The Overstory Asks Readers to Think Differently About Forests
March 19, 2025
While reading Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (2015), I can almost feel the light of this great American novel pierce my soul, refracted through the spores and dust floating in the forest air, disturbed by my feet as I tread across the novel’s loamy pages. The novel is about Americans in the 20th and early 21st centuries, and how fleeting human life is when compared to the centuries lived by trees. Beginning like a collection of independent short stories, each focused on a different set of characters, the novel brings its disparate storylines together in a manner analogous to the mycorrhizal networks that connect the roots of individual trees into a single living forest.
The novel is divided into four main sections—Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. Roots is subdivided into eight chapters, each focused on a different set of characters. Each character’s story includes a tree (or trees) with which that character has a relationship. For example, Nicholas Hoel grows up on a farm that features a single chestnut tree, which his family members have photographed monthly for generations, resulting in a flipbook of a thousand photos showing the giant tree’s evolution. The Hoel Chestnut, as it is known, becomes a rarity after fungus decimates four billion chestnuts throughout the entire eastern United States. The history of that blight is interwoven with the story of four generations of the Hoel family. Like the Hoel chapter, each of the other chapters in the Roots section weaves together the lives of its characters and trees. The characters begin to converge in the second section, Trunk.
In Trunk, The Overstory’s characters coalesce around an environmental action camp in an old-growth forest of Redwoods in California, where a logging company is clearcutting. The novel juxtaposes the living forest and its sublimeness with the clearcut aftermath of hillsides that look like the lunar surface (p. 241). This juxtaposition is first experienced at a distance by video game designer Neelay as he looks out his office windows (p. 227) in contrast to his vegetatively lush game world (pp. 307–8). As the logging continues to decimate forests and ecosystems collapse, Neelay’s gameworld becomes the only “place” where the (digitized) beauty of untrammeled nature can be seen (Neelay’s game is like a cross between Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise and the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online). The novel implicitly asks whether the digital is an adequate or desirable substitute for the real, and implicitly suggests that it is not.
Time, or rather the different scales of time, is an idea that recurs in the novel. When the lifespan of a tree is considered alongside the lifespan of a human, the difference in scale begins to become clear. This is most striking in the passages describing the Hoel Chestnutt flipbook, Mimi’s father’s scroll, and the Mimos tree. The photo flipbook was originally created by Nick’s great-great-great-grandfather when he planted the family chestnut 120 years ago, and was maintained by successive generations of Hoel men who continued to photograph the tree religiously once a month, the stack of photos running toward the thousand mark. “Three quarters of a century dances by in a five-second flip,” and although the chapter narrates that tumultuous human history for the reader, the flipbook shows only the steady growth of the tree (17). “Makes you think different about things, don’t it?” remarks Nick’s father (19). Ultimately, time passes differently for trees than it does for humans, and one of the revelations of this is that it would take humanity an eternity “to learn what forests have figured out” (p. 285).
To suggest that forests have knowledge humanity lacks is to recognize forests (and trees) as living beings with some semblance of sentience or intentionality. This idea is broached most explicitly within the novel when Ray, a lawyer, reads an article asking whether trees should have legal standing (p. 247), which is a reference to the classic book Should Trees Have Standing? (1972) by legal scholar Christopher D. Stone. Vexed by the article, Ray ponders questions such as: “What can be owned and who can do the owning? What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?” (p. 249). The question of property, ownership, and rights for living beings that cannot speak for themselves (pp.250–251) runs parallel to the plotline of Ray and Dorothy navigating their failing marriage, and Dorothy’s assertion of her independence (“I’m not your property, Ray”). This question is also the underlying basis for the morality of activists taking action to stop logging companies from clearcutting versus waiting for legislation that takes so long that the logging companies “will have killed all the giants by the time the law catches up with them” (p. 214).
Characters who act on behalf of the forest, or the non-human world more broadly, in defending nature from the destruction caused by humanity’s rapacious extractivism (see, for example, page 215) is one connection between The Overstory and Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Readers might also draw connections to Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic,” which argues for humanity to shift its understanding of its relationship to the rest of the world from that of mastery or domination to one of an ethical relationship as equal members of the biotic community. Finally, readers might also draw connections to popular science books such as Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, which explains in detail the relationship between trees and fungi that the character of Patricia briefly illuminates in The Overstory (see, for example, page 218).
Ultimately, The Overstory is a richly rewarding and thought-provoking novel that is well worth the commitment to reading its 502 pages. The book club members and I discussed it for over an hour and still left feeling that we had only scratched the surface of all that the novel offers, a feeling that I am experiencing once again as I bring this brief article to a close.
Further Explorations
Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Harper Perennial, 1975.
Forest History Association of Wisconsin. “Aldo Leopold, the Land Ethic, and A Sand County Almanac: The Makings of a Movement.” [Video]. YouTube. Mar 21, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xoIKIKVLM.
Leopold, Aldo. The Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, 1949.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape our Futures. Random House, 2020.
Stone, Christopher D. Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. Oxford University Press, 2010 [1972].
The Aldo Leopold Foundation. “The Land Ethic.” aldoleopold.org, n.d. https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/the-land-ethic.
The American Chestnut Foundation. “American Chestnut History.” N.d. https://tacf.org/history-american-chestnut/.
The Appalachian Storyteller. “When Giants Roamed Appalachia: The Story of the Chestnut.” [Video]. YouTube. Mar 15, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsSLxadmrJc.