_The Overstory_ by Richard Powers (NY: WW Norton, 2018 ISBN 978-0-393-35668-7) is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while. Powers did a great job and, even better, added something new: he made the trees and forests characters. It is, so far, for me, the most honest human attempt to speak their language in prose.
After I finished reading the book, I found this notice on the copyright page:
The Overstory is printed on 100% recycled paper. In using
recycled paper in place of paper made from 100% virgin
fiber, the first printing has saved
480 trees
393,576 gallons of water
152,288 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions
40,272 pounds of solid waste
Totals quantified using the Eco-Calculator at https://rollandinc.com/
The quotes and words I flagged:
(page 84) 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.
(85) The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.
(89) Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
(216) They christen themselves with forest names that night, in the soft drizzle of the redwoods, on a blanket of needles. The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.
(217) involucres - a whorl or rosette of bracts surrounding an inflorescence (especially a capitulum) or at the base of an umbel.
(218) How willows clean soil of dioixins, PCBs, and heavy metals.
(222) 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. And with those words, she has her book’s end.
(226) mandir - Hindu temple or Mandir is referred to a place where Hindus go to worship gods in the form of various deities.
(260) cladistics - a method of classification of animals and plants according to the proportion of measurable characteristics that they have in common.
(281) Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere.
(297) The cause they’ve given themselves to - this defense of the immobile and blameless, the fight for something better than endless suicidal appetite - is all they have in common.
(244) {Slogan]
No to the suicide economy
Yes to real growth
Editorial Comment: For me, “real growth” means growth in quality not growth in quantity. Whenever anyone tells you that ecological concerns will destroy growth, you can tell them ecological concerns produce great growth in quality of air, water, resources, biodiversity, and LIFE
(358) 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.
(375) 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. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it. Evolution is stage three.
(383) 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 moblized 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.
(393) pareidolia - the adaptation that makes people see people in all things. The tendency to turn two knotholes and a gash into a face.
(423) That’s life; the dead keep the living alive.
(454) Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.
(481) You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
(482) As Neelay learned with the greatest pain: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
(491) He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong.
The trees and forests who are characters in The Overstory are also lead actors in the relatively new field of geotherapy, the practice of working with ecological systems to repair the damage homo sap sap (that sap) has done. The peer-reviewed scientific text, Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase (https://www.crcpress.com/Geotherapy-Innovative-Methods-of-Soil-Fertility-Restoration-Carbon-Sequestration/Goreau-Larson-Campe/p/book/9781466595392), John Todd’s Healing Earth: An Ecologist's Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship provides an ecological design methodology based upon his decades of work around the world, and Biodiversity for a Livable Climate Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming (https://bio4climate.org) has been organizing conferences on the wide variety of geotherapeutic possibilities which are being studied and put into practice now. Their video proceedings are available at https://bio4climate.org/conferences/
It appears to me that geotherapy can work more quickly, more productively, more effectively than almost any other technology, hard or soft, being considered.
After all if "You Can Fix All the World's Problems In a Garden” (http://solarray.blogspot.com/2007/06/you-can-fix-all-worlds-problems-in.html), imagine what we all can do if we can begin to think on the time-scale of trees and plant forests as well as gardens. After all, it is more than possible than the Amazon rainforest was such an endeavor (see Charles Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (NY: Knopf, 2005 ISBN: 978-1-4000-4006-3).
Perhaps Richard Powers is working even now on a novel that imagines this extension of his story.