The Overstory

by Chris Hubbard, Education Director

“First there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”

—Opening of The Overstory

Thus begins The Overstory, the Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best seller by Richard Powers. Organized in four parts, the epic tale opens with “Roots”, a series of character sketches spanning generations that introduce the reader to the nine main characters. We learn of each person’s connection with trees: at times tragic, at times inspirational, but with each character developing an insight to nature. In addition to the human characters populating the book, Powers includes trees as central protagonists, and we come to know individual trees as though they were human.

The characters’ paths begin to merge in “Trunk,” as they come together to fight the timber companies cutting the last old growth stands of giant redwoods in California. Following a desperate culminating act of arson that ends in tragedy, the characters separate and move on with their lives in “Crown” and “Seed”, as the consequences of their actions hang over them through the years. We eventually see all but one of the characters become environmental activists, attempting in various ways to defend the endangered forests, with varying levels of ramification for their actions.

Powers weaves tendrils of scientific fact throughout the narrative, which at the time of publication was “verifiable, consensually repeated, and agreed upon.” We learn of trees that communicate with each other through the air with chemical signals, warning of predation; of Old Tjikko, a Norway Spruce in Sweden with a root system estimated to be over 9,000 years old; and of the stand of aspen in southern Utah, consisting of approximately 50,000 stems sprouting from a rhizome mass estimated to be 80,000 years old. We learn how of the extraordinary life that exists high in Redwoods.

In an interview with PBS (Dec. 2, 2019), Powers challenges us to reconsider our worldview, to shift our thinking in terms not as humans and nature as two separate things - human separatism – but rather to understand how deeply connected and reliant humans are with the natural world, including the trees so prominently featured in his text.

Most importantly, Powers’ book is a call to action: to save what little old-growth forests we have left, to curb the increasing effects of climate change, to stop the ravage of the natural world, which we – human and non-human alike, depend. It’s a call we ignore at our own peril. Trees can survive without humans. Humans cannot survive without trees. And the trees are saying things, in words before words.

“Look at that!” Twelve apostle trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nick drew once with a protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago. Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose.”

—Quote from The Overstory, pg. 254