The Overstory

by Richard Powers

ACROSS THE BIOMES, at all altitudes, the learners come alive at last. They discover why a hawthorn never rots. They learn to tell apart the hundred kinds of oak. When and why the green ash split off from the white. How many generations live inside the hollow of a yew. When red maples start to turn at each elevation, and how much sooner they’re turning every year. They will come to think like rivers and forests and mountains. They will grasp how a leaf of grass encodes the journeywork of the stars. In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things. The translations will be rough at first, like a child’s first guess. But soon the first sentences will start to come across, pouring out words made, like all living things, from rain and air and crumbled rock and light. Hello. Finally. Yes. Here. It’s us.