Lisa's Reviews > The Overstory

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils! Cheers, my friends on our shared planet!

I sit in silence, holding the paperback copy of The Overstory in my hands, thinking of trees.

Wondering which trees grew to become the books on my shelves. Wondering which ones became the cherry tree desk my grandfather made for me. Wondering how old the oak trees were that turned into the logs that made it into my wooden house, to turn into beloved bookshelves. I wonder at the kind of trees that frame my paintings. That give my brushes shape. I even have jewellery made of wood. And Swedish butter knives. And art.

My fence is made of wood, and my garden holds an oak tree, an acorn, three apple trees, plum trees, three cherry trees (plus a baby cherry trying to make it), AND my garden holds a three-year-old chestnut experiment.

My daughter and I collected chestnuts one autumn and put some of them into a corner of our garden. The following year, we saw a few single sticks with a leaf each coming out of the soil.

Then we had five or six leaves on each of the three tiny chestnut trees - growing in slow motion (human time perception). This year, I have already checked that they are still alive, and I can see there will be more leaves. Will they survive?

I don't know, but I took a picture, imagining while I did so that I was Nick, owner of a family's collected photographic memory of a chestnut tree planted where they usually do not grow. And I felt it made such perfect sense - my tiny gardening project connected to my vast reading life, growing side by side as long as I am around to think and feel.

"What do stories do?" This is what one character asks at a crossroads. "They kill us a bit and make us change."

And that is precisely what happened to me while I read The Overstory. Filled with the pain of the world's development in recent decades, I had grown ready for this book. I would not have had patience ten years ago to follow from roots over trunk to canopy and seeds the stories of people who see what others choose to ignore: that humanity is using up the resources of its own habitat at a speed that nature can't cope with, and that we are unlikely to stop the trend because stopping it means destroying our most cherished religion: the belief in growth and ownership. "We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling".

What to do if we see this happening, and if we don't want to see the world change from diversity to monoculture, from natural life to surviving in an adverse and hostile habitat? I am as guilty of what the psychologist character in the book calls the bystander effect as anyone else. I know we must change our ways to make our planet a sustainable home, but I am unable to break the patterns I was raised and taught to take for granted. Reducing meat intake and plane rides is not enough. We must learn to think beyond commercial benefit and growth of assets if we want to have a future that can remember us.

This book is amazing, like a Tree Of Life! It grew out of the need to verbalise the imminent threat to our species and its unique ability to LOVE nature in all its forms.

Read it. Pulitzer redeemed for as long as it takes a tree to grow!