Richard Powers
The Overstory
Itook a job as a professor in the English department at Stanford University, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. It’s an intense place with an insane amount of money flowing through it: the global HQs for Google, Apple, Intel, HP, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Yahoo, Tesla and all kinds of other worldchanging companies. The feel of the Valley is a little like science fiction at its most utopian.
Just to the west run the Santa Cruz mountains, full of regrowing redwood forests that were cut down to build and rebuild San Francisco. I loved to hike up and disappear into this ghostly remnant of America’s past, whenever the future became a little more than I could bear.
Walking underneath the Santa Cruz regrowth, intoxicated by the look and smells of those cloister-like forests I forgot that the enormous creatures above me were mostly youngsters. One day, I came across a truly old one which, for whatever accidents of history, had never been cut. It was like seeing a blue whale swimming among a pod of dolphins. I had trouble believing what I was looking at: a single living thing wider than a house, taller than a football pitch is long, and almost as old as Christianity.
I began to realise what these forests must have been like before they were cut. A tremendous reservoir of natural capital - engines of creation and endless diversity -had been sacrificed in the building of what would become San Francisco, and by extension, Stanford and Silicon Valley. Though some part of a forest had grown back, something much larger, richer and more complex had been lost.
When I came back down to the Valley after seeing the Methuselah tree, life changed for me. I became obsessed with reading everything about trees and forests that I could lay my hands on. It stunned me to discover that, of the four immense original forests that had covered America before the Europeans arrived, roughly 98 per cent had been cut down. Then I learned that ancient California redwoods, not to mention other centuries-old trees in the few remaining acres of America’s old-growth forests, were still being cut down to fuel whatever it is that we’re trying to become next. The late stages of a great and largely ignored drama were playing out in a way that I had never seen treated in literary fiction. I’d written 11 novels myself and had never taken Earth’s 3 trillion trees seriously as an essential part of who we are.
My novel came together quickly after that, as if the pieces had all been there for a long time, waiting to be assembled into a narrative whole. The human characters were composites of people I’ve known and people I’d read about: nine protagonists who, for various reasons, achieve tree consciousness or have it thrust upon them. They each get caught up in the war between humans and non-humans, the struggle for destiny that we mistakenly believe was decided a long time ago. Once you begin to see trees, they start to reveal themselves as creatures with agency and intention, with intricate behaviour and intrinsic meaning. Recent research over the last several decades has discovered that trees are in fact immensely social beings, communicating with each other both over the air and through underground fungal networks. And we humans have always been part of those networks, changed by, changing, and dependent on them. We’ve become what we are by virtue of what trees have allowed us to be.