But sometimes facts and figures just aren’t enough to move people. “Reason never convinced anyone. Only a good story can do that,” says Adam Appich in The Overstory, the 2019 Pulitzer prize winning novel by Richard Powers. And a good and moving story is exactly what Powers has planted. Drawing upon a wide array of inspiration including E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth, Peter Wollheben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest, the Overstory is, as Bill McKibben noted, “beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.” In short, The Overstory is an utterly unique and compelling book that will change you and how you see trees: Here are some seeds:
“A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”
“What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”
“She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.”
“A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”
“Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we’re near…when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you”
“Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.”
“You and the tree in your backyard come 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 still share a quarter of your genes. . . .”
Professor Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich co-authored a recent study estimating that reforestation could remove 205 billion metric tons of C02, roughly two-thirds of the total CO2 put out by us humans. Crowther stated “I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.” While there are a lot of logistical concerns (planting 1 trillion trees requires an area equal to the United States and China combined), trees are inexpensive to plant, can be implemented globally and have numerous additional benefits including increased biodiversity, erosion reduction and recreation opportunities.
