I finally read The Overstory, by Richard Powers (Norton 2018). A FBriend recently posted their opinion that it is “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the climate crisis.” This raised my eyebrow at first (“Hmm. Do the trees talk like they’re in a minstrel show?” I wondered); but then it got me curious. After all, UTC made something happen.
There is one thing certain about the book: it is long and complex (and big — tho there is a disclaimer about carbon offsets, etc.) The first section, “Roots,” details the seemingly separate and mutually irrelevant stories of each of 9 characters, from childhood to young adulthood. (My wife is reading this part now: she’s on the second of these stories and is already lost. All I can say is it helps to have taught Faulkner novels.) In any event, as you might imagine, in the subsequent section, “Trunk,” some of the characters’ lives — and various varieties of trees — begin to intersect in interesting ways. The main action begins during the “Redwood Summer” of 1990 in the remote far northern reaches of the California redwood forests. That movement involved chaining oneself to various things and people, spiking trees, and sitting in trees, as a way to prevent them from being cut down. But they were cut down, by and large — are being cut. And it’s hard to tell whether to be hopeful or despairing, by the end of The Overstory. Take, for instance, this moment, in one of the tree-sits: “They can’t win. They can’t beat nature.” “But they can mess things over for an incredibly long time.” Yet on such a night as this, as the forest pumps out its million-part symphonies and the fat, blazing moon gets shredded in Mimas’s [“their” redwood tree’s] branches, it’s easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour. (292) This is hopeful, I suppose — unless, possibly, if you’re a mammal. Or as long as you’re someone who sees the larger biome as being more important than any one species. The problem for our species, as a lawyer character sees it, is that “[l]ife will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees” (498). But, of course, it does not. People can’t see beyond the troubles of the day, let alone the year, the decade, or generations. And that is their (our) undoing. The forestry scientist, Patricia Westerford, puts it this way, to her husband, Dennis: “People are so beautiful.” He turns to her, horrified. But he’s a man of faith, and waits to hear whatever explanation she cares to deliver. And, Yes, she thinks. The thought makes her stubborn. Yes: beautiful. And doomed. Which is why she has never been able to live among them. “Hopelessness makes them determined. Nothing’s more beautiful than that.” “You think we’re hopeless?” “Den. How is extraction ever going to stop? It can’t even slow down. The only things we know how to do is grow. Grow harder; grow faster. more than last year. Growth, all the way up to the cliff and over. No other possibility.” “I see.” Clearly he doesn’t. But his willingness to lie for her also breaks her heart. She would tell him – how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man. (304-5) Why doesn’t “man” do anything? Well, most folks don’t see on the timescale Westerford or the trees do. We didn’t evolve for that — our rational faculty was never intended by nature to preserve all of nature, just us. We’re afflicted by confirmation bias, belief bias, the ambiguity effect, singularity effect, and of course, this all-time greatest hit: “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. [. . .] The larger the group . . .” “. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?” “Because if there were a real problem, surely someone – ” “ – lots of people would already have –“ (321) But given that these are the brains we’re working with, what is to be done? Especially by a writer? Powers does seem to have faith in narrative. As the psychologist of the group puts it, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” The problem is that the good stories are not telling the story that needs telling: The books [. . .] share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive – character – is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. (382-3) Clearly, Powers is trying to write precisely such a novel — and perhaps recognizing the impossibility of making that contest seem more compelling than your overdrawn bank account or the kids’ fighting over the Wii. It’s a novel that de-centralizes character in favor of trees (and non-human life in general) as the main focus. There is a brief thread at the end having to do with technology and consciousness, but it’s not clear whether that will lead to salvation or faster destruction. One must have a mind of winter, and take the very very long view, in order to produce a sense of acceptance, let alone optimism. Having said that, the human characters do make ethical choices about their relationships to one another, as well as to trees — some with enormous consequences. The book finds meaning in virtue and vice, existential decisions, and sacrificing for love. But that which you truly love shall be taken from you, and it’s clear no rational or ethical response is possible without that understanding. This summer I re-read part of Deleuse’ & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. So much of it reads like goofy 1970s weed-induced rambling that I found it kind of hard to take seriously. But their comments on the danger of “arboreal” metaphors still struck a chord. The world-tree is an axis, a center, around which the grand story of history and life revolves. And if you’re not at the center, in the canopy, well . . . Anyway, that’s one tough tree to fell. Roots-trunk-crown: it’s an inherently hierarchical model for a book or a universe. And dealing with redwoods (esp. as synecdoches of “the world”) automatically tends toward gigantism. I have to wonder whether it isn’t better to be thinking rhizomatically, as D & G suggest — in terms of multi-nodal networks, rather than central shafts. Will survival of body and soul be promoted by government or government’s employer, big business? Or will it take a network of smaller communities or affinity groups finding whatever meaning and livelihood is to be found by helping one another? Clearly, the redwood-crusader characters are fetishizing individual trees, giving them names, etc. But, to Powers’ credit, he points out that there are networks a-plenty in the forest, both underground, in connections between root systems, and above ground, in chemical communications between various species’ branches and leaves. The aspens — those gigantic, self-cloning single-organism forests — make an appearance, and our attention is frequently drawn down down down, to the rotting logs on the forest floor. That’s where the action is — the generation of a variety of small life forms, denning by others, growth of arborescent and non-arborescent plants. Maybe such a model argues for replacing the grand récit, the über-story, with shorter ones — a linked short-story collection, maybe, rather than a novel. Getting down in the leaves like that is the only way art can help link our lives to Life.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |