The Overstory

by Richard Powers

That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

Something shines out, 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.

All he ever wanted was to earn an honest living, promote the general welfare, earn the respect of his community, and raise a decent family. Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood. Nothing left on the continent even hints at what has gone. All replaced now, by thousands of miles of continuous backyards and farms with thin lines of second growth between them. Still, the soil remembers, for a little while longer, the vanished woods and the progress that unmade them. And the soil’s memory feeds their backyard pine.

Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.