I came to this one, a Pulitzer prize winner, from various recommendations: friends, podcasts, and a quote from President Obama who said "it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it". I can see why, it did the same thing to me.
In this book Powers has given to the climate movement the greatest gift an artist can give: inspiration for the cause. He's quite transparent about what he's doing:
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
“Yes! And what do all good stories do?” There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
The setting where I was reading this book contributed to its ability to have a significant effect on me. We were staying in the forest near La Push, WA on the Olympic Peninsula, and hiking in the temperate rainforests of Olympic National Park: home to the densest biomass on earth.
Completely surrounding the national park are huge swaths of clear cutting, usually deliberately hidden with thin green strips from the major freeways traveled by tourists, so as to avoid igniting any inconvenient anti-forestry sentiment. Clear cuts are a private destruction whose only evidence is a parade of logging trucks and massive lumber mills. Driving past the logging trucks made us sad an angry. Take a look at the satellite view and you'll see brown/grey patches of clear cuts everywhere that isn't national park.
The Northwest has more miles of logging road than public highway. More miles of logging road than streams. The country has enough to circle the Earth a dozen times. The cost of cutting them is tax-deductible, and the branches are growing faster than ever, as if spring has just sprung.
I also recently learned that Frank Herbert drew inspiration for Dune and the once verdant but now sand-covered planet of Arrakis from time spent with the Quileute Nation of La Push and learning of ecological destruction in the region.
The Overstory speaks the language of the pacific northwest: hemlock, sitka, doug, and western red. It's something I feel in my bones now having lived, run, hiked, and biked in these forests for years. Our dougs are throwing their mouse-tailed cones at our roof and dropping them in among the kinnikinnick that foams over our front yard as I write this.
...the drooping females with their mouse tails sticking out from the coil of scales, a look he finds dearer than his own life.
...secret congregations of salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, snowberry, devil’s club, ocean spray, and kinnikinnick. Great straight conifer monoliths fifteen stories high and a car-length thick hold a roof above all.
Before I moved to the temperate rainforests of cascadia ("THE FREE BIOREGION OF CASCADIA"), I lived for years in mountain view, home to the character Babul Mehta, and another area that features prominently in the book.
Outside, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the ghosts of almond, cherry, pear, walnut, plum, and apricot trees spread for miles in every direction, trees only recently sacrificed to silicon.
Descriptions of driving up sand hill road to skyline and seeing the massive redwoods at Big Basin brought back many memories of biking and camping in those woods. That's all a very long way to say that this book was definitely up my alley.
I was surprised to find it really tough going in the beginning though. And that's mostly due to the high number of different POVs (nine) that are used to tell the story. Keeping track of who they all were was a bit of a struggle, and even though I figured the stories would start converging at some point it was hard to care about so many different disconnected characters.
Powers is trying to do exactly as the text states: motivate us to action with a good story. And he's targeting the widest possible us: you're an immigrant who can't vote? someone without the physical ability to chain yourself to a tree or even really get to a forest? a struggling artist with no money? a young undergraduate scientist with no publications? No problem. You all have things you can do to protect the environment. You need to start by knowing we're pointed in the wrong direction and do something.
No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.
If nothing else stays with me from this book it will be the knowledge of massive interconnectedness of forests through the astonishing work of Suzanne Simard whose biography shapes one of the major characters. Dying trees giving nutrients to their neighbors, warning of insect attacks through the mycelium network, and inter-species nutrient sharing are all things I'd never really considered before.
Some spoilers ahead.
The book has a certain fatalism and realism. The characters try a lot of things: building computer games that give people a way to explore and connect with the natural world, replanting old growth with weak monoculture forests, chaining themselves to trees, protests, living in a tree canopy to prevent mother trees being logged, blowing up logging equipment, considering public suicide as a protest. Everything fails. The giants die. The activists get pepper sprayed, tazed, and go to prison.
During the blowing-up-equipment section I thought Powers might end up documenting, and semi-advocating for, a guerrilla war against the destruction of trees. But he swerves away from both that and also a sad on-camera form of green matyrdom. If you're hoping to find a 3-step action plan for environmentalism, you'll be disappointed, this is fiction after all.
I found the resolution of the nine different stories somewhat unfulfilling for all the investment, they don't all exactly converge. But it was really brutally realistic.
“We accomplished nothing,” Adam says. “Not one thing.”
Ultimately I think Powers is telling us it's going to be messy, but we need to get involved. High school students will undoubtedly be studying this one for years.
It's a difficult read, I definitely wasn't enjoying it in the beginning. And I suspect that with less plot threads, more unification of threads and a more memorable ending it would have been 5 stars. But any book that permanently changes my view of the world needs at least:
4.5 stars.
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