The Overstory

by Richard Powers

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”

nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!”

She replants their experiment in a spot behind the house where she and her father liked to sit on summer nights and listen to what other people called silence. She remembers what he told her about the species. People, God love ’em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

Something about her perks boys up. Not her looks, of course, but an ever-so-slightly head-turning quality to her walk that they can’t quite place. Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

“People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been.”

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

In his handyman’s heart, he already knows how few things man is really the measure of.

“I never knew how strong a drug other people are.” “The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused.” “How long does it take to . . . detox?” He considers. “Nobody’s ever clean.”

There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.

She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.

My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

“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!”

A flash of orange at the window catches her eye: American redstart, male, flushing insects from the thicket with its tail and wings. Twenty-two species of birds this last week alone. Two days ago, at twilight, she and Ray saw a fox. Civil disobedience may cost them thousands in compounding penalties, but the view from the house has been much improved.

How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around. But there it is: the ability to see, all at once, in all its concurrent branches, all its many hypotheticals, this thing that bridges past and future, earth and sky.