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Friends oF red rock canyon 5
Sharon’s Slant
ward winning American novelist,
Richard Powers, writes about the
A effects of science and technology on
our planet. His books have covered topics such
as artificial intelligence, photography, genetics,
music, physics and memory. His twelfth novel,
“The Overstory”, is all about trees and it has
most deservedly won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in
Fiction.
Powers does a wonderful
job creating characters that
you genuinely care about;
the novel begins with short
stories describing how trees
have impacted each of their
lives. They include a com-
puter programmer crippled
as a young man in a fall
from a tree; a botanist whose
life’s work is studying trees
and preserving our forests; a
lawyer who lets nature recre-
ate a forest in his backyard,
a forest that was cleared
away years ago to build his
subdivision’s homes; two
activists whose passion for
saving the trees leads to
one’s death; an engineer and
a Viet Nam veteran who inspire each other to
become activists; a psychology professor study-
ing world-savers.
But the real main characters in the book are
all the species of trees found on our planet.
It is up to Nick, Mimi, Adam, Ray, Douglas,
Neelay, Patricia and Olivia to teach readers the
history of trees and how they continue to grow,
remind us of their interdependence in order to
survive diseases and blight, confirm their use-
fulness to humans, and implore us to remember
that we impact their survival.
By Sharon Schaaf
The settings in “The Overstory” take us
across the United States, from Manhattan to
St. Paul, Minnesota, to the National Parks of
the West, into San Francisco and Portland,
Oregon and then across the ocean to the rain
forests of Brazil. The human characters recall
a blight from China that kills the chestnut trees
on America’s East Coast and the devastation
caused by Dutch Elm disease in the Midwest.
One survives the Viet Nam War, another is
major part of the advent of video
games and they all become in-
volved in the Timber Wars of the
Pacific Northwest and an event
that eventually affects each one.
The information contained
in the book is another of its
strengths. My personal favorite
character is botanist Dr. Patricia
Westerford who shares the results
of her research from her lifelong
study of trees. Her passion is best
displayed by an incident in the
early 1980s when Pat was work-
ing in the forests of the Western
Cascades. She stops to talk to a
huge western red cedar. “Thank
you for the tools. The chests. The
decking. The clothes closets. The
paneling. I forget…Thank you,” she says. And
then she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know
how hard it is for you to grow back.”
In her final lecture to a group of scientists, Dr.
Westerford tells them her rule of the forest and
in my opinion the theme of the book: “What
you make from a tree should be at least as
miraculous as what you cut down.” And from
all of us who work to save our environment for
future generations, an enthusiastic thumbs up!
This book is available on Amazon.
Summer 2020