Michael's Reviews > The Overstory

A wonderful tour of how human lives can intersect and become engaged with that of trees. The complex narrative of nine separate characters who grow alone, have different kind of formative influences from events involving trees, and then converge in mind or action by the middle of the book on the political fight in the 80s over the logging of the last old-growth forest plots in the Pacific Northwest. In the process we get to experience a satisfying interplay and integration between tree-hugger spirituality (or cult mentality from some perspectives) and the surprising discoveries about the ecology and botany of trees in recent decades.

All of us I think are reeling from the planetary ecological crisis brought on by the interconnected issues of deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and global warming. This book provides emotional relief by making these issues part of the personal stories of characters whose aspirations and motivations are easy to identify with. Some get attuned to trees through their parents of family traditions; others through accidents or surprises. In each case, their lives eventually become transformed by concern for trees. As Ovid began “Metamorphoses”:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

For example, a key character, Patricia, grows up feeling isolated by her hearing impairment but gets drawn to the mysteries of the world of plants through the inspiration of outdoor travels with her father and readings of his books such as those by the 19th century naturalist John Muir, who said:

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.

Her thesis and post-doctoral work on chemical alerting among trees upon attacks by insects ends up being so ahead of its time, is attacked by established scientists at meetings where she can overhear the slanderous rejection in whispers in the crowd: “There’s the woman who thinks that trees are intelligent.” She quits academia for work as a high school teacher and later as a wilderness ranger in an Oregon national forest.

Nick is another key character because his story of a tree connection follows multiple generations, starting with the arrival of his Swedish ancestor at a farm homestead in Iowa in the 19th century. His admiration of the grace and nut bounty of the American Chestnut in his transitional residence in Brooklyn leads him plant some at the new farm. The advent of photography leads him to take monthly pictures of the one seedling that survived, a tradition passed down and given impetus when soon after the turn of the century all chestnuts east of the Mississippi succumb to an undefeatable fungus. Nick inherits the huge stack of photos, which when flipped provide a rare window into the growth behavior of a tree over the span of more than a century, branching, reaching, and racing for the sun. Marvelous invention by Powers (or highlight of something actually done?).

When Nick’s parents die in a propane heater accident, the contrast of this tree’s timescale puts his tragedy in perspective:
When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts, lifting its lower limbs and shrugging its ample globe. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphore against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.

Nick’s affinity is with art and painting, not in the death-throes of the family farm in the face of industrial agribusiness. In reducing possessions before selling the farm, he advertises “Free Tree Art” on the highway, and chance favors him with a visit by one Olivia who is passing through on her way to joining the protesters against clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest. Her character was introduced earlier as a disinterested actuarial student who, like Saul on the road to Damascus, has a near death experience which makes her suddenly hungry for s more meaningful path to her life. A TV news interview with a protester engages her with this powerful logic:

Some of these trees were around before Jesus was born. We’ve already taken ninety-seven percent of the old ones. Couldn’t we find a way to keep the last three percent?

They join the growing movement of activists trying to stop the rush of timber companies in Oregon trying to harvest all the big, old redwoods and Douglas firs before a law is passed to restrict the harvest. At first non-violent civil disobedience prevails. Nick and Olivia do things like chaining themselves with others to block harvest equipment passage on logging roads. The next step is ‘tree sitting’, which puts them together for months on a platform in the canopy of a fir more than 300 years old. The efforts of Powers to capture such an experience was a high point for me in the book. A lovely example of the convergence of character stories comes when they read a book together during their vigil called “The Secret Forest”. Written by Patricia, it begins:

You and the tree in your back yard came 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 share a quarter of your genes.

