The Overstory

This belongs to a rare category of book that I've grown fond of lately, the kind I love and hate about equally. I think this is an underappreciated category! First, I find that resisting the temptation to collapse a thing that is very good and very bad into a single judgement, to hold both opinions in mind at once, is a useful exercise, a kind of epistemic strength training. Second, loving the book motivates me to honestly and carefully articulate exactly what I hate about it, in a way that I might not bother to do with a lesser book. If you don't have any books you hate as much as you love, you may be missing out.

The book’s project is to shift our focus away from people and our interpersonal drama and toward the natural world. Or rather, to restore the perspective you might naively expect us to have, given how comparatively small and ephemeral we are. This is the point of the title, I suppose: the overstory are the trees (and by extension, nature) that dwarf us and our shrubby little concerns down below. Even the book's cover makes the point: it's a forest scene with two human figures in the center that you can barely make out. Concentric circles around the image suggest a vast zooming out, containing only forest and sky.

I am on board with this and think it's a worthy goal. And, as a matter of literary skill, I think it’s a masterpiece. And yet I was deeply frustrated with it, to the point of almost giving up on the book halfway through. I mean that as an endorsement.

The Understory

It's the 90s in Oregon, and a formerly responsible lumber company has been bought out by a private equity firm, who uses it as a shell company to clear-cut old-growth forest. This allows the buyer, (some rich guy in Texas, we are told, who has never seen a redwood), to turn a one-time profit at the expense of environmental devastation. When word gets out, activists stage protests, sabotage equipment, and even build and inhabit treehouses high in the targeted trees, to prevent the lumber company from cutting them down. Five characters fall in with the activists: Nick, an artist, adrift since his family died in a freak accident; Douglas, an erratic Vietnam vet, Mimi, an engineer; Adam, a psychology grad student who joins the activists in order to research activist psychology; and Olivia, a college student guided to the protest site by spirits, who she discovers she can hear after waking up from a coma.

As the standoff drags on, the lumber company and police apply increasingly violent tactics: Nick, Olivia and Adam are nearly blown out of their camp within a redwood by a helicopter; Mimi is pinned to the ground; Doug is pepper-sprayed in the genitals. Some of their fellow protestors are murdered, and all five of them are cursed and intimidated by the loggers. Eventually the loggers and police prevail, and the forest is clear-cut. The main characters, enraged at having lost, and by having been victimized by the police, are driven further into radicalism, and they start torching construction sites with improvised bombs. In one incident at a logging equipment yard, a bomb goes off prematurely, gravely wounding Olivia. Nick, her lover, sends Adam to call an ambulance. Adam, convinced Olivia is going to die anyway, and knowing that if the authorities arrive they’ll all be arrested, gives up his search early, and Olivia dies there at the crime scene. The group burns her body in the fire in an attempt to cover their tracks. Then they split up: they know the police will eventually find human remains in the ashes, which will trigger a manhunt. They hope if they go their separate ways they’ll elude the police for long enough that it will blow over.

But Nick and Doug never forgive Adam for failing to call for help. Later, when the police catch up to Doug, he incriminates Adam in revenge.

When you reach this point in the novel, it feels like a dramatic climax: it’s got love and death, idealism and pragmatism, betrayal and revenge. It’s got a run from the law, a shared dark secret, and lives lived in the shadow of the past. The author could have stopped there and it’d have been a pretty good novel. But he had something much more ambitious in mind, which is to make you not care about any of that by the end of the book, and instead to reorient you to a conflict of vastly higher stakes. Simply as a matter of artistic skill, it is remarkable how well he pulled this off. I had nearly forgotten this plot detail by the end of the book because he had so successfully made human drama seem irrelevant.

The next segment takes place 20 years later. Nick becomes a loner, making environmental activist art in his time off work at an Amazon fulfillment center ("the company he works for will not rest until every last person on earth is fulfilled"). Mimi becomes a therapist whose therapeutic technique involves looking her patients in the eye, in silence, for hours at a time. Adam becomes a professor of psychology. Doug works odd jobs, haunted by his past, and, as a cathartic release, writes a confession of his role in the equipment yard arson, which a visitor finds and reports to the police. When Doug is arrested, and the police ask for the names of his accomplices, he names only Adam, in revenge; both he and Doug serve jail sentences.

