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A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside oursâ??vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.… (more)
paradoxosalpha: If you were confused or excited by the juxtaposition of silviculture and the Internet in The Overstory, Smith's book is good stuff, especially the second chapter, on "The Ecology of the Internet."
paradoxosalpha: The forest in Powers' book takes on the organizing and animating function of the river in McDonald's. Both of these novels also have a regard for artificial intelligence that de-centers it from the human perspective.
This is a much reveiwed book so I am not entirely sure what I can say about it that others haven't. It is such a large book with so many strands, it is almost impossible to hold it all in your head. Maybe it was designed to be like that. I am going to pull out three things that this novel of ideas (A novel of ideas is one in which the plot is driven by an exploration of an idea or set of related ideas, and all other elements of the story are subservient to that idea ) made me think about.
It is a book that argues for a way forward in climate change and saving forests and that way forward is interdisciplinary, just like the book is. It brings together science, myths and the literary arts to provide a more compelling case that just might affect us on an emotional level. In fact, this is signalled at the very beginning of the book in the epigraphs with quotes from an essayist, a scientist and environmentalist and an Aboriginal Australian.
The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The ony thing that can do that is a good story. p420
The book starts with the stories (understories) of nine characters - you read almost a third of the book, entitled Roots - with several of these characters connected to the world of research. The purpose of these stories is to show their tree consciousness, how their upbringing and work helped shape them to become the activists they were. The science of trees is therefore easy to present, both the over-the-air communication and mycorrhizal exchanges being based on a real-life conflict between Suzanne Simard and the rest of the scientific community. She was shunned over her ideas that trees communicated through chemicals released into the air and helped each other in times of stress, and like the character Patricia Westerford, she hid quietly, but continued to work.
Powers is an author who understands that climate change demands a broader and more comprehensive solution than one discipline can offer.
One of the other key ideas in The Overstory is timescales; the book has a narrated timespan of 250 years if we start with the Hoel family migrating to America, the average life span of a tree. Powers is urging us to consider trees as communal beings and that they provide an 'overstory' to human lives. Often, we are 'plant blind' - a scientific term to describe how we don't see plants that we pass everyday, and that trees and humans are entwined in so many ways. One example of the timescale being greater than a human one is the idea that the Hoel family have of taking a picture of a Chestnut tree they planted outside their house every month. This tradition passed down through the generations until they had hundreds if not thousands of pictures of the tree and could flick through them to see the growth. The images excluded everything else and demonstrated the idea that trees keep on going regardless of what we do, although we can help and nurture along the way. It also demonstrates that the book is interested in what is going on in the images - the trees are the thing.
Contrast this timescale with the timescale of the deforestation. How laws which were meant to stop logging meant that the companies speeded up their logging in order to cut as much as they could before the law came into being. Or, the timescale of the tree planting that Dougie undertook. Years planting thousands of slips to reforest an area only to have it pointed out that all he was doing was providing companies with ways to cut more not reforesting.
We could also consider the trees that were significant in the book. The Chestnut that the Hoel family planted and that was immune to the blight that most others succumbed to. There is the oak that causes Neelay's accident and the Banyan that Douglas gets caught in when he ejects out of a plane. Trees saving humans. And in order that humans save trees, there is the Giant Redwood that Olivia and Nick live in, up in the canopy for a year, trying to save it.
The writing is wonderful: poetic in places; direct in others. Two of the characters, Dorothy and Ray are reading their way through The Hundred Greatest Novels of All time.
The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they 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. p296
So here we have the third important thing for me. A desire to rethink how we live alongside and with non-human living beings. What would it mean to live alongside an ancient forest, taking only what is necessary and the forest can stand? Perhaps we should be talking to First Nation People here who have been doing this for centuries rather than listening to our current mindset of take what we can and then take a bit/a lot more.
I thought the way the book was structured was really clever. Roots, Trunk, Leaves and Seeds as sections. The roots were the nine individual stories of people who gradually became connected in the Trunk section to protest against deforestation. In Leaves they were protesting, living a life of activism, giving up their day jobs and joining others, and then in seeds they disperse with fragmented stories of the nine characters and how they go on to germinate ideas in others. This last part I found quite hard to keep together but again, I think that was an intended outcome of the section.
This book did not work for me on just about every level, but the part I found most distressing was the cherry picking from Judi Bari's life (http://www.judibari.org/) for the vague character of Mother N and the omission of the incredible labor organizing she did that was foundationally tied to her incredible environmental organizing.
I also didn't find the depiction of trees particularly powerful, especially in contrast to Sue Burke's brilliant novel [b:Semiosis|35018907|Semiosis (Semiosis Duology, #1)|Sue Burke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494613337l/35018907._SY75_.jpg|56303145] exploring and demonstrating the very same perspective, and also much more about human society. Everything about this book is superior to Overstory--plot, characters, presentation of plant worlds/life, social organization, interrogations of philosophical questions, and more. ( )
I loved this book. There is so much there. While there are nine characters that are followed through this book, the main character is the trees and the environment. I learned so much about trees and how they communicate with each other. This book is very timely. I liked how the story was told through the eyes and actions of the people. But I have to admit I had many questions as to who were the terrorists? Seeing the two sides--environmentalists vs. corporations--I came down on the side of the environmentalists. I could see where they came from. They were not trying to hurt anyone. I am not so sure of the corporations and police. The story ends where it began--in Iowa. Excellent book that everyone should read. ( )
“Literary fiction has largely become co-opted by that belief that meaning is an entirely personal thing,” Powers says. “It’s embraced the idea that life is primarily a struggle of the individual psyche to come to terms with itself. Consequently, it’s become a commodity like a wood chipper, or any other thing that can be rated in terms of utility.” [...]
