The Overstory: Trees are more important than we knew.

Environment, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, The Overstory, Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize

I just read the most enthralling book about trees.  I have also recently published my 250^th post as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  Virtually all of those posts are about people – in all their confusing complexity.  Many of the posts are about wrapping my mind around people at the margins – and wrestling with the idea of how to value all people.  And then this book lands in my lap.  It is a Pulitzer Prize winner – so I decided to read it.  The Pulitzer Prize in fiction is awarded to the book in a given year that, in the opinion of the committee, best describes the American Experience.  Of course, this is a matter of opinion – but those committees – over the years – have recommended some very fine books.  And this is no exception.  Except that, early in this book, it turns all of my work as a blogger on its ear.  It seems to say that people are not that interesting.  They are a carbuncle on creation.  The center of creation – and perhaps creation’s best exemplar is – the tree.  And the tree, this book suggests, has been marginalized by people.  As the book progresses, this idea becomes more nuanced and ultimately shifts, but it remains the author’s position that human beings’ well-being is dependent on the well-being of the trees.

Because this is a book that is ultimately about people (and the American experience), and because we are much more likely to resonate with people than with trees, it is a book about people who resonate with trees – and, as we resonate with these people, the author hopes (I think) that we will follow the lead of his people and that we, too, will resonate with the trees.  So the heroes in this book emerge – slowly (we get to know them as complicated individual people first – people who have some connection – sometimes visceral but often seemingly tangential – with trees.  They have very different backstories – they come from vastly different biomes, as it were) – but they come together as tree huggers.  They get there mostly by accident.  Trees figure in their lives, but their passion for trees is just one of many threads in their lives until that thread is revealed to be a wrapped skein of threads that unravel and then weave themselves into a pattern with trees as the central motif.  Most, but not all of the characters end up becoming interwoven not just with trees, but with each other.  By the end, each of them has touched all of the others, even if only in their imagination.

As I write this post, I sit in my study and look across the street at a magnificent hemlock.  Actually, it’s a pretty run of the mill hemlock.  We used to have a magnificent hemlock in our front yard, but it was blown over by the remnants of a hurricane that traveled through the Midwest ten years ago.  I learned then that the hemlock is a shallow rooted tree – held in place not by a tap root but by spreading shallow roots that form a large mat that is its base.  The tree across the street is still there because it is planted in the middle of a yard, and there is a lot of room for those roots to spread out in all directions.  Our tree was planted near the intersection of the sidewalk and the driveway, so that its mat could only spread in two directions.  Fortunately those directions helped it stay upright in the prevailing winds, but the hurricane winds were not only strong, they sucker punched it from weak side – they blew from the direction of the driveway rather than towards it and the tree came down – all sixty feet of it - fortunately between the houses, with the root system pried up and exposed for all to see the root, as it were, of its demise.

As a kid, I grew up in the generation immediately following the hippies.  I grew my hair long and wore jeans that were more patches than denim.  I hitchhiked across the country – including to Washington D.C. for the bicentennial to join a protest that I didn’t completely believe in, but I wanted to protest something and maybe get teargassed – somehow that seemed romantic from a distance.  As I grew older and pursued traditional jobs and then a profession, I realized that some of my hippie buddies were much more closely tied to that movement than I was.  Oh, I believed in the principles (though I’m not sure I ever saw them spelled out overtly) of living closer to the land and being respectful of creation and focusing on love – not war.  And, I think, caring for the marginalized.  Though I never became a vegetarian, much less a vegan, I respected those who did.  But my friends who were more clearly living the hippie creed, if there is such a thing, followed courses of life that led them into things like carpentry and massage therapy.  Oh, I’m a therapist, too, but I don’t touch my patients, except to shake their hands – and very rarely to offer a hug when they are particularly distraught or when we are parting for the last time.  I am cerebral where the true hippie is, I think, more – quite literally – in touch with the world.

Compared to my hippie friends, who I keep up with on Facebook and in other ways, I feel that I have lost my way.  This book helps me feel that gap more profoundly.  Despite being tall for my species, I am dwarfed by trees, of which the book reminds me constantly, not just physically dwarfed but psychologically - by the trees themselves, but also by the characters in this book.  I have tried throughout my life to keep the small parts of me hidden and sequestered, but I think they actually take up much – perhaps most – of the space inside me.  And the small part of me that this book highlights is my focus on myself – on my survival – as if it were ever in doubt.  I am worried about whether I will have enough.  So I am always in search of more – whether that is food or things or books to read or movies to watch.  I am constantly hungry and my hunger consumes many things – and this book points out that it has consumed many trees.  Heck, just buying the book consumed trees (it is 500 pages long).  Facing this leads to feelings of guilt, of course.  These are familiar to me.  They have lurked around in the back of my mind for some time – and they have not done much – OK they have done nothing to curb my appetite.  But somehow, in the midst of this book, I feel differently.  I feel not just guilty, but overwhelmingly concerned about something much bigger than me.  I am not concerned so much for myself, but for us all – at least for the moments when I am reading.  I feel sucker punched by this book – uprooted and exposed, for all to see.

So this book surprised me.  First because I found trees – and their biomes – more fascinating than I imagined possible – and because I found that I was drawn to tree huggers in ways that I have not been before.  The characters in this book, each in his or her own way, has gotten a sense of urgency – an urgency that I think we are all beginning to share – about what it is that we have done to this planet and what we must do to undo it.  Oh, the planet will survive – but I think we are beginning to realize that we may not.  I was raised with a vision of the way the dinosaurs died out – slowly – as the result of volcanic smog.  Recent science has proposed that they actually died in a heartbeat.  After a huge comet crashed into the earth sending tons and tons of liquefied mud into space in the after-splash, if you will, the mud froze and turned into glass shards that ringed the earth and then they were pulled back, by the earth’s gravity, after they had encircled it.  When they re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, they burned up, and so much stuff burning simultaneously all around the earth raised the temperature on the surface of the earth to 400 degrees, boiling the dinosaurs alive!  We exist because of some mice that were burrowed under two or more feet of earth - enough to insulate them from the heat.  I think our end will be drawn out – the way we used to think of the dinosaurs end.  I may well