What Will Save the World
Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers (USA: W.W. Norton, 2018)
by Dhanya Lingesh
Richard Powers’ The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, surges beyond the dense canopy of published ecocritical literary fiction to bring readers a new and refreshing perspective. Refusing to romanticize nature or frolic among daffodils, newer ecocritical fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century attempts to give a realistic understanding of the social and political issues that impact our environment. Eradicating human blindness, promoting both biological and cultural diversity, and buttressing ecological redress are the emergencies that Powers urges readers to recognize. Trees are used, beautifully, as an extended metaphor throughout his novel to band together nine—yes, nine—individuals on a journey that ends with them developing a new, higher rationality about the ecological issues of our time.
The novel begins with eight chapters that introduce the many, initially isolated, key players. The first of these is Nick Hoel. A descendant of Norwegian immigrants who settled in Iowa in the 19th century and started a farm, Nick is the last standing member of his family. His only companion is an American Chestnut tree that his ancestor planted over three-quarters of a century ago. The next story involves Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who escapes the fall of communism in China by travelling to America. Mimi’s father plants a mulberry tree for each of his three daughters. Then comes psychologist Adam Appich, who grows from curious child, inspecting the patterns of ants in his backyard, to a rather jaded adult, who can only see humanity’s faults. “Human kind is deeply ill,” he says, “the species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.” Powers’ ability to weave in these insights throughout the novel is impressive. His language is beautifully poetic, and he dispenses his lessons without being excessively overt.
Vietnam War veteran and pilot Douglas ‘Douggie’ Pavlicek owes his life to the tree that intercepts his fall when he is shot down from a military plane, while intellectual-property lawyer Ray Brinkman and his eventual wife, Dorothy Cazaly, build a garden in their backyard after Ray suffers from a stroke. Neelay Mehta, the son of an Indian immigrant Silicon Valley engineer, who is crippled in his youth after falling out of a tree, becomes a computer genius, creating online games that take over the world. Powers’ depiction of these various characters is admirable. He has done his research about Chinese and Indian cultures, for instance, to be able to portray these characters with some cultural integrity. His reference to Chinese mooncakes or the cultural stigma that “Shame, for Indians, is worse than death,” for example, are the fruits of his findings.
The lives of these diverse individuals, though disparate at first, are linked together just as seemingly solitary trees are in fact part of a greater network. This parallel begins with Dr. Patricia Westerford, a plant ecologist whose research and theory rests on the assumption that trees can indeed communicate. “Trees are social creatures,” she says as she listens to what other people call ‘silence’. Later, the narrative rephrases this insight: “Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.” Dr. Pat is joined by another strong female character, Olivia Vandergriff, a druggy college student who in an alcoholic stupor, fortuitously it would seem, electrocutes herself. Spared an early death, she is ‘reborn’ with a new ability to hear the voices of the trees, introducing a strain of magic-realism into Powers’ predominantly realist text. These astonishing and incredibly vivid life stories draw the reader’s attention to the interconnections between the different characters. They become the understory to the great branching epic that Powers ambitiously designs to re-educate us.
One of the more vivid introductions to ecological damage that touched me particularly was Douggie’s realization that the sublime forests that he drives by are in fact a mirage:
He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road, and peers through the woods on the other side … The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.
Douggie realizes here that these perfectly replanted trees serve only to distract from the reality of corporate mass logging. Behind this parade of trees, deforestation has caused irrecoverable damage. Even if trees are replanted, primary forests can never regrow with the same original diversity. Douggie sets about replanting as many trees as he can, but quickly comes up against a barrier that many eco-conscious individuals today similarly realize. One person’s efforts—to reuse plastic bags, to refrain from purchasing single-use plastic, to recycle paper, to consume less, and in Douggie’s case, to engage single-handedly in plant propagation—will never be enough to make a change, when set against the relentless and indiscriminate destruction wrought by transnational corporations. It is for this reason that, in a manner reminiscent of Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), these isolated eco-conscious activists must come together to make a loud and strong enough non-violent assault on these corporations.
