The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Peattie’s Natural Histories,

Thrones have crumbled and new empires arisen; great ideas have been born and great pictures painted, and the world revolutionized by science and invention; and still no man can say how many centuries this Oak will endure or what nations and creeds it may outlive.

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.

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

But now she’s primed to see.

“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.”

Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.