Other characters, introduced earlier, get intertwined at this point:

Patricia is a forestry scientist, a real scientist’s scientist: she’s fascinated by nature and wants nothing more from life than to understand it better and share her knowledge. She has no interest in professional advancement, little interest in other people, and is happiest doing field studies deep in the woods. Early in her career, she discovers that trees communicate by sending chemical signals through the air. When she publishes this finding, it comes off as sufficiently anthropomorphic that she's derided by the rest of the academic community, loses her academic standing, and retreats from the professional scientific world for decades. Later research confirms her finding and vindicates her, but by then she's lost interest in academia.

Near the end of her life she receives an invitation to speak at a conference about climate change initiatives (called "Home Repair") for wealthy donors in Silicon Valley. She reluctantly agrees, and uses the platform to relate the story of the Tachigali versicolor, a tree that flowers just once in its life. Its seeds fall near the tree’s trunk, and these children would never germinate for want of light, except that, after flowering, the parent tree dies and collapses, opening a hole in the canopy, providing just enough light for its offspring to sprout. It's called the suicide tree. Then, in front of the crowd of donors, she raises a vial of poison to the crowd, toasts the suicide tree, drinks it and dies.

But she doesn’t quite die. I have to quote the actual passage here:

The speaker raises her glass, and the world splits. Down one branch, she lifts her glass to her lips, toasts the room and drinks. Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience^[1].

Nowhere else in the book does the author use the “branching timeline” trope (branches; get it?), just this single scene near the end. It's the only suggestion of magical reality in the whole book. And let me suggest that this is the right proportion of magic in a story: almost none, but not zero. It adds a sense of wonder, while demonstrating that the author isn't just using it as a crutch to escape writing a coherent plot.

Neelay is a computer programmer (permanently wheelchair bound from a childhood injury after falling out of a tree) whose early hobby of game development blossoms into a massively popular video game franchise, attracting the greatest engineers in Silicon Valley. He comes to regret his life’s work because he feels that he has trapped millions of people into neglecting their real lives in exchange for an addictive simulation.

He is in the audience at Patricia's suicide speech, and is the only one who tries to stop her from drinking the poison. Afterward he dedicates his still-considerable wealth and influence to a new project: writing a software interpreter for Nature itself: billions of software agents all over the world observe nature, in the form of the behavior of trees, birds, insects, fish. They synthesize, from that behavior, the message that Nature is trying to communicate to humankind.

Ray is an intellectual property lawyer married to Dorothy, a court stenographer. Ray is kind and intelligent, but straight-laced and dull, and Dorothy is wild-spirited. They have a steady but joyless marriage until Dorothy has an affair. When Dorothy reveals the truth to Ray, he has a stroke that leaves him with barely any motor control, unable to speak, or write, or feed himself. Dorothy leaves her lover and spends the rest of her life taking care of Ray. He finds himself spending his whole day staring out the window at his backyard, and this stillness opens his eyes to the richness and complexity of Nature that he previously took for granted. He and Dorothy start identifying trees together, using a guidebook that narrows down the potential tree by asking successive questions about it (a decision tree! get it?). They decide to let their yard grow wild, drawing pleas, and later threats, from their neighbors to mow their lawn. Dorothy, now the neighborhood's crazy lawn lady, comes to find a perverse joy in defying her neighbor's pleas for yard maintenance, as if she's finally been given the opportunity for rebellion she's always wanted^[2].

I can't help but feel that the author smites Ray for being an intellectual property lawyer. He does, after all, grimly approve of the police arresting those tree-hugging activists, when he sees them on TV. On the other hand, the author slyly works in a reference to Philemon and Baucis, a Greek myth where Zeus transforms an elderly couple into a pair of trees so that they can die at the same time. Ray in his wheelchair becomes rather like a tree, an immobile observer, somehow outside of time and human affairs, and perhaps that's meant as a blessing rather than a curse.

Responses

I seem to be the only person with a mixed opinion of the book. Everyone I know who has read it raved about it. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Strangers have approached me in a coffee shop upon seeing the book cover, just to tell me how much they loved it. There's plenty to admire, but plenty to object to, too, and I found myself shifting from feeling mostly positive about it (about halfway through), to mostly negative (near the end), to a grudging reconciliation (on reflection).

