NotitiesThe Overstory
Richard Powers
"The Overstory" by Richard Powers explores the interconnectedness of trees and humans, emphasizing the vital roles forests play in our ecosystem and the urgent need for environmental awareness. Through various characters and their relationships with nature, the narrative reveals how trees communicate, remember, and influence life on Earth. The book argues for a deeper understanding of our connection to the natural world and the importance of preserving it.
Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.—JAMES LOVELOCK (Location 18)
Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear. NICHOLAS HOEL (Location 42)
The work is brutal, but theirs. (Location 68)
But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring. (Location 161)
He was sure the idea would be a hard sell. Hoels were farmers, feed store owners, and farm equipment salesmen like his father, violently practical people grounded in the logic of land and driven to work long, relentless days, year after year, without ever asking why. (Location 297)
Outside, the cold dips well below bitter. (Location 328)
Charlotte gives up trying to control them. No one suspects yet, but she has already begun to slip into the long private place that each passing year will deepen. She sits in the front seat, navigating maps for her husband and humming Chopin nocturnes under her breath. Dementia starts here, in these days of quiet, automotive sainthood. (Location 581)
Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail. (Location 774)
Safe in the boys’ room at the top of the house, he asks Emmett, who’s eight—almost grown—“ What’s retarded?” “It means you’re a retard.” “What’s that?” “Not regular people.” And that’s okay, to Adam. There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world. (Location 778)
Plans in the absence of any planner. Paths in the absence of a surveyor. (Location 881)
Adam doesn’t get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets. He keeps his head down and keeps counting. (Location 892)
“You want proof?” Emmett reaches down, tears a handful of grass, and stuffs it in his brother’s mouth. Adam, impassive, spits it out. Emmett walks away, shaking his head in pity, victor in yet another one-sided debate. (Location 898)
High school is four dark years in the bunker. He’s not without friends or fun. In fact, there’s a surplus of both. Nights getting smashed and skinny-dipping in the reservoir above town. Entire weekends in basements pitching dice and arguing over esoteric role-playing rules with obese, anemic boy-men who tote suitcases full of collectible trading cards. (Location 940)
The book is so elegant that Adam kicks himself for not having seen the truth long before. Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. 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. (Location 999)
If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy. (Location 1027)
His earnestness is hypnotic, his commitment to fairness and stability. You’re profiting from something that belongs to someone else. The world can’t work that way. Almost always, the other side settles out of court. Dorothy’s prediction, for her part, is not exactly wrong. The bombs are indeed falling. But mid-sized bombs, all over the globe, small enough that nobody has to flee the planet, just yet. She, for one, keeps the day job, transcribing the words of people under oath as fast as they can speak. The secret is not to care what the words mean. Paying attention decimates your speed. (Location 1120)
Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. (Location 1321)
LOADMASTER PAVLICEK belly-flops through the blue, faultless air. The whoosh perplexes him. Disaster floats high above him in the cloud, no longer needing to be solved. He wants only to forgive the world, forget, and fall. The wind takes him where it will, halfway across Nakhon Ratchasima Province. As the earth rushes up to meet Douglas, he revives. He tries to steer the chute toward a rice terrace, topped with water and stippled in green bundles. But the toggles tangle, he overshoots, and in the mad collapse of the last hundred feet a sidearm strapped to his thigh discharges. The bullet enters below his kneecap, shatters his tibia, and tears out through the heel of his Leather Personnel Carriers. His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall. (Location 1333)
LIFE COUNTS DOWN. Nine years, six jobs, two aborted love affairs, three state license plates, two and a half tons of adequate beer, and one recurring nightmare. (Location 1374)
Douggie is aware that the behavior could appear somewhat eccentric, from the outside. But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value. In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof. (Location 1380)
A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible. (Location 1470)
They look so pitiful, his tiny Douglas-firs. Like pipe cleaners. Like props for a train set. From a distance, spread across these man-made meadows, they’re a crew cut on a balding man. But each weedy stem he puts into the dirt is a magic trick eons in the making. He rolls them out by the thousands, and he loves and trusts them as he would dearly love to trust his fellow men. (Location 1478)