“I want literature to be something other than it is today,” Powers says. “There was a time when our myths and legends and stories were about something greater than individual well-being. "
Acquiring tree consciousness, a precondition for learning how to live here on Earth, means learning what things grow and thrive here, independently of us.
We are phenomenally bad at experiencing, estimating, and conceiving of time. Our brains are shaped to pay attention to rapid movements against stable backgrounds, and we’re almost blind to the slower, broader background drift. The technologies that we have built to defeat time—writing and recording and photographing and filming—can impair our memory (as Socrates feared) and collapse us even more densely into what psychologists call the “specious present,” which seems to get shorter all the time. Plants’ memory and sense of time is utterly alien to us. It’s almost impossible for a person to wrap her head around the idea that there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California that have been slowly dying since before humans invented writing.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nodto me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. -RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her--a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight--but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me an old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. --James Lovelock
Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her - a sentient Goddess wit a purpose and foresight - but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in teh wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. -JAMES LOVELOCK
Tree . . . he watching you. You look at tree, he listen to you. He got no finger, he can't speak. But that leaf . . . he pumping, growing, growing in the night. While you sleeping you dream something. Tree and grass same thing. --Bill Neidjie
Tree . . . he watching you. You look at tree, he listen to you. He got no finger, he can't speak. But that leaf . . . he pumping, growing, growing in the night. While you sleeping you dream something. Tree and grass same thing. - BILL NEIDJE
Dedication
For Aida.
For Aida
First words
First there was nothing.
First there was nothing.
Quotations
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.
The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside oursâ??vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
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It is a book that argues for a way forward in climate change and saving forests and that way forward is interdisciplinary, just like the book is. It brings together science, myths and the literary arts to provide a more compelling case that just might affect us on an emotional level. In fact, this is signalled at the very beginning of the book in the epigraphs with quotes from an essayist, a scientist and environmentalist and an Aboriginal Australian.
The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The ony thing that can do that is a good story.
p420
The book starts with the stories (understories) of nine characters - you read almost a third of the book, entitled Roots - with several of these characters connected to the world of research. The purpose of these stories is to show their tree consciousness, how their upbringing and work helped shape them to become the activists they were. The science of trees is therefore easy to present, both the over-the-air communication and mycorrhizal exchanges being based on a real-life conflict between Suzanne Simard and the rest of the scientific community. She was shunned over her ideas that trees communicated through chemicals released into the air and helped each other in times of stress, and like the character Patricia Westerford, she hid quietly, but continued to work.
Powers is an author who understands that climate change demands a broader and more comprehensive solution than one discipline can offer.
One of the other key ideas in The Overstory is timescales; the book has a narrated timespan of 250 years if we start with the Hoel family migrating to America, the average life span of a tree. Powers is urging us to consider trees as communal beings and that they provide an 'overstory' to human lives. Often, we are 'plant blind' - a scientific term to describe how we don't see plants that we pass everyday, and that trees and humans are entwined in so many ways. One example of the timescale being greater than a human one is the idea that the Hoel family have of taking a picture of a Chestnut tree they planted outside their house every month. This tradition passed down through the generations until they had hundreds if not thousands of pictures of the tree and could flick through them to see the growth. The images excluded everything else and demonstrated the idea that trees keep on going regardless of what we do, although we can help and nurture along the way. It also demonstrates that the book is interested in what is going on in the images - the trees are the thing.
Contrast this timescale with the timescale of the deforestation. How laws which were meant to stop logging meant that the companies speeded up their logging in order to cut as much as they could before the law came into being. Or, the timescale of the tree planting that Dougie undertook. Years planting thousands of slips to reforest an area only to have it pointed out that all he was doing was providing companies with ways to cut more not reforesting.
We could also consider the trees that were significant in the book. The Chestnut that the Hoel family planted and that was immune to the blight that most others succumbed to. There is the oak that causes Neelay's accident and the Banyan that Douglas gets caught in when he ejects out of a plane. Trees saving humans. And in order that humans save trees, there is the Giant Redwood that Olivia and Nick live in, up in the canopy for a year, trying to save it.
The writing is wonderful: poetic in places; direct in others. Two of the characters, Dorothy and Ray are reading their way through The Hundred Greatest Novels of All time.
The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they 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.
p296
So here we have the third important thing for me. A desire to rethink how we live alongside and with non-human living beings. What would it mean to live alongside an ancient forest, taking only what is necessary and the forest can stand? Perhaps we should be talking to First Nation People here who have been doing this for centuries rather than listening to our current mindset of take what we can and then take a bit/a lot more.
I thought the way the book was structured was really clever. Roots, Trunk, Leaves and Seeds as sections. The roots were the nine individual stories of people who gradually became connected in the Trunk section to protest against deforestation. In Leaves they were protesting, living a life of activism, giving up their day jobs and joining others, and then in seeds they disperse with fragmented stories of the nine characters and how they go on to germinate ideas in others. This last part I found quite hard to keep together but again, I think that was an intended outcome of the section.
This is a story where trees influence people. (