Kruse's Keys: Read "The Overstory" to Understands the Roots of this World

On more than one instance, a character in Richard Powers’ Pullitizer prize-winning tale The Overstory, states that “The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”  Powers sets out to change all our minds in this sprawling (24 hours on Libby app!) story of nine people’s life-changings relationships with various trees (e.g., American chestnuts, a mulberries, maples, banyans, douglas firs, and redwoods).  Prior to reading The Overstory, I had a very baseline understanding of trees and their role in the world.  I believed that having forests was a good thing but reading headlines about 10,000 acres of rainforests disappearing each day would solicit only a small tisk from me before I went on with my day.  I lacked any emotional connection to them.  

This book changed that.  The Overstory changed my mind about trees.  It stoked my curiosity and left me mourning the loss of these incredible living giants (creatures dare I say?).  I was aghast to discover that the entire east coast was once filled with BILLIONS of chestnut trees (the redwoods of the east coast) but that they were decimated after a parasite rode in from East Asia with imported Japanese chestnut trees in 1904.  Less than three decades later, almost every mature American chestnut was gone! Learning about the hundreds of different uses for the American chestnut compounded my sense of loss.  The North American continent that existed since creation is irrevocably different and forever wounded due to this loss.  

The book’s power stems from the readers’ experience of the characters’ lives, among them a group of eco-terrorists, a ground-breaking scientist, and a paralyzed man.  Powers pens the lives of the people with the same care and attention as he does the trees–the trees in fact, probably inhabit more space in the novel (just as they do in the world).  It quickly becomes apparent how much we don’t know about trees.  With the human life cycle less than a century, the millenia-long life cycle of trees means our discoveries will never stop.  

Perhaps the most eye-opening discovery was the way in which trees communicate not only with each other but with us.  Early in her career, scientist Dr. Patty Westerford uncovers the way in which certain trees communicate but she is roundly and ridiculed by her scientific peers.  This shame sends her into academic Siberia and it is only decades later that she is vindicated through later studies.  It turns out that trees are indeed able to warn each other of marauding animals, blight and disease through spores, intertwined root systems, and ways in which we don’t yet understand.  In a speech Patty notes “Nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”  

While reading this book has not prompted me to chain myself to a redwood it has changed the way I interact with the trees around me in simple ways.  For instance,I downloaded the “Picture This” app and now routinely snap photos of trees to learn more about them. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I learned to read in kindergarten and would read aloud everything I saw–billboards, signs, advertisements–I had discovered a power that unlocked the world around me.  The Overstory unlocks a similar power–to discover and appreciate the world of trees whose very roots hold us all together.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Related reading:

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual Read my review of Patagonia founder’s manifesto here.  

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World

Greenwood: A Novel 

Natural History of North American Trees

Gaia

Key Quotes:

Beautiful writing here:

“You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.”

“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.”