“It’s a great idea, trees. So great that evolution keeps inventing it, again and again.” (Location 1881)
“We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.” (Location 1899)
Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking. (Location 1909)
She preaches this covert revolution to her undergrads. “You’ll look back in twenty years, amazed at what every smart person in forestry took to be self-evident truth. It’s the refrain of all good science: ‘ How could we not have seen? ’ ” She works well with her fellow grads. She goes to the barbecues and hootenannies and manages to take part in departmental gossip while remaining her own little sovereign state. (Location 2017)
The tedium makes her ecstatic. She calls it the science paradox. It’s the most brain-crushing work a person can do, yet it can spring the mind enough to see what else but the mind is really out there. (Location 2043)
Too many zeros: their eyes glaze over. She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe. “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.” (Location 2053)
She starts to examine sugar maples, in a forest east of town. Her breakthrough comes as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident. (Location 2070)
Confirmation comes the following spring. Three more trials, and she’s convinced. The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives. That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. (Location 2078)
She can’t quite let herself believe. But the data keep confirming. And on that evening when Patricia finally accepts what the measurements say, her limbs heat up and tears run down her face. For all she knows, she’s the first creature in the expanding adventure of life who has ever glimpsed this small but certain thing that evolution is up to. Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in. (Location 2084)
No other animal closes ranks faster than Homo sapiens. (Location 2110)
Her real life starts this night—a long, postmortem bonus round. Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself. Human estimation can no longer touch her. She’s free now to experiment. To discover anything. (Location 2130)
She reads Thoreau over wood fires at night. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? And: What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense ! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? (Location 2143)
These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future. (Location 2196)
Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. (Location 2205)
She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning. (Location 2213)
Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood. (Location 2221)
She walks in silence, crunching ten thousand invertebrates with every step, watching for tracks in a place where at least one of the native languages uses the same word for footprint and understanding. The earth gives beneath her like a shot mattress. (Location 2225)
Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. (Location 2250)
A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine. (Location 2302)
The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. . . . It will take years for the picture to emerge. There will be findings, unbelievable truths confirmed by a spreading worldwide web of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia, all happily swapping data through faster and better channels. Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. (Location 2361)
She turns the corner onto Cedar in the half dark. Other students, stumbling under the weight of their own backpacks, have beaten trails through the snow, clumping around the first walker’s mostly terrible guesses. (Location 2423)
It’s like watching a zoo animal circle its cage. For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body’s most private moments, something else joins in. (Location 2564)
Her housemates return in the new year. They treat her like she’s ill. They’re afraid of her, now that her bitchiness has vanished. She sits in the kitchen while people around her joke and get smashed and try to ignore the ghost at the table. It amazes her that she has never felt their sadness or noticed their distress. Incredibly, they still believe in safety. They live as if a shim and some duct tape might hold them together. They have become vulnerable in her eyes, and infinitely dear. (Location 2593)
Her mind has nothing even faintly resembling a plan. But she remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow. Once the nuns made every student memorize a Bible passage; she chose that one to irritate the teacher, who was big on personal responsibility. She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. A gust of remorse passes through her as she drives. I’m missing Statistical Inference. Fitting. (Location 2612)
It’s hard to pray and drive at the same time. (Location 2619)
She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions. (Location 2631)
Dawn-pinked snow coats the fields. Across the western sky, pewter clouds begin to lighten, and somewhere beneath them lies life’s moment. (Location 2680)
