The Overstory

by Richard Powers

That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural

A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

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

Far away, a satellite-guided agribiz monster, practically robotic, combs through the rolling fields.

Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.