The Overstory

by Richard Powers

She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints.

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing.

What work can’t the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees.

All the world’s trunks come from the same root and are rushing outward, down the spreading branches of the one tree, trying for something.

We live, we get out a little, and then no more, forever. And we know what’s coming—thanks to the fruit of the taboo tree that we were set up to eat. Why put it there, and then forbid it? Just to make sure it gets taken.

Soon his eyes close on their own accord, and he’s swept back into sleep, that nightly place of plantlike deliverance.

indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How poplars clean soils of chlorinated solvents and willows remove heavy metals.

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . .

There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. 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. . . .

it may take centuries to learn as much about trees as people once knew.

saprophytic latecomers that live off the energy green things make.

Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.

Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love.

the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons of water up hundreds of feet into a giant Douglas-fir trunk every day.

What the boy wanted the black box to do was innocent enough: return him to the days of myth and origin, when all the places a person could reach were green and pliant, and life might still be anything at all.

“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

Study those people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.”

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?

Humboldt Timber employs hundreds of people. Thousands of machines. It’s owned by a multibillion-dollar multinational. All the laws are on their side, backed by the will of the American people. We’re a bunch of unemployed vandals, camping out in the woods.”

Many mention the giving trees—those ancient Douglas-firs that, with their last act, give all their secondary metabolites back to the community.

She loves her own species, too—sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it—yet chosen by creation to know.

She tells him about the ambrosia beetle. The alcohol of rotting wood summons it. It moves into the log and excavates. Through its tunnel systems, it plants bits of fungus that it brought in with it, on a special formation on its head. The fungus eats the wood; the beetle eats the fungus.

She squints and sees her father. The voice is wrong but there are the rimless glasses, the high, surprised eyebrows, the constant curiosity. All those first lessons from half a century ago cloud around her, days in the beaten-up Packard, her mobile classroom, tooling around the back roads of southwest Ohio. It stuns her to recognize all her own adult convictions, there in embryo, formed by a casual few words with the window rolled down on a Friday afternoon and the soy fields of Highland County unspooling into the rearview mirror.

This land of animated wishes will expand without limits. It will fill with richer, wilder, more surprising life beyond life. The map will grow as full as the thing it stands for. And still people will be hungry and alone.

“I mean, how does knowing you’re going to die give you a leg up?

His fellow philosopher seated next to him at the satinwood bar replies, “Could you shut the hell up for a second?”

He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.

He has begun to see certain things about faith and law that hid themselves behind the expanse of common sense. Jail without arraignment helps his eyesight.

It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.

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

The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world’s most wondrous creatures: all these abandon Adam, 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.

What are those treetops like? They’re like that cog-toothed drawing toy, spinning out surprise patterns from the simplest nested cycles.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

Everything is owned; a one-year-old knows that. It’s as much a law as Newton’s. Walking down the street without cash is a crime, and no one alive would imagine for a minute that things in real life might go any other way.

That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and 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.

a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.

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.

Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. . . .

And what do all good stories do?”

“They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”

The boss is out of control. He’s willing to crash the franchise, to trash the endless moneymaker that will keep them all in junkets forever just to solve the problem of too much satisfaction.

Sempervirens, with its five divisions and countless employees, its massive annual revenues from subscriptions and media, hasn’t been under anyone’s control for some time. The tens of thousands of fans posting to online forums have more control over what happens next than any of the upper brass. Complex adaptive system. A god game that has escaped its god.

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.

Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near.

When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.