Olivia can’t help smiling: the life her father begs her to return to—the drugs, the unprotected sex, the psycho parties and life-threatening dares—is hell itself, while this trip westward is bringing her back from the dead. (Location 2786)
Something comes over her, strange and beautiful courage. She has no resources, only a name for a destination, and no real clue about what she must do once there. Outside the car, it’s bleak and arctic, and all her worldly possessions are back in her rooming house. Yet she has a bank card linked to a small war chest, a sense of destiny that won’t quit, and friends in what she can only assume are very high places. (Location 2811)
“How do you live?” The man grins and tips his head. “You’re making a big assumption.” (Location 2874)
“I don’t feel crazy. That’s the weird thing. I was crazy before. I know what crazy feels like. This all feels . . . I don’t know. Like I’m finally seeing the obvious.” She cups her hands over the hot teacup. (Location 2909)
“It’s amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.” (Location 2928)
A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name. (Location 3008)
He needs to walk. Walking: the only sane thing left. (Location 3088)
If memories change the pathways of the brain, then the trail must still be there. It’s just a matter of waiting for the wild things to emerge out of the understory. (Location 3231)
For a hundred yards of trail, he’s fine. Then his left tire hits a wet declivity and slips. He guns the joystick, trying to power through. He backs up and spins, hoping to pop out laterally. The tire kicks up mud and digs in. (Location 3236)
They learn about a volunteer encampment in the muddy fields of a sympathetic retired fisherman, not far from Solace. The bivouac swarms with more activity than coherence. Quick young people, loud in their devotion, call across the tent-dotted meadow. Their noses, ears, and eyebrows flash with hardware. Dreadlocks tangle in the fibers of their multicolored garb. They stink of soil, sweat, idealism, patchouli oil, and the sweet sinsemilla grown all through these woods. Some stay for two days. Some, judging from their microflora, have been in this base camp for more than a few seasons. (Location 3505)
PATRICIA WESTERFORD sits on her ladder-backed chair at the pine farmhouse table, pen in the air, taking dictation from the insects. (Location 3601)
How willows clean soils of dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals. (Location 3610)
She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make. Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . . There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. (Location 3611)
Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees. (Location 3620)
She’d sooner retire again than inflict on these beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public. Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone. But this millstone book: She’s sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press. And she’ll never earn out what her publisher has already paid. All winter long she has struggled with how to tell a stranger everything she knows. The months have been hell, but paradise, too. Soon enough, the hellish paradise will end. (Location 3631)
The spruces near the cabin wave spooky prophecies under the near-full moon. (Location 3638)
She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for. (Location 3641)
She finds the trail and ducks beneath her beloved Pseudotsuga. A path cuts under the spires lit by late winter’s moon, a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural. (Location 3643)
The many uncataloged volatile compounds breathed out by needles at night slow her heart rate, soften her breathing, and, if she’s right, even alter her mood and thoughts. So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. (Location 3645)
let a little light into that swamp. Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky. (Location 3653)
Fungi mine stone to supply their trees with minerals. They hunt springtails, which they feed to their hosts. Trees, for their part, store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded. A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive. Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees. (Location 3657)
It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love. (Location 3662)
IN THE MORNING, she splashes cold water on her face, makes a flax-berry slurry, drinks it while reading yesterday’s pages, then sits at the pine table, vowing not to stand up until she has a paragraph worthy of showing Dennis at lunch. (Location 3664)
But hope and truth do nothing for humans, without use. (Location 3675)
She remembers the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. (Location 3677)
But graphics have never meant much to Neelay. The visible is only a placeholder for real desire. (Location 3744)
“While I’m in the game, I feel I have a goal. Always something more to do.” Yes, oh, yes, Neelay wants to tell him. Safe and comprehensible, with no swamps of ambiguity to suck you down, no human-on-human darkness, and your own will receives its rightful land. Call it meaning. “I think a lot of people feel more at home, in there. Than they do out here.” (Location 3778)
“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it. (Location 3869)
