The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

Dad, I would very much like to plunge off the edge of commonsense existence, at your expense, and become certifiably unemployable.

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

The only dependable things are humility and looking.

she can’t believe what her animal fear was willing to make her do. The opinion of others left her ready to suffer the most agonizing of deaths.

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

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

The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer.

Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.”

A people! United! Can never be defeated! A forest! Once blighted! Can never be re-seeded!

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

and he’s left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.