First impressions review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers
For the first 127 pages of this book, I thought its subtitle – ‘a novel’ – was inaccurate. What it seemed to be was a series of short stories with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous tree connections. An immigrant family travels west, carrying American chestnut seeds that take root and grow far from where the blight will strike. Adam, a probably-autistic boy, watches ants and obsesses over which trees his father chooses to plant to represent his siblings. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant tries to understand why her father killed himself under the mulberry tree in their backyard. Good, engaging stories, beautifully written, but not a novel. Then I hit Patricia Westerford.
Patricia is a partially deaf girl who discovers her love of plants through her agricultural extension agent father (yes, another dad - moms just fuss in the background in this book). As part of her graduate work, she starts collecting the gases given off by trees, and comes to the startling conclusion that the trees are sending each other messages to ramp up their defenses when they are attacked. That caught my attention, because it is a real research finding. So was Patricia also a real person1? Then on page 131, as Patricia stops to visit a giant grove of aspens that are all one genotype, a single huge living organism2, it says:
Across the road, where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin to Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping…The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson.
And I was like… “Wait. That’s Mimi Ma, the girl from the earlier story. But she hasn’t set fire to anything yet. So maybe these threads will connect.”
They start weaving together in earnest in the middle section of the book, simply called ‘trunk’. Olivia Vandergriff, who accidentally electrocuted herself in the last part of the first section (‘roots’), comes back to life feeling like she was sent back with a purpose…but she can’t remember what it is. It is something to do with trees, though. She finds herself following the path of Johnny Appleseed, then latching onto a story about the plight of the last redwood forests. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help. She meets up with Nick Hoel, the descendant of those immigrants who planted the chestnut, and whose own offspring photographed its growth for decades. It is dying now, though; the blight finally found it. The next two to connect are Mimi and Douglas Pavlicek – who has spent years replanting seedlings on clearcuts only to learn that that just gives the timber companies a license to cut more. They individually try and fail to save the pine grove outside Mimi’s office before joining up with the growing protests around old-growth Douglas-fir forest.
Meanwhile, Adam has been studying social psychology, and his advisor is trying to prod him to pick a thesis topic. He says: “We’re trapped. By social identity...”
His advisor responds: “Well, no. Clearly not, or in-group realignment would never happen…Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime…You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness…You’ve seen the news. People up and down this coast are risking their lives for plants…” Adam has seen the stories, but he ignored them. Now he can’t see why. “Plant rights? Plant personhood.” A boy he knew once jumped into a hole and risked live burial to protect his unborn brother’s sapling from harm. That boy is dead… “Are these people really appealing to a new, nonhuman moral order? Or are they just being sentimental about pretty green things?”
“Trunk” leaves all the characters at their lowest point; “Canopy” finds them again 5-15 years later, rebuilding their lives as they can. The one still working for conservation most directly is 60-year-old Patricia, who is building a seed bank3. The odd thing is that this part of the book doesn’t acknowledge that, at least in part, the protesters won. The logging scramble slowed, the last 5% of the old-growth redwoods are still there, and organizations like The Save The RedwoodsLeague are working to restore some of the damaged areas. The battle certainly isn’t over; There have been flare-ups recently due to bad fire seasons – which, no, are not caused by “lack of logging”, at least not of big trees4. And of course forests in the tropics are still very much imperiled. “Seeds” wraps things up on a semi-hopeful note. The book mostly derives hope from the idea that life finds a way, that trees of some sort will probably outlive humanity. That weird source of hope works for me too, sometimes. But Patricia’s last act comes over too pessimistic, to my mind, attributing the damage to “humans” rather than particular ways we have organized our society and culture. There are other ways of thinking available if we chose to draw on them.
The cast of
characters is diverse in ways that don’t always get reflected in fiction,
particularly neurodiversity and physical ability, which is great. But I wish it
were a bit less white. There are two Asian characters, but no one is Black or
Latino, reinforcing the misconception that those communities aren’t involved in
these types of struggles. Ironically, Patricia tells her audiences about Chico Mendez and Wangari Maathai but this book
doesn’t explain who they are or give us similar stories5. And, while
Native people get a line here or there, none are central characters, even
though they’ve been fighting for the land and water and a different way of
relating to them for longer than any of us – and continue to do so, as the
recent Standing Rock protests
illustrate. Also, Mimi’s bisexuality gets brought up multiple times, but the
story never does anything with it except to have a guy to think of it as
one of her exotic qualities (which is why I’m not tagging
it)6.
She even ends up
living in San Francisco’s Castro district, but…nada. It did make me think about
ACT UP, though, and wonder if
there was any crossover between these two lines of protest questioning which
lives were valued and the logic of neoliberal capitalism that treats people and
trees alike as commodities or as expendable. Probably not - I remember environmentalists of the time being very focused on the non-human; that is fortunately starting to change now, with swelling support for things like a Green New Deal, and even
the wilderness-focused Sierra Club getting engaged
in environmental justice issues.