Righteousness makes Mimi nuts. She has always been allergic to people with conviction. But more than she hates conviction, she hates sneaky power. (Location 4000)
They hike through dense spruce for the length of three choruses. Trunks slice the sunlight into shards. (Location 4004)
RAY NIBBLES ON DINNER—pistachios and an apple. Reading is slow, and all things distract him. Staring at the bottom of the apple’s core, he realizes that the calyx—a word he’ll never know in this life—is nothing less than the leftover bits of a withered apple flower. He looks up from the thicket of words three times a minute, waiting for truth to hit like a falling oak smashing through the house’s roof. Nothing comes to kill him. Nothing at all happens, and it keeps on happening with great force and patience. (Location 4150)
The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time. (Location 4164)
It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them. (Location 4171)
He has only this essay to keep him company and torture him. (Location 4176)
What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance? The essay flickers under his fingers. He can’t follow it, can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or rubbish. His whole self is dissolving. (Location 4176)
At the light at Snelling, she looks up into the rearview mirror and sees her eyes hiding from her own furtive glance. (Location 4184)
I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps. (Location 4202)
Nick slips off his backpack, floats weightless for a few steps. (Location 4238)
People need things from her. People mistake her for someone else. People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world. (Location 4303)
Weeks of steady rain have turned the trail to Turkish coffee. (Location 4316)
The weight of the pack and the foot-sucking muck pull him down until every step is a pole vault. He stops to catch his breath, and the sleety air goes through him. Up ahead, Maidenhair forges on like some mythic beast. Power rises into her feet from the needle-bedded ground. Each mud-coated plunge renews her. She’s dancing. Cowardice adds several stones to Nick’s pack. He doesn’t want to get arrested. He’s not crazy about heights. He has only love to drive him up the cliff face. She’s fueled by the need to save everything alive. (Location 4318)
The tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. From underneath, it could be Yggdrasil, the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. (Location 4330)
Sitting still and looking: their new job description. (Location 4436)
Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all. Just crossing the nine-foot platform is a national epic. More time passes. A tenth of an eternity. Two-tenths. When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. “I never knew how strong a drug other people are.” (Location 4464)
But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now. (Location 4658)
“It’s your life’s work. You can’t walk away now.” “It’s not my life’s work. My life’s work is listening to trees!” “No. That’s your life’s play. The work part is telling people what they’re saying.” (Location 4672)
“Then why doesn’t the market respond?” Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite. (Location 4732)
“We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .” She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too. (Location 4830)
He surrenders to the rage as this tree has done, through a millennium of killer storms. As sempervirens has done for a hundred and eighty million years. Yes, a storm topped this tree, centuries ago. Yes, storms will bring down trees this size. But not tonight. Not likely. Tonight, the top of a redwood is as safe a spot in this gale as any. Just bend and ride. (Location 4945)
“I feel miserable. I want to hurt those cops.” She squeezes his hand in time to the swaying hemlocks. “People. So much pain.” THEY PACK the dirty dishes into his truck for the ride back to town. She grabs him at the car door. “I’m a rich woman, right?” “Not rich enough to run for public office, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She laughs too hard for the joke, and sobers too quickly. “In situ preservation is failing. And I see now it always will.” He looks at her and waits. She thinks: If the rest of the species were as comfortable with looking and waiting as this man, we might yet be saved. “I want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees in the world as there were before we came down out of them.” “Because of us?” “One percent of the world forest, every decade. An area larger than Connecticut, every year.” He nods, as if no one paying attention would be surprised. “A third to a half of existing species may go extinct by the time I’m gone.” Her words puzzle him. She’s going somewhere? “Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we’ve barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once.” “You want to start an ark.” She smiles at the word, but shrugs. It’s as good as any. “I want to start an ark.” “Where you can keep . . .” The strangeness of the idea gets him. A vault to store a few hundred million years of tinkering. Hand on the car door, he fixes on something high up in a cedar. “What . . . would you do with them? When would they ever . . . ?” “Den, I don’t know. But a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.” (Location 5100)