I'll start with what I liked. A major theme of the book is the delusion that we're separate from nature. I don't mean in the sense of living in cities and having indoor plumbing, but metaphysically separate: that we are a different order of beings from animals and plants, and that distance justifies using nature as mere resource and ornament. The intuition that we are separate from nature blinds us to the fact that damaging the natural world eventually damages us as well. I generally agree with this: I do think we (broadly speaking, in the West) conceive of mankind as separate from the natural world, maybe as a legacy of Christian theology, and that inclines us to make short-sighted judgements about the natural world. Good: I think he’s right to point this out.

Second, when we consider nature as an object of study, we oversimplify it. I am loath to use the term "reductionist", but I think it captures the idea here: we imagine nature as a series of discrete objects, with artificial borders between them, following the conceptual map we intuitively apply to the world. I imagine, as a caricature of this worldview, nature as portrayed in Minecraft: oak tree #437 is eight squares east of daisy #17, etc. But in reality, the tree and the flower are connected in complex and subtle ways that we're only just starting to understand. And the fact that we are still revising our models of organisms in important ways (like the fact that trees communicate with each other, via underground mycorrhizal networks) should make us less confident that we understand how they work right now.

Advocates of this position sometimes swing too far in the opposite direction, straying into mysticism and an unjustified derision of Western science. Science does oversimplify reality. But it does it on purpose, because that allows us to conduct experiments with a finite number of variables. It’s just not practical to model every feature in a natural interaction. But that’s ok, because you can still learn things by modelling only some of them (“All models are wrong but some are useful”). Every biologist I know is keenly aware of this, because many of them have lost months or years of work, precisely because they oversimplified reality, causing a model that worked in a lab to fail in the real world. Those who succeeded as scientists learned to simplify as much as possible, and no more. But I grant that most non-scientists probably don't appreciate this, and probably do have a sort of Minecraft-y mental model of nature. And that flawed model likely does cause us to, say, underestimate the ecological fallout of clear-cutting a forest.

Third, on a spiritual level, he suggests that this estrangement from nature makes us neurotic, ruminative and purposeless, so the first victims of this attitude is ourselves. And that our pursuit of comfort and material consumption is largely a result of this purposelessness, an attempt to fill a spiritual void. And he suggests that a remedy for this can be a contemplative life, as, for example, occasioned by long periods in nature. I think he's right about that too.

Finally, I have to admit, the book is beautiful. Richard Powers deserves his Pulitzer. To pick a scene somewhat at random, here's the view from atop of the redwood that Nick and Olivia camp in:

Here and there, solo spires rise above the giants' chorus. They look like green thunderheads, or rocket plumes. From below, the tallest neighbors read like mid-sized incense cedars. Only now, seventy yards above the ground, can Nicholas gauge the true size of these few old ones, five times larger than the largest whale. Giants march down into the ravine the three of them climbed last night. In the middle distance, the forest broadens into denser, deeper blue. He has read about these trees and their fog. On every side, trees lap at the low, wet sky, the clouds they themselves have helped to seed. Skeins of aerial needles -- knobbier and more gnarled, a different thing from the smooth shoots growing at ground level -- sip the fogbanks, condensing water vapor and sieving it down the sluices of twigs and branches. Nick glances upstairs into the kitchen, where their own water-catchment system works away, running droplets into a bottle. What struck him as ingenious last night -- water for nothing -- turns crude compared to the tree's invention.

About half the five hundred pages contain scenes and reflections like this, marveling at the beauty of nature, both in the pure aesthetic sense, and also the way an engineer would praise an ingenious piece of machinery. I admire that synthesis of poetry and scholarship, as well as the intelligence and sensitivity that gave rise to it. It was a pleasure to read, dramatically, stylistically, and scientifically.

But not philosophically. And if you make me choose, philosophy wins over all other considerations. I thought The Overstory was too comfortable with mysticism, too morally confident in its world view and too content to sermonize in the abstract without considering the world as it is.

