The Overstory

by Richard Powers

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

She laughs at the gift and hugs him. He finds it after she moves out, in the crates she leaves behind for the Salvation Army.

His respect for the cleverness of ants grows without limit. Flexible behavior in the face of changing conditions: What else can you call it but wicked smart?

They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

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.

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.

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

Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

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.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

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.

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 liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian.

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

Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.

There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

The accumulated possessions of generations disperse like wind-borne pollen.

“I talked to two lawyers. No laws were broken.” “’Course not. The wrong people have all the rights.”

ignorant armies going up against each other as they have forever, for reasons hidden from even the most vehement. When will it be enough?

Her face tilts straight up the titanic trunk. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe there’s no other way to protect this thing except with our bodies.” Loki says, “If nobody’s losing money or getting hurt, the law doesn’t give a fuck.”

He hears that revered Received Pronunciation whispering off-camera, When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways.

He takes one and taps it on his open palm. Seeds fall out like coarsely ground pepper. One sticks in the crease of his lifeline. From such a speck came a tree that holds him two hundred feet in the air without flexing. This fortress tower that could sleep a village and still have room to let.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now. It’s

He must pick himself up and live. But how? Why?

“You’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people. You should be studying everyone who thinks that only people matter.”

“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?” The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”

“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

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.

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.

Ease is the disease

The screen is news, travel, the company of others, a reminder of the luck he’d had all life long and failed to see.

The reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe. Instead, she says, “We’re banking trees whose uses haven’t been discovered yet.”

Many of her prospective patrons suffer from nothing worse than too much money.

“We have a Midas problem. There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.”

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

“A reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”

If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

“You asked me here to talk about home repair. We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too.”

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

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

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.

The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true.

Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.