The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The law doesn’t stop with death. It reaches far beyond the grave, for years, entangling the survivors in bureaucratic hurdles that make the challenges of pre-death seem like a cakewalk.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.

Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body’s provinces, across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say.

The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.