Richard Powers speaks for the trees. 

Five years after the publication of the highly acclaimed Orfeo, the National Book Award-winning novelist returns with a dense, passionate, and suspenseful tale of the connection between humanity and some of the planet's most ancient, massive, and indispensable living organisms. The Overstory, out today from W.W. Norton, centers around big trees—and around humans who come to take trees as seriously as they do other people.

Science and literature have played dual roles in Powers’s career from the beginning. Born in 1957, he studied physics, literature, and rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then worked as a computer programmer until he quit to write his first novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance. Following publication of two additional novels, he joined the Creative Writing faculty at UIUC and also maintained affiliation with the cognitive neuroscience group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.                   

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Powers later taught creative writing and worked in a biochemistry lab at Stanford. He presently lives in Tennessee, near Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

His novels include Generosity, The Echo Maker, and Galatea 2.2. Ambitious and urgent, Powers’s work tackles topics including genetics, race, artificial intelligence, music theory, biochemistry, and storytelling.

The Overstory follows nine human characters as they struggle to understand the hidden connections of the natural world and preserve what may be the continent's last stand of virgin forest. With compassion and erudition, Powers has constructed a sweeping narrative that mixes history, myth, science, and literature. The author takes inspiration from Muir and Thoreau and understands the impact of newly developed technology.In The Overstory, Powers presents the treacherous, denuded slope on which humankind has built its dreams, and offers an intricate meditation on extinction, survival, and transcendence.

Reached by phone, Powers discussed the origins of his book, the growing evidence of plant communication, and literary fiction's reluctance to tackle climate change.

Sierra: You spent a year living under the redwoods of California’s Central Peninsula before writing this book. Could you talk about that influence?

Richard Powers: It’s a strange and very intense part of the world. To the east, you have Silicon Valley, this incredible concentration of wealth, power, and digital capitalism—the seat of corporate headquarters of prominent companies like Google, Apple, Intel, Facebook. To the west, you have large, open-space preserves formed by the concentrated efforts of many people. I lived in the middle of this evocative split, between the central engine of digital capitalism and this desperate attempt to preserve the remnants of one of the world’s truly unique and stunning ecosystems.

I would go up into the Santa Cruz mountains whenever I could to escape this vision of the future being created down in the Valley. I had never been especially sensitive to trees, but it doesn’t take much to have your imagination set on fire by the redwood forest. I began to wonder why I had paid so little attention to these creatures that are so much larger and more profound in their effect on the land, climate, and atmosphere than I had ever appreciated.

What kind of research went into writing The Overstory?

Once I germinated this plan to tell a story of several people transformed by the emergence of tree consciousness, I began to travel to places throughout America that were most important to the stories. Those travels took me through all four of the great North American forests that were cut down over history. I ended up visiting one of the largest remaining tracts of old-growth forests east of the Rockies, and in the Smoky Mountains, where there’s something like 120,000 acres that were never logged. I fell in love with the place, and I ended up moving there. The book changed my life quite literally.

The research also included a tremendous amount of reading—well over a hundred books. That includes both scientific books, and those dealing more with the history of interactions between humans and trees. Because I was a dendrological novice, I needed to do foundational groundwork. I pored over field guides and read introductory texts like Donald Culross Peattie’s Natural History of North American Trees.

Then I looked deeper into what’s called the new forestry—the transformation of the way scientists think about what is happening in forests, and the best ways for humans to take the resources they need from those ecosystems with the least possible damage.

I also profited a lot from social histories—accounts of how trees have changed humans and their cultures. I read several books about the actions of environmental groups and individuals who were active in saving the last remnants of virgin forest out West.

To what extent did you delve into the research on plant communication?

I looked quite a bit into plant communications, and it changed the way I thought about life. Much of that reading made its way into the novel. Our growing awareness of both over-the-air communication and mycorrhizal exchanges between trees lies at the heart of the story. Trees are every bit as social as we are.

To see trees as flexible, subtle, and supple in their response to environmental changes—to see the ways they influence, nurture, and respond to one another and form collective, reciprocal exchanges of resources—is to understand how much more there is to these enormous creatures than we thought even a short while ago. The Overstory asks what all those new discoveries about plant behavior might mean for our attempt to live in a world dependent on green things.

What was it like to write from a tree’s point of view?

Ideally, I would have made them the central characters of the book. Unfortunately, a novel needs humans in the center of things. My solution was to create human beings who, in ways as diverse as their characters, come to take seriously these enormous, long-lived, powerful creatures that we depend on and share the world with.

