The Overstory

by Richard Powers

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

“If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

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

Maybe we want to hurt trees so much because they live so much longer than we do.

She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back.

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

the night the woman came to trouble him into life,