Book review: The Overstory
Trees are the central characters of The Overstory, a novel that celebrates their beauty and diversity and mourns their demise as they fall prey to a relentless assault by humans.
Author Richard Powers tells the interwoven stories of nine men and women, to illustrate the devastation humanity has brought to forests and consequently, the planet. His message is that in our relentless pursuit of economic growth, we have come to a point where our future and that of the planet is threatened.
The first chapter of The Overstory is devoted to the American chestnut, a tree that was wiped out in the early twentieth century when a fungus arrived with ornamental chestnuts imported from Asia. Powers succinctly sums up the blight’s result, “America’s perfect tree, backbone of entire rural economies, the limber, durable redwood of the East… every fourth tree of a forest stretching two hundred million acres from Maine down to the Gulf is doomed.”
Like the mingling of tree roots, the human characters are connected to one another and the stories that Powers tells about their lives are as compelling as those of the trees. That is Power’s main point, trees and humans have so much in common and the tragedy is that as a species we fail to fully appreciate this.
Powers tells the story of the chestnut’s fate by paring it with a family of Norwegian immigrants who take six chestnut seeds with them as they move west into Iowa at the time of the American civil war. Powers provides a history of both the six seedlings and the immigrant family from the 1860s to the present day.
Other characters in the story include a wheelchair-bound programming genius, a Vietnam veteran, a psychologist and an artist. These characters and the others highlight the importance of trees in our lives and our failure to fully appreciate them. As one character says, “this is not a world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
Instead of viewing forests in purely economic terms we should see them as rich resources that have the ability to protect the planet from ecological disaster. This is summed up by Patricia, the tree expert, who is preparing notes for a conference on global warming, “She would tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance that sequesters carbon, cools the ground, scrubs the air and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free.”
The Overstory is a powerful, well-told story with a sobering message. One favourite take-away, “When you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.” Another is that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. Read this novel and you will want to get planting.