He sits in his vehicle in the roadhouse parking lot, working his unplanned plan. (Location 5273)
“Skyline yarder. A couple of grappler Cats. We could be sealed off by tomorrow.” He looks at Adam. “You may want to ask whatever you want to ask, then head back down tonight.” “Or join us,” Maidenhair says. “We’ll put you up in the guest room.” Adam can’t answer. His head is still crushing him. Breathing makes him ill. He just wants to be back in Santa Cruz, analyzing the data from his questionnaires and drawing dubious conclusions from ironclad statistics. (Location 5323)
Maidenhair’s smile makes Adam feel fraudulent. She’s years younger than he is, but decades more certain. (Location 5348)
Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.” Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand. (Location 5370)
“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking. “Is the house on fire?” A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.” “And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.” A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . .” “. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?” (Location 5384)
Maidenhair taps the questionnaire. “I suppose you have your answer now. About the psychology of world-savers?” Watchman touches her shoulder. “What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?” (Location 5404)
“Well, okay, then. Can we study you?” A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world. Adam puts out his hands to steady himself and touches only a swaying twig. Held high up above the vanishingly distant surface by a creature who should want him dead. His brain spins. The tree has drugged him. He’s twirling again by a cord the width of a vine. He fixes on the woman’s face as if some last desperate act of personality-reading might still protect him. “What . . . ? What are they saying? The trees?” She tries to tell him. (Location 5408)
Sounds at all distances, a thousand volumes, mezzo and softer. There’s a bird Adam can’t name, beating its wings on the blackness. (Location 5439)
IN JAIL, fitful in his upper bunk, Adam sees great redwoods explode like rockets on their launchpads. His research is intact—all the precious questionnaire data gathered over months—but he is not. (Location 5503)
ADAM CARRIES the curse back to Santa Cruz. For weeks he works up his data. Almost two hundred people have answered the 240 questions of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. They’ve also completed his custom questionnaire testing for various beliefs, including thoughts on human entitlement to natural resources, the scope of personhood, and plant rights. Digitizing the results is trivial. He runs his data through various analysis packages. Professor Van Dijk has a look. “Nice work. Took you a while. Anything exciting happen during the fieldwork?” (Location 5543)
CERTAIN TENDENCIES of radical environmentalist temperament emerge from the data. Core values, a sense of identity. The scores of only four of the thirty personality factors measured by the NEO inventory turn out to predict, with remarkable accuracy, whether a person will believe: A forest deserves protection regardless of its value to humans. He wants to give himself the exam, but it would say nothing now. Back at his apartment after ten hours in the computer lab, Adam turns on the TV. Oil wars and sectarian violence. It’s way too early to think about sleeping, though that’s all he wants to do. He’s still a score of stories up in the air, held aloft by a nonexistent tree, listening to the creak of that high house and the calls of birds he’d like to be able to name. He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead. (Location 5550)
Adam follows the cut, climbing along sentry conifers—spruce to hemlock to Douglas-fir, yew, red cedar, three kinds of true firs, all of which he sees as pine. (Location 5577)
The tripod woman grins. “We don’t have leaders here. But we do have those two.” HIS OLD FELLOW criminals greet Adam like they knew he was coming. Watchman clasps him by the shoulders. Maidenhair hugs him, long. “It’s good you’re here. We can use you.” They’ve changed in some subtle way no personality test could quantify. Grimmer, more resolute. The death of Mimas has compressed them, like shale into slate. (Location 5608)
The erstwhile minister says, “We welcome you, Maple. We hope you’ll stay as long as you’re able. Please, if it’s in your heart to do so, repeat these words after me. ‘From this day forward . . .’ ” “ ‘From this day forward . . .’ ” He can’t very well not repeat, with so many people assembled to watch him. “ ‘. . . I’ll commit myself to respect and defend . . .’ ” “ ‘. . . I’ll commit myself to respect and defend . . .’ ” “ ‘. . . the common cause of living things.’ (Location 5623)
“You’re a psychologist,” Mimi says to the recruit. “How do we convince people that we’re right?” The newest Cascadian takes the bait. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” (Location 5632)
