The Overstory

by Richard Powers

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity. . . .

Eric shows the print to the old man. It’s easier than trying to tell his father he loves him.

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

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

We only see things that look like us.

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

The fables seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away.

Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground

‘How could we not have seen?’

“Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.”

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

She looks marvelously weathered, old beyond her years. She has gone to seed.

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

Sometimes, when she lies down and closes her eyes, she feels that moss will cover her lids by the time she opens them again.

Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them.

“It’s easy to like people who take plants seriously.”

She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats.

She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

how lucky she has been, to spend these few blessed years married to the one man on Earth who’d let her spend most of her life alone.

until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

“I sometimes wonder whether a tree’s real task on Earth isn’t to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time.”

“Fire suppression used to seem like rational management. But it costs us much more than it has saved.”

What difference will it make, once the right to unlimited prosperity turns all forests into geometric proofs? The wind blows and the hemlocks wave their feathery leading shoots. Such a graceful profile, so elegant a tree. A tree embarrassed for people, embarrassed by efficiency, injunctions. The bark gray, the branches beginner green; the needles flat along the shoots, pointing outward and on. The habit tranquil, philosophical, even, in its repose. Its cones, small, downward sleigh bells content in constant silence.

a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.”

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.

Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

A forest deserves protection regardless of its value to humans.

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

On this mountain, in such weather, Why stay here any longer? Three trees wave to me with urgent arms. I lean in to hear, but their emergency sounds just like the wind. New buds test the branches, even in winter.

The reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe.

another Anglo collector, here to steal their seeds. But on the afternoon when her team discovers mahogany and ipe elders hacked to pieces, they come around. They’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t them, crying over trees.

But he never asks what he wants to ask, what she knows he should. Who’s going to do the replanting?

How can you bear to look at me? There are harder things to bear.

The gardener sees only the gardener’s garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

But there’s always the same distal cause, and you know it and I know it and everyone alive who’s paying attention knows it.

“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us!

In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.

“Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.

The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.