In his theoretical work The Humanities in the Age of Loneliness, Professor Robert D. Newman reintroduces E. O. Wilson’s notion of the Eremocene, or the ‘Age of Loneliness’ as an alternative to the term Anthropocene. The latter is an appellation for the current geological age in which humans themselves have become a kind of geological force, enacting irrecoverable damage to the environment in their desire to reap the profits and comforts that capitalism affords. According to Newman, the Eremocene (eremo coming from the Greek word for lonely or bereft) refers to “both the rapid decline of biodiversity on our planet, and the fact that humans, while increasing their proportion of and dominance over the Earth’s population, suffer a consequent isolation, commanding the Earth while eradicating its complexity, diversity, and natural beauty.”
It is this reality that Powers envisions in his fictional work. In a recent interview with the Chicago Review of Books, he said that “the causes of our estrangement from our “local habitation” may run even deeper than our runaway mobility. There’s something in the levelling tsunami of commodity individualism that works hard to make all places interchangeable. At the same time, we are migrating farther and farther into digital, virtual place.” In other words, it is not necessarily globalization and faster travel that has caused our isolation, but the fact that we, as human beings, have lost touch with ourselves, others, and the natural environment through our intensifying greed for more. The Overstory attempts to surmount the cultural norms that propagate this human isolation and instead promote a more holistic, hopeful, and cooperative way of life that respectfully incorporates the more-than-human world.
The next portion of the novel features some of these characters joining forces, seemingly coincidentally, to engage in various ecological crusades. Olivia Vandergriff, led by the voices she hears, meets Nick Hoel who joins her in her quest to save the trees:
“They aren’t even they,” Olivia says of the voices in her head. They’re part of her, kin in some way that isn’t clear. Emissaries of creation – things she had seen and known in this world, experiences lost, bits of knowledge ignored, family branches lopped off that she must recover and revive. Dying has given her new eyes.
Her rebirth, coupled with the uncanny voices of the trees, re-educates her. She now recognizes the previous state of isolation she was mired in. No longer needing to numb herself with alcohol, she participates in a tree-hugging protest, as when the women of the Chipko Movement in India hugged trees to prevent deforestation in the 1970s. She and Nick make camp in an enormous redwood tree known as Mimas for over a year to prevent it from being cut down. It is this portion of the novel that touched me particularly. Powers masterfully parallels the budding romance between Nick and Olivia to the growing might of their non-violent ecological movement.
Yet, despite their efforts, the inevitable occurs. Mimas is unceremoniously truncated by loggers and the activists go on the offensive. It is from this point onward that rather over-dramatic climaxes occur in quick succession. Olivia is killed in an accident, Adam get arrested many years later for his culpability in her death, Dr. Pat commits suicide, and Ray and Dorothy’s marriage fail. It is all very sudden and quick when juxtaposed against the longevity of the trees that Powers stresses throughout the novel. When Adam is given two consecutive life sentences, he considers the penalty disgracefully paltry: “The lenience shocks him. He thinks: Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak.” Even when forcibly isolated by the law, Adam still manages to find a connection to the trees. His sacrifice promises renewed attention to the more-than-human world, particularly when his last words to the court are “Soon, we’ll know if we were right or wrong.”
What Adam realizes is that our institutionalized rationality is the cause of our climate’s destruction: “reason is what’s turning all the forests into rectangles.” However, it is reason of a particular social kind.
Again and again, [...] Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy […] What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.
This desire for mastery is also explained and excoriated in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1992). In that novel, humanity is split between two camps: the Takers and the Leavers. The Takers think that they know “one right way” to live and so consider themselves gods. “Wielding the knowledge of good and evil,” Ishmael says, “we have made ourselves the masters of the world, and the gods have no power over us.” This knowledge, however, does not translate to wisdom. In our blind adherence to the stories that capitalism and commodified culture propagate, we allow ourselves to be distracted and tricked, like Douggie, into following other blind people down a path of ecological and social turmoil.
The purpose of The Overstory is to lead blind people into the light, where they can see each other and work as a collective to embrace and protect all that nature has to offer.
“Yes, and what do good stories do?” a friend asks Neelay.
“They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
It is this rebirth that Powers encourages. New insight and a new form of higher rationality, freed from the story of capitalism, is what will, quite literally, save the world.
Dhanya Lingesh is a current Master's student in English Literature at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University with a research focus on ecocriticism.