The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

night, at the campsite near Norris, Mimi asks him, awed. Her father has changed

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.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.

Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

“It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.”

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

“Think about it! They’ve figured out how to live trapped in place, with no other protection, whipped by winds at thirty below zero.”

Yet the senior who emerges out of freshman ugly ducklinghood knows what she loves and how she intends to spend her life, and that’s a novelty among the youth of any year.

Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

A secret suspicion sets her apart from the others. She’s sure, on no evidence whatsoever, that trees are social creatures. It’s obvious to her: motionless things that grow in mass mixed communities must have evolved ways to synchronize with one another. Nature knows few loner trees.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they’re seeing.

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no

Things are happening; the world is cracking open.

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

Drumlins lift and fall. The road cuts a double trench through winter’s white, all the way to the horizon. Attractions are few, but each one delights her. The Herbert Hoover Library and Museum. Sharpless Auction. Amana Colonies.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

And the scent of it, the smell of anticipation and loss, of fresh-cut pine.

The point of the game is to keep playing.

NEVADA IS WIDE and bleak enough to mock all human politics.

we want you to take passive resistance training and pledge the nonviolence code

coprophagic

“Identity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists.” “Or: Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?”

He waves his work-gnarled hand across the crowd in goofy cowboy joy. “Homo sapiens, man. Always up to something!” Mimi trots to catch up with him.

For her entire life, unwittingly, she has complied with her parents’ first shared principle: Make no noise in this world. She, Carmen, Amelia—all three Ma girls. Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense.

The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes.

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

“Yesterday’s political criminals are on today’s postage stamps!”

He’s never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through. The man in the tent lies bathed in signals hundreds of millions of years older than his crude senses. And still he can read them. The five white spruces sign the blue air. They write: Light and water and a little crushed stone demand long answers.

Capital’s answer to a slipped schedule is simply to add more shifts.

are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, 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.

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Just upriver, the Achuar—people of the palm tree—sing to their gardens and forests, but secretly, in their heads, so only the souls of the plants can hear. Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

I don’t always like myself. At parties, almost never.

One of them has a thought, which at once becomes the other’s. Enlightenment is a shared enterprise.

“Yes! And what do all good stories do?”

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

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.

In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

you. So many wonder drugs have come from