At the same time, there are individual trees that become characters in the story, and also societies of trees, such as the research forest in Oregon where my female dendrologist makes her great discoveries about tree communication. As both individuals and as groups, trees flesh out the story and become active protagonists in their own right.

Which of the human characters did you arrive at first?

The characters developed together over a long period of time. The book’s tree researcher, Patricia Westerford, emerged out of my perception of a couple of prominent researchers in the study of tree behavior: Suzanne Simard and Diana Beresford-Kroeger. Because I was building my story up from reading their work, my researcher was one of the first to form herself in my imagination. I’m not saying that the women themselves or their personalities are in my character, but the drama of their discoveries, and the ways in which their discoveries made their way into the human imagination, are at the heart of Patricia Westerford’s story.

What has living near the Great Smoky Mountains taught you?

The Smokies are often described as the most biodiverse area in the world outside of the tropics. Several reasons contribute to that. The glaciers never reached this far but pushed along entire migrating populations of flora and fauna in front of them. These species striated up the sides of the Southern Appalachians and were trapped there when the glaciers retreated. The different elevations and the heavy rainfall (we count as a temperate rain forest) contribute to the fecundity. Walking from the re-growth in the Smokies into the old-growth for the first time, even a person who’s indifferent to the subtleties and richness of trees will notice. It’s a dramatic and compelling contrast, and you can immediately feel the increase in diversity and richness.

Was your residence threatened by the November 2016 firestorms?

The fires came within a couple miles of the house. I've been through all the burned areas of the Park and outside on the Gatlinburg side, and it’s remarkable how quickly nature is reclaiming those burned areas. The fire itself is a harbinger for the future. We have so transformed these places and so abjectly altered the climate that these kinds of disasters are going to be more and more quotidian.

Much of the novel was written prior November 2016. Has the book and its message changed at all since the election of Donald Trump?

We’re living in a frightening moment. This administration has turned those institutions that were created for the express purpose of protecting and restoring the natural world into arms for that world’s destruction. There is a war being waged on natural ecosystems. Trump, Zinke, Pruitt, and others in power are doubling down on a way of life that simply can’t exist for much longer.

We depend on these systems. To think that we can master them is suicidal. In that regard, I would say writing this book and the sending it out into the world have become more urgent for me.

Can you talk about literary fiction’s response to our changing climate?

Literary fiction has been somewhat blind to the real world. Belles lettres and the novel of character revelation assume that meaning is a strictly private or interpersonal thing. That’s a terrible indulgence. Most novels fail to show the enormous drama that humans live among. They exclude all conflict and reciprocity between humans and non-humans. They think we’re the only game in town. That’s why literary fiction has been so slow to treat the central drama of the present: climate change.

The real question for humanity now is whether we can find stories that confront what it will take for us to live among non-humans in a permanent way. Writers need to turn their eyes outward and start asking what kinds of values we would need to develop, what myths we need to tell ourselves, and what perceptions we need to cultivate to truly live here and not in an imaginary, self-exempting place that externalizes all costs and acknowledges only private and individual meaning.

One character in The Overstory asks, “What do all good stories do?” His answer is “They turn you into something you weren’t.” I’m interested in how you see that theme as playing out, and how that works with the novel’s structure.

Our brains are shaped to be excited by and identify with those things that look most like us. Because trees unfold on such different physical scales over such immensely different time frames, it’s hard for us to notice them, let alone take them seriously as complex, social agents who want something. All nine of the central characters in The Overstory get turned into something they weren’t: people who takes trees as seriously as they take other people.

The book itself is laid out like a gigantic, unfolding tree. In the section called “Roots,” the separate characters emerge from their formative pasts. In “Trunk,” they are joined together in a shared fight to save the last uncut forests. In “Crown,” they scatter, following the catastrophe of those attempts. But in “Seeds,” their legacy diffuses into the world in a surprising way.

I’ve tried to tell a story that changes a reader’s capacity to identify with these magnificent and essential living things—the endlessly resourceful creatures that make our own lives possible.

Do you see The Overstory as a hopeful novel?

It depends on what you’re hoping for. If you’re hoping for a happy ending to a story of human-exceptionalism and consumer-driven individualism, then no. That story is doomed.

But the book holds out another kind of hope—the hope that people, who are so flexible and so ingenious at telling stories, might learn how to be more capable of living here. We need more stories about re-discovering and re-integrating with a world that is going to survive us one way or the other.