The Overstory – A Novel

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Nicolas Turcev (November 12, 2018). "Richard Powers lauréat du Grand prix de littérature américaine 2018". Libres Hebdo (in French) . Retrieved November 12, 2018. Moving through history and across landscapes, this tree-filled novel unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the natural world.

This particular novel is about trees and forests, but the same thing is happening to our oceans and rivers and coastlines. Build more houses and condos and roads, allow offshore drilling for oil, because there are more and more of us, and we all need more and more stuff. This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.Animism, Tree-consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers' The Overstory". Center for Humans & Nature. February 26, 2019 . Retrieved December 1, 2021. Trees are silent sentinels witnessing the passing of generations, as human families are characterised in tree years through parts of the story. In this the pervading power of the natural world is contrasted against the fragile nature of human existence. Our environment has evolved drastically, but we haven’t. We still have many innate animal behaviours that are completely unsuited to the modern world. We are ill adapted to our concrete environments. There’s a reason why we feel a sense of peace and tranquillity when we visit a forest or an open landscape. It’s where we belong.

At the same time Mimi and Douglas are brought together when a pine grove outside Mimi’s office is cut down in the middle of the night, enraging both of them. Together they start joining various activist events defending trees, and both are arrested and physically abused by police. They too make their way to the Life Defense Force. It is true that we all need to become better stewards of the environment, and this book gets points for its good intentions and cool factoids about our arboreal friends. But almost anyone who makes it through this book is probably already converted to the environmentalist cause (or at least whatever substrate involves believing "trees = good"), and I wager that anyone who wasn't will be turned off by how silly and mawkish this book is. Read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate instead.

My other major concern with this book was the understandable but ultimately unhelpful craze to anthropomorphise scientific research. Wohlleben's book has garnered much attention but it is far from accepted doctrine to talk of complex tree networks as if they have intention and consciousness. Powers leans heavily upon this, trees "bleed" sap, they have plans to travel north, they communicate intention with each other, they would talk to us if only we were listening. Certainly there is scientific evidence to support communication and symbiotic relationships and much else interesting besides. But it seems to me a fallacy to try to view these findings through a lens of human behaviour. Is that not an egregious form of egotism on our part? It can change the way you think about trees slightly, and it certainly did for me. Jessie Burton, author of 'The Muse' Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live,” the author Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books. Before writing the book, Powers had been living and teaching in Palo Alto, between tech-centric Silicon Valley and California’s old-growth forests. An encounter with a giant redwood shook him; in a Guardian profile, he describes it as a kind of “religious conversion” that showed him his place in “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” Powers then began work on the novel, and his research took him to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Months later, he moved there to live deep in the woods, where “walking a trail has become as important to me as writing.” I’m also familiar with the types of characters the author has selected, quirky, iconoclastic, talented (mostly) outsiders. Many began with an early interest in the natural world until adulthood caught up with them.

Fabiani, Louise (2018). "It's Not the Trees That Need Saving: The Overstory (Review)". Earth Island Journal . Retrieved February 1, 2021. The overstory is the name given to the part of a forest that protrudes above the canopy. When you look at a rainforest, for example, what you see from above is the canopy with trees standing out above it. What you don’t see unless you get into the rainforest is the understory that sits below the canopy but above the ground, then the shrub layer below that and, finally, the forest floor. A lot of the tree information I am already familiar with, as are many prospective readers, but there’s always more to learn. This extraordinary novel transformed my view of nature. Never again will I pass great tree without offering a quiet but heartfelt incantation of thanks, gratitude and wonder Hannah Rothschild, Waitrose Weekend

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There are many other character’s stories that eventually become somewhat intertwined, but at the root of all of these stories is this reverence for trees, so much so in some of these stories that they act as one of the characters.