While a forest ranger, Patricia encounters botanists at a field station who tell her that ten years after her research discoveries were discounted it was finally validated and serves as a major inspiration to them. She gets a chance to join them and expand upon her work on airborne signaling to underground communication between trees through fungal filament network in the soil linking their roots. The “mycorrhizal” networks represent a symbiosis based on the fungus providing the trees mineral nutrients from the soil and trees in exchange providing them glucose. Through the network a large tree can send water and nutrients to nurture vulnerable saplings, and a dying tree can bestow its resources to healthy survivors. The activists gather in the message that trees form a cooperative network that bears some resemblance to an intelligent community of communicating individuals. In the case of a grove of aspens, the individual trunks one sees turns out to be genetically identical offshoots from a common root mass which could be thousands of years old.

From the foregoing, you can get the picture on how all the tree-hugger elements of the tale are tempered with a lot of real science for a foundation. The character of Adam plays an interesting role for bridging this divide. He joins Nick and Olivia during their tree-sitting to interview them for his thesis research, which aims to investigate the foundations of tribal biasing of human thinking toward irrational beliefs, such as that of trees being intelligent and deserving of legal rights. The more Adam comes to experience what Nick and Olivia are up to compared to the intransigent greed of the logging industry, the more he respects them. Their opponents display stickers like these on their vehicles:

Loggers: The Real endangered Species.
Earth First! We’ll log the other planets later.

Adam gets even more radicalized from the dangerous and brutal tactics to complete the logging of the tract and, finally, the tree they are protecting. Some of the tragedy we experience in the downing of the Tree of Life in the movie “Avatar” comes through to him. Soon after their release from arrest for their crimes, Adam joins the couple in their escalation toward more active and criminal resistance, such as destroying loggers’ equipment. A disastrous outcome from one such initiative sends Adam into hiding and pursuit of a quiet academic life.

So far I’ve talked only about four characters. Among the five other characters, another man and woman have their own critical tree experiences that ends up putting them on the path toward activism in the Northwest. The others are very different. There is an urban couple who work at a legal office and do amateur theater with only limited intersections with trees. But eventually they get interested in gardening, and, in compassion for the deforestation problem, adopt the practical antidote of letting their back yard go wild, neighbors and municipal authorities be damned. And just maybe they can imagine some effective legal arguments to support the rights of a forest. The final character, the son of an Indian electronics engineer, becomes paraplegic from a fall from a maple tree planted in honor of his birth. He has the gumption and skill to succeed in life as a computer programmer, and from his heart designs a role-playing computer game that puts a lot of heroes out of Hindu mythology in the context of a forest world that emulates a lot of global ecology. By this means he sensitizes millions toward a mindset of problem-solving ecological issues. These are all vibrant characters and round out the others I highlighted.

This novel surprised me on almost every page with special ways of looking at our human lives in relation to our poor stewardship of forest resources. The flights of science, poetry, politics, and mythology never intrude as discursive or self-indulgent elements in the narrative, but they always emerge naturally from the human stories portrayed. I feel ashamed to have accumulated so many books by Powers over the years without reading one until now.

Related readings to consider
Personally, this book was a perfect fit with other books read in recent years, including these that I can recommend:

--Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, by Robert Pogue Harrison—a tour of cultural history and mythology about forests as a sites for human quests, refuge, or spiritual transformation
--My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir—a naturalist’s portrayal of his hikes in these California mountains, including his poetic and spiritual reactions to his first encounters with the ancient, giant redwoods and sequoias (free audio version at Librivox)
--The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey—satirical, semi-autobiographical take on a set of colorful characters engaged in radical activism against deforestation
--Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren—entertaining and educational autobiography of an ecological scientist, including some forays into the field of tree communication via fungal networks
--The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson—masterful synthesis of biodiversity and species interdependency in ecosystems and scope of the current threat, with a focus on forests and jungles

Value added reading:
--Do Trees Talk to Each Other?, by Richard Grant; Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018--review of Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate”
--Nature's Internet: How Trees Talk to Each Other in a Healthy Forest, by Suzanne Simard. Youtube video of TED Talk, July 2016
--Why Should Trees Have Legal Rights? by Maria Banda; Globe and Mail, June 1, 2018
--Branching Out, by John Gorka, 1987; YouTube video--whimsical song about becoming a tree which is "gonna reach, gonna reach for the sky, gonna reach until I know why"