The Overstory

I guess, since I already paid a lot of attention to trees, and already considered them more or less to be people, and was already familiar with some of the research into how trees communicate with each other, it didn't impact me as much as some other readers.

I also really disliked the fact that Powers has a large cast of characters, whose stories span a century and most of a continent, and not a single one of them was Black or Indigenous. To not mention the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in a book that's about the nature and ecology of North America seems disrespectful at the very least. Then again, if Powers were to mention Native Americans, he would have to grapple with the fact that many Native American societies were quite successful in consciously stewarding and co-evolving with trees and other species, which would then detract from his anti-human message.

Much of Powers' interesting information about tree science can be found in "The Hidden Life of Trees" by Peter Wohlleben (note, he has the same initials as the tree scientist character), so, if that's what you're after, maybe read that first.

The author likes trees (Even those among us who call climate change a Chinese hoax can say that!) and he is dismayed as we approach the end of our times. He has created an extraordinary literary work that uses trees as an image, a metaphor, and an underlying structure at every level from the smallest expressed thought to the whole novel. Beginning with a series of short story-like introductions to the novel's human characters and their relationships with trees, we progress to another story about the battle to preserve trees in which our characters meet and interact, and to the dénouement of their lives corresponding to the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene epoch. The verbal richness of the work in its final pages leaves us with small traces of hope; the possibility that a character's massive online game is a new reality and the thought that maybe only our destruction will permit the persistence of life on earth.

One of the characters is asked to travel across the country to give a lecture on trees to a group looking for simple answers to how they can help the environment. She thinks,
She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she'd get an ovation.

Overstory is an extraordinary novel, one of the best I read in the past few years. It a book of vast ambition and scope, a book that explores our relation with the natural world and more specifically with trees, these magnificent, complex beings that offer so much to our planet. Overstory is a book about trees.

Most of us, cannot see the trees around us. That’s because we only can identify with things that look like us. But humans and trees are interrelated. We still share a quarter of our genes with trees. Truth is, human life could not exist if there were no trees. A mature tree produces as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year. Trees are excellent carbon sinks, meaning they absorb carbon dioxide. Trees fight soil erosion, conserve rainwater, and reduce water runoff and sediment deposit after storms. They fight flooding. They refill aquifers. Trees clean up dirty air and muffle noise pollution. Trees feed us and give us medicine.

Trees make our life possible but they are so alien to us. Only recently we have started to actually understand the complexities of the behaviour of trees, how they communicate and interact with each other, how they help each other to survive. “Forests are just like human families,” says Suzanne Simard, forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia. A network of fungal threads connects the trees in a forest. At the hub of a forest’s mycorrhizal network stand the “Mother Trees” the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. These forest networks are organised in the same way as our neural networks and our social networks. It is a fascinated underground world, whose concept illustrated in the movie Avatar. Actually, the field biologist Patricia Westerford, one of the nine human characters in Overstory reminded me of Suzanne Simard.

Most of us are so deeply colonised by this idea that we (humans) are the only thing that really matters and that the rest of creation is here basically to be a resource to us that it really shocks us to think that there actually might be another way of looking at the world. As a result, eighty percent of the forests that originally covered the earth have been cleared, or fragmented. It may have something dramatic to take place in one’s life in order to spin someone deeply addicted to this idea, and perhaps that’s why a lot of the nine human protagonists in the story have to have this moment, for to see the world differently. Through these nine characters, Richard Powers explore trees and the human connection to trees from many different angles. It is as if the characteristics of a tree are displayed, in a way, in the consciousness of the character as a parallel.

Richard Powers’ Overstory is a wonderful exploration in what means to write from the perspective of trees, but one of his greater achievements in this book, is, I think, the formation of identification and empathy in something that does not look like us, but something that we depend upon and will outlive us. And, unless they fall victim to human greed and global warming (which, sad to say, is quite possible), tress will be still here, growing in silence, giving food and medicine, comfort and pleasure, to children yet unborn.

Read the full revie at Maquina Lectora