First, there's a subplot suggesting that Nature is actually conscious and agentic. Patricia seems to believe this near the end of her life (and, after all, she was right about the tree-communication thing). Neelay builds a digital translator for Nature, to allow it to literally speak to us. Ray reads an article suggesting that we should treat trees as having rights in legal proceedings. Neelay mentions a sci-fi story about aliens who visit Earth, and their metabolism is orders of magnitude faster than ours, so they see us as lifeless statues. They destroy all humans and suck up all of Earth's resources before we, or they, realize what is happening. In this light, our destruction of Nature is more than an imprudent use of natural resources; we're harming a conscious being that can't defend itself.

That's very interesting, and I suppose it could be true. But consider: the number of animals killed for food each day is 250 million, and you don't need abstract, speculative arguments to believe that they are conscious and suffering and unable to defend themselves. The welfare of animals gets zero mentions in the book's five hundred pages.

I am uncomfortable making this objection, because it's kind of a dick move to dismiss one person's moral concern just because they're not including your moral concern too. But I am overriding that reservation because the disparity in this case is just so huge. 250 million animals per day are killed for meat, and no one disputes this. But also…Nature itself could also be conscious, if you squint. And he dedicates his tremendous talents as a novelist to champion the speculative idea, and not the for-certain 250 million. That seems like a perverse moral priority.

My second objection is economic. Throughout the book, nature is described in sacred terms ('sacred' in the sense of having infinite value). For instance, in the Oregon standoff, some activists describe the lumber companies as turning "ancient geniuses" (old trees) into shingles. Well, how many people need to be kept dry with those shingles, to justify cutting down one old genius? There are eight billion humans, after all, and we invariably make some impact on the environment we live in. How do we balance the needs of human beings with the needs of the rest of the natural world?

Granted, this is a novel, not a special report in The Economist. It is unfair to expect detailed proposals on economic and environmental policy from it. Still, after five hundred pages decrying man's self-absorbed plunder of the Earth, I naturally found myself wondering, well, how should we live, then? The book's only answer is: not like this. This recaps a lot of my frustration with ecology activists.

There's a passage, fourteen pages before the end of the book, in italics (which I take to be the voice of the author): 'The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.' I read that passage as almost an apology for writing a novel: sorry guys, this is the only thing that works! I'm not sure he meant it that way, but that interpretation allowed me to let go of my irritation, and eventually reconciled me to the book. He's not wrong after all: for most people, most of the time, pure rational argumentation only goes so far. Whereas we are famously susceptible to persuasion by art. More of the vegetarians I know cite My Octopus Teacher as their inspiration than Peter Singer. If I desperately wanted people to value the natural world more, and reconsider the relationship between mankind and nature (and I were as talented as Richard Powers), I'd probably write a novel too, with all its mystical exuberance. I’d include lots of scenes of ancient redwoods shrouded in mist and not many statistics about pig farms.

Here’s a metaphor. The character Mimi, the engineer-turned-therapist, treats her patients by silently locking eyes with them until they break down and sob in grief and catharsis. Powers never quite explains why this is supposed to work, but the mechanism seems to be that the weight of a human gaze slowly erodes the psychological defense mechanisms that prevent the patient from seeing his situation clearly and objectively. Traditional talk therapy gives you opportunities for motivated reasoning: you can spin a story to your advantage, justify your own bad behavior, smear your enemies. But pure focused silent attention denies you those excuses.

I think you could read this as a metaphor for the novel itself. Or novels themselves. Powers refuses to list discursive arguments in favor of conservation because, after all, you’ve heard them all before. You already agree…or else you don’t, and you have an arsenal of counterarguments ready to fight back with. If you take the anthropological account of reasoning (that it’s a social skill designed to persuade people, and is uncorrelated with truth), then all reasoning is motivated reasoning: better to avoid it altogether. Instead, he tells an emotional story, with sympathetic, relatable characters, who happen to want the same things the author wants. So it changes your mind by evading reason altogether.

So, in other words, it’s a novel. It persuades by using artistic techniques, rather than rational arguments. As annoyed as I am with its flirtation with mysticism, its suggestion that the world is doomed and it’s Jeff Bezos’s fault somehow, its omission of animal welfare concerns, etc., I have to admit that it surely does more for animal welfare indirectly than I do by quoting statistics at people. So I should just shut up and declare common cause: The Overstory is an effective piece of rhetoric and I grudgingly recommend that you read it.