Who Will Speak for Trees? The Overstory by Richard Powers

Why begin a new year with thoughts of the end of the world as we know it? Because human voices have spoken enough untruths, it seems right to hand at least some of our narrative over to those we have always assumed to be silent.

Trees speak in this novel, which seems fitting, since in the real world we refuse to give them voices. Because the very pages we use to mourn them are made from their bodies. Powers examines the tragic paradoxes of life in our world, in our time, by taking the long, long view that a tree takes. What a brilliant imaginative leap, immediately engaging! Then the prose kicked in and swept me along through the novel’s 500-odd pages so I couldn't stop.

Passages like this:

Extinction sneaks up on the Hoel farm–on all the family farms in western Iowa. The tractors grow too monstrous, the railroad cars full of nitrogen fertilizer too expensive, the competition too large and efficient, the margins too marginal, and the soil too worn by repeated row-cropping to make a profit.

And this:

Germination happens fast. Neelay finishes his space opera. Some part of the elongated boy in the futuristic wheelchair still wants to give the game away for free.

This:

They read about how a branch knows when to branch. How a root finds water, even water in a sealed pipe. How an oak may have five hundred million root tips that turn away from competition. How crown-shy leaves leave a gap between themselves and their neighbors. How trees see color.

And this:

Other learners, born yesterday…

Yes. Exactly. The humans of tomorrow. So many passages just shook themselves into my mind like leaves on a windy day.

Arbutus, Victoria, BC, 2021

And then there’s the structure of the book. The characters’ stories form the roots, and as they entwine, we begin to see how they will form a trunk, and then a crown. The seeds come as a surprise, leaving me with the kind of hope that finds itself itching to break free, especially on days when I think, Oh hell, the planet will be better off without us petroleum-guzzling, tree-addicted people. Just save the seeds and maybe someone better will come along and plant them.

But there’s a humanity here as well in the fine details with which the people are depicted. I can care about their stories while knowing that they all, like the rest of us, are part of a bigger story, whether they know it or not.

Pair with Suzanne Simard’s memoir, Finding the Mother Tree. In the picture book universe, find tree meaning for the very young with The Tree in Me.