Richard Power’s recently published novel, “The Overstory,” a book about what the trees are trying to tell us — and we’re not listening — could easily serve as the basis for a new religion.
Let’s start with a statement made by Powers after he published this epic centered on a species-other-than-humans, a goal matched only by “Moby Dick.” The difference being that this book is steadily readable from the first page to the last. It may be a new Bible. But like Genesis, it’s packed with good stories.
“Trees are among the very largest, longest-lived, most successful, and most collaboratively social forms of life on the planet,” Powers stated in an interview. “They live, all at once, in the sky, on the surface, and under the ground. They make the atmosphere, filter the Earth’s waters, and help to regulate the temperature… Deforestation, by the way, is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gasses, after burning fossil fuel.”
Trees made the world; our world, “The Overstory” tells us. Aside from the oceans, the normative state of Planet Earth is forest: “It’s the earth’s chief way of being.”
To summarize, the air we breathe evolved through the interaction of sky and green plants. All our food, our fresh water, and most of our medicines are the products of green plants. Trees are the most fully evolved organisms on our planet.
This isn’t “our world, with trees in it,” playing a supportive role by being so “useful,” as one of the main characters in “The Overstory” observes. “It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
And yet, as the same character points out to a lecture hall of well-educated politely attentive, but “un-woke” academics, “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago you parted ways…. You and the tree still share a quarter of your genes.”
Yes, human characters populate this book, as they do all our stories. The chief characters are introduced in separate longish stories at the book’s start. Their lives have interesting or even crucial intersections with trees, and they come together during the “eco-wars” in northern California in the late 1980s and ’90s, when protestors tried to save the last American “old forest,” with its stash of huge, irreplaceable redwoods, from the greed of the lumber industry. Reading “The Overstory,” I was surprised that I knew so little about these events.
As Powers tells it, the eco-warriors lose these wars, or at least the big battles (though apparently some pieces of the forest were saved). This central crux of the novel holds most of the book’s big dramatic encounters, and the author refrains from giving us big, last-minute action scenes at his book’s conclusion. This is the narrative equivalent of writing “The Iliad” with Troy falling in the middle; then watching the scattered Trojan survivors try to get on with their lives. (That story is actually the plot of the Vergil’s “Aeneid”).
So while people matter and human lives are always being lived on the page, what they learn about humankind’s failing relationship with Planet Earth is the novel’s central concern.
That’s why this is a different, potentially path-finding novel. We know the ending of any human being’s story; people die. What of the trees’ story? What of the future of life itself on Planet Earth?
Patricia Westerford, the character who offers many of the book’s large, scientific conclusions, is decades ahead of her time in discovering remarkable truths about the life of trees — that they are social beings, they communicate with other trees and other life forms; they form what Powers calls ‘neighborhood watches’ to protect themselves against diseases and insect infestations — that only in recent years have gave gained wide acceptance in the life sciences.
Among Westerford’s (and Powers’) other messages and warnings: Earth’s forests are disappearing at a rapid rate:
“The annual loss: One billion trees…. Half the world’s species will be gone by the century’s end.”
Earth’s “wild uncatalogued forests are melting away.”
Unidentified species in earth’s Third World forests, in Brazil or Indonesia or other unstudied ecologies, are going extinct before they can be identified and studied for potential benefits such as disease cures: “Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about.”
“One trillion leaves are lost every day.”
There are only “half as many trees in the world today,” Westerford (and Powers) point out, “as when we climbed down from them.”
And we are offered this stunning metaphor: “It’s like burning down the library, the art museum, pharmacy and hall of records, all at once.”
Another central character of “The Overstory” is a Vietnam veteran who helped destroy tropical forests with Agent Orange. Back in the US, he is shocked at the loss of national forests on federally owned lands in Western states and dedicates a decade of his life to replanting, one at a time by hand, ten thousand trees cut down by lumber companies.
Later, working as a solitary caretaker at a remote tourist site abandoned in the Montana winter, Douglas Pavlicek gazes on a wild mountain side and has this revelation: “We’re cashing in a billion years of savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
“Why,” he asks, “is it easy to see on a mountain, impossible to see when you join billions of people doubling down on the status quo?”
The answer is what another character, who becomes a prominent academic psychology researcher, calls “the bystander effect.” Example: When someone calls for help, the more people nearby the less likely he or she is to receive it because everyone assumes someone else will go help. If there’s only a couple of people around, one of them will rush in.
The extrapolation: The more time you spend with any group, the more likely you are to think like everybody else. A ‘society’ or nation or civilization or ‘economy’ is just that sort of group. So we keep cutting down forests, and otherwise consuming all of Earth’s natural resources, assuming that it’s somebody else’s job to think about the consequences.
Frankly, Powers’ “The Overstory” is the most radical analysis of what the future holds for the human species (and life on Earth) that I’ve read anywhere. The current vogue for dystopian fiction, concentrating on the potential for human evil when things get tough, isn’t half as searching and seems short-sighted in comparison.
If human beings are being bad to other human beings, the possibility exists that some human beings will become better. Or the good ones will manage overthrow the bad ones.
In “The Overstory,” the implication is that human nature is itself the problem.
In the scary future scenarios suggested by scientific analyses such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction,” the extrapolation of current trends of the current geologic age lately christened the “Anthropocene” — the period of the planet’s domination by humans — focuses on the rapid, appalling extinction of other species because of environmental changes we have caused.
“The Overstory” suggests we can’t do anything but keep making things worse. “The only thing we know to do is grow,” Westerford says. “Growth all the way up to the cliff and over. No other possibility.”
We’re the problem. For the trees, the environment and, ultimately, for ourselves as well.
To suggest some basis for hope, I’ll conclude with another comment from that interview in which Powers cites an imperative by that earlier great literary writer on the subject of trees — Thoreau.
“One way or another, we humans are on our way to becoming something else. The question is rather how gracefully or how violently we make that Ovidian metamorphosis. We will learn, as Thoreau says, ‘to resign ourselves to the influence of the earth,’ or we will disappear.”