The trees are really the starring characters in this for me – like Mimas, the ancient redwood Olivia and Nick camp out in that has a pond with salamanders and clumps of huckleberries growing up in its crown. The human characters are messy, mostly interesting people, and you definitely feel for them. But a few things bugged me. For instance, there are several male characters who are both attracted to and inspired by a particular woman for reasons that make sense, but you rarely get the same in reverse. That makes most of the women except Dot feel oddly sexless7, and in Dot’s case we get no indication of what it is she likes about the men she likes. Dot is also simultaneously a "can't tie me down"/"you don't own me" character and someone who feels broken and worthless for not being able to bear a biological child. I’ve never met anyone who combined both those qualities, and I suspect they are contradictory: There is nothing that more ties you to another person and saps your freedom than having a baby! Dot and her husband Ray never meet any of the other characters either, so felt disconnected from the story. The programmer Neelay Mehta is only marginally more connected to the main plot, but at least you see him taking inspiration from plants throughout his career.
Still, this book hit close to home for me. It took me back to my childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s: To climbing white pines in Indiana and magnolias in Florida, to weeping over a dogwood tree dying from stem borers and my elation when it resprouted from the roots. I wasn’t much for following the news back then, but I knew about the timber wars, and “save the whales” and “save the rainforest” and people sitting in redwoods to protect them were things that resonated with me. Ultimately, that’s what brought me to where I am today: studying forests and hoping my research will help us understand how to help them stay healthy and functional in a rapidly changing environment. Sometimes it is hard to stay optimistic. But I live in California now and we almost take for granted that of course the last of the ancient redwoods should be protected, that timber harvests should be smaller and more selective to aid natural re-seeding, and that western forests need natural fire8. Urban and suburban development is now more the threat, with climate change creeping up behind it, but still…it is good to be reminded that attitudes can change profoundly within half a human lifetime (which is no time at all to a tree), even if it is a fight to get there.
Overall recommendation: If you are someone who loves trees, you will probably enjoy at least half of this book. Whether you like the structure or the human characters will be more down to taste, but I definitely respect the unconventional storytelling approach. In a way, I might have preferred if this was about the real researchers and activists but emotionally descriptive like a novel – something like the way Erik Larson took the true story of the Chicago worlds’ fair and the serial killer that haunted it and made it feel like a thriller in ‘The devil in the white city’ (which is a book that definitely deserves a re-read review).
1. Well, no – she was evidently based on Suzanne Simard and Diana Beresford-Kroeger. See also ‘The hidden life of trees’.
2. Not named in the book, but probably meant to be Pando, which is probably the world’s largest living organism.
3. Though I have to note that my nitpicky forest scientist brain here goes: “Wait…a normal seedbank stuffed with tropical trees?” You can do that with pines or aspens easily, but many tropical trees have very large animal-dispersed seeds, and those don’t have long-term natural dormancy any more than oaks or chestnuts do – the seeds need to sprout within one year because they are such a nutrient bonanza that something is sure to devour them if they wait too long. However, there have been interesting advances recently in storing the frozen embryos of such species. It works just like with mammal embryos, only you don’t need a womb to bring them back to life – you can grow them in a test-tube.
4. It is the brushy undergrowth– dried out by increasingly hot summers - that provides the fuel if not removed by regular understory fire.
5. In brief, Chico was a Brazilian rubber-tapper who became a trade union leader and environmentalist who fought for the forests that sustained his livelihood; he was murdered by a rancher, but the idea of “extractive reserves” – where things such as rubber or fruit or Brazil nuts can be sustainably harvested – spread, and 13% of the Amazon is now designated as such. Wangari was a Kenyan activist who founded the Green Belt movement – which organizes rural women to plant trees and trains them in trades such as forestry and beekeeping - and was the first African woman to win a Nobel Prize.
6. To be clear, there doesn’t have to be a reason for a character to be queer; some people just are, just as some people have brown hair or green eyes. But anything you bring up about a character more than once usually has a purpose. Mimi’s background as the daughter of a refugee, for instance, plays into how she thinks and acts. But we never meet any of her girlfriends, and her sexual orientation doesn’t affect how she approaches the world or how it approaches her – which is weird, given the time period! A better example of an incidentally-queer character is Kanya in ‘The Windup Girl’. The way that Jaidee and his wife mention her former girlfriend shows us that – despite the other predjudices evident in this society – they don’t judge Kanya and, moreover, care about her happiness and well-being (and that relationship between Jaidee and Kanya is crucial to the story). Second, Kanya’s ex is a scientist, who is able to give her important information.
7. We know why Patricia likes her husband, but that relationhips might actually be meant to be asexual.
8. There's still some public debate on the latter points, but you’d be hard pressed to find foresters or ecologists or similar professionals who would disagree.
