Trees!

We're talking trees in Environmental Ethics today. One of my favorite authors, Richard Powers, has made himself an authority on the subject by writing the excellent 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. We're treated to an excerpt, at the end of Paul Hawken's "Forests" chapter in Regeneration.

The title is a clever play on the botanical and literary dimensions of the word. "An overstory," says our verbose verbal authority Merriam, "is the top foliage from multiple trees that combine to create an overhang or canopy under which people can walk or sit."  

And an overstory is a fable, or complex of connected fables, intended to create an understanding of one's place in a larger narrative. “The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” 

Philosophers generally hesitate to go all in on that concession, holding out for more receptive listeners and (if we're very lucky) readers willing to follow the argument and even sometimes let it upend treasured convictions. But it's generally true, I think we've observed especially lately, that opposing arguments tend to amplify rather than deconstruct partisan intransigence.

So it's wonderful that Powers and others (including KSR, next on our reading list) have created such a fine and growing body of work in the category known as cli-fi. Time before last this course was focused on that genre, maybe it'll be time to do it again in 2024.

Barbara Kingsolver, former working biologist, is one of the masters of clif-fi with titles like Flight Behavior and Unsheltered. Of The Overstory she said:

Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their livelihoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their children. They breathe, eat and have sex. They give gifts, communicate, learn, remember and record the important events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees — to name one example — with rapid response networks to alert others to a threatening intruder. They manage their resources in bank accounts, using past market trends to predict future needs. They mine and farm the land, and sometimes move their families across great distances for better opportunities. Some of this might take centuries, but for a creature with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must surely have a different feel about it.

And for all that, trees are things to us, good for tables, floors and ceiling beams: As much as we might admire them, we’re still happy to walk on their hearts. It may register as a shock, then, that trees have lives so much like our own. All the behaviors described above have been studied and documented by scientists who carefully avoid the word “behavior” and other anthropomorphic language, lest they be accused of having emotional attachments to their subjects.

The novelist suffers no such injunction, but most of them don’t know beans about botany. Richard Powers is the exception, and his monumental novel “The Overstory” accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.

And then we're introduced to

an odd little girl who loves trees more than she loves most people and grows up to be a scientist. As Dr. Pat Westerford she spends years alone in forests doing her research, initially mocked by her peers but eventually celebrated for an astounding (and actually real) discovery: A forest’s trees are all communicating, all the time, via a nuanced chemical language transmitted from root to root.

And that's where our excerpt comes in. Dr. Westerford is based on a real person, Suzanne Simard, who told The Long Now Foundation and TED that the forests are abuzz with their own kind of talk whether anyone's there to hear it or not, that "trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support." They're nature's true Internet.

 

Another of my favorite authors, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, tried his hand at fiction and mostly avoided talking about it (Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, 2017) when he sat down with Powers in California. But they had a great conversation that echoes resonantly for us Wendell Berry fans, especially when they distinguish commodity-driven culture from a community-based state of mind. 

 

Kingsolver is right, The Overstory "is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children." 

Renkl is right, such masterfully crafted fiction is "a lie that teaches us the truth."

All we need now is a new generation of readers who'll value and insist on the truth. And who'll vote and act on it.

 

Additional reading recommendation: You'll want to pick up Bewilderment next, a story about life in the universe and especially its future on earth... and about a brilliant little boy who

loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

We really do need more like him.