THE NEXT DAY is pure work. Trenches to be widened and deepened, a wall to be secured. Adam swings a hammer for hours. By evening he’s so tired he can’t stand. He shares a cookout with the four friends who strike him as a Jungian archetypal family: Maidenhair, the Mother Priest; Watchman, the Father Protector; Mulberry, the Child Craftsman; and Doug-fir, Child Clown. Maidenhair is the glue, casting spells over everyone in camp. Adam marvels at her bulwark optimism, even after the routs she has suffered. She speaks with the authority of one who has already seen the future, from high above. They take him in that night, a square fifth wheel. He’s not sure what his role in this desperation-forged clan is supposed to be. Doug-fir calls him Professor Maple, and that’s who he becomes. That night, he sleeps the deep oblivion of an exhausted volunteer. (Location 5640)
That night, lying in his bag against the Earth, Adam wants to head back to Santa Cruz to finish his thesis. Anyone can dig a trench, pile up an earthwork, fasten himself to a lockdown. But only he can complete his project and describe, in measured facts, why people might care whether a forest lives or dies. But he stays on another day, becoming something new—his own object of study. (Location 5657)
The man must rise and get to work, as the trees are already doing. His work is almost done. He’ll strike camp tomorrow, or the day after. But this minute, this morning, he watches the spruces writing and thinks, I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need. (Location 5919)
“Say nothing, no matter what. Time is with us.” But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died. (Location 5941)
He talks to no one, goes nowhere. It’s the rainy season again, the season that just ended. He falls asleep in a drizzle and wakes to a downpour. (Location 6001)
She leans in for an agonizing game of charades with no pantomime. (Location 6221)
We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces. (Location 6237)
He can’t remember when the Web wasn’t here. That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be. (Location 6246)
The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. (Location 6316)
It’s tempting fate, doing anything that could bring him to the attention of the police. But the compulsion to scream in images is too strong for him. (Location 6329)
Nick takes a finger-wide camel-hair brush and a pot of black enamel out of the backpack and freehands a stanza of Rumi next to the coded bars: Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all (Location 6339)
The crowd surges and splits, lashes out and regroups. A phalanx of riot shields beats them back. Synchronized lawlessness flows over the barricades and around the armored cars. (Location 6360)
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. 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. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone. The heroes, villains, and walk-ons his wife gives him this morning are better than truth. Though I am fake, they say, and nothing I do makes the least difference, still, I cross all distances to sit next to you in your mechanical bed, keep you company, and change your mind. (Location 6373)
The mountains are high, the soil steep and thin, the trees have been culled once too often, and all the precious metal mines are spent. All that’s left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want. (Location 6410)
Today he rereads yesterday’s effort—two pages about what it meant to watch his Mimi get her eyes swabbed with fire. Then he takes up the Bic and pushes it in furrows across the page. It’s like he’s slinging trees again, up and down the contours of a hillside. Problem is, while he’s on the general subject of Failure, he can’t help probing the nearby, related topic of What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind. (Location 6426)
Here, the week is seven long days of census. Dr. Westerford’s team counts from dawn to dusk, a workday that should drain any woman in her sixties. But she lives for this. Yesterday they counted 213 distinct species of tree in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud. In so dense a living mass, (Location 6504)
Just upriver, the Achuar—people of the palm tree—sing to their gardens and forests, but secretly, in their heads, so only the souls of the plants can hear. Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage. (Location 6575)
The real question, session by session, is whether she can stay sane herself as her clients eat her soul. (Location 6637)
She bathes her mind in Zen aimlessness. (Location 6649)
No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds. A quarter minute and they’re in agony—introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all—fear of seeing and being seen. A dog will bite if you stare at it too hard. People will shoot you. And though she has looked for hours into the eyes of hundreds of people, though she has perfected the art of endurance staring, Mimi feels a tinge of fear herself, even now, gazing into the skittering eyes of Stephanie, who, blushing a little, powers through the shame and settles down. (Location 6675)
Just look. Looking must correct and heal all thoughts. (Location 6692)
Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. (Location 6745)
The math stuns him—how few years he has been away. So much has gone untouched. The farms, the roadside warehouses, the desperate public service billboards: FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD . . . So many imprints from deepest childhood, permanent scars in the prairie and in him. (Location 6785)
But he waits. Waiting has become his religion. There’s corn to listen to, miles of it. Beans to watch grow, sheds and silos on the horizon, an interstate, and a huge tree cut out of the sky in negative space, like a Magritte. He sits with his back against the house, feeling the farm emerge again, like wild animals from the edges of a trail when the hiker holds still long enough. As the clouds crimson out, he heads to the car and retrieves his folding campfire shovel. Wrong tool for the wrong job, but the best he has. In a minute, he’s on the rise behind the machine shed, looking for loose gravel. The ground feels different; the distances are wrong. Even the machine shed has been moved. The scree turns up, hiding under a lush green shag. He snicks the campfire shovel into the weeds and digs until he hits the past. (Location 6810)
Regeneration only at realistic rates. No rising from the grave. A wrong choice in the game should lead to permadeath.” The elves catch each other’s eyes. The boss is out of control. He’s willing to crash the franchise, to trash the endless moneymaker that will keep them all in junkets forever just to solve the problem of too much satisfaction. “How . . . ?” Nguyen says. “How are limits and shortages and permadeath going to be fun?” For a moment the sunken face turns rubbery, and the boss is a little kid again, learning how to program, his code branching outward in all directions. “Seven million users will need to discover the rules of a dangerous new place. To learn what the world will bear, how life really works, what it wants from a player in exchange for continuing to play. Now, that’s a game. A whole new Age of Exploration. What more adventure could you ask for?” (Location 6915)
Night: the third part of every day that remains a foreign country. (Location 7082)
No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible. (Location 7100)
One passage keeps springing back, every time fear or scientific rigor makes her prune it. Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes 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. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. (Location 7115)
When the box is set to go, she gets ready for bed. Ablutions are quick, and grooming even faster. Then the reading, her nightly thousand-mile walk to the gulf. When her eyes won’t stay open any longer, she finishes with verse. Tonight’s poem is Chinese—Wang Wei—twelve hundred years old, from an anthology of poetry she winds through at random, the way she likes to hike: I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. . . . You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river. (Location 7128)
“Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them.” The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end. (Location 7255)
Long ago her father taught her an old formula, one that converts cricket chirps per minute into degrees Fahrenheit. (Location 7314)
The home repair they want is just a slightly less wasteful demolition. (Location 7321)
She reads through to the letter’s stirring closing. As Toynbee once wrote, “Man achieves civilization . . . as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort. (Location 7329)
“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.” (Location 7375)
If his hands weren’t cuffed together. A tree like this grew on the street just outside the house of the man who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, and a small few of them survived that blast. The fruit flesh has a smell that curdles thought; the pulp kills even drug-resistant bacteria. The fan-shaped leaves with their radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Ginkgo. The maidenhair tree. (Location 7401)
“Now we know that plants communicate and remember. They taste, smell, touch, and even hear and see. We, the species that figured this out, have learned so much about who we share the world with. We’ve begun to understand the profound ties between trees and people. But our separation has grown faster than our connection.” (Location 7575)
“At some time over the last four hundred million years, some plant has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realize how varied a thing working might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.” (Location 7608)
“Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.” (Location 7617)
“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens. (Location 7622)
Life is speculation, and speculation is life. What a marvelous word! It means to guess. It also means to mirror. (Location 7636)
“Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to. “If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. (Location 7637)
The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think. (Location 7737)
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. (Location 8046)
For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth, and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he? (Location 8083)