solitary wild bees.

What a marvelous illustration of generosity in nature! Far from exhibiting a “selfish gene” honed for survival of the fittest, what we see in these living examples is a tribute to an intelligent designer that not only takes thought for the future of an individual species, but for the well-being of many others.

A final aspect of fireweed that deserves mention is its beauty as a symbol of hope. One author expresses it this way:

For me, fireweed represents the promise that beauty will return after bodily sickness or environmental destruction. When woodlands are damaged from fire, or clear-cutting, it is fireweed that brings the first promise of recovery.

Whether loss has come through recent fires in California or hurricanes hitting the southeastern states, we all need reminders that life and beauty can flourish again, even after devastation.

A Resurgence of Life

This past summer, my wife and I often enjoyed walking through a nature preserve on the outskirts of town. We often remarked to each other how beautifully the meadow had bloomed this year with an unusually diverse abundance of wildflowers. We thought that perhaps the management of the area had seeded the ground with a wildflower mix that included new plants we hadn’t seen in past years. 

Then one day on our walk we met a man working there who related this story. The previous fall, in order to reduce the growth of invasive species in the meadow, he had bush-hogged the whole place. As he said this, I remembered the emotion I felt last fall when I had come there and seen the entire meadow, with its autumn colors of purple, amber, and golden laid waste by what I could only imagine was a senseless and over-zealous mowing crew. 

We asked if he had then sown the wildflower seeds now blooming in such an amazing diversity of beauty. The land manager smiled and assured us that all the wildflowers grew from native seeds that had lain dormant in the ground, perhaps for years, ready to spring to life after the old, invasive growth was mown down. 

This illustration of the resurgence of life spoke powerfully to us as a parable of hope. In like manner, fireweed’s beauty from ashes is a poignant reminder that the harsh realities of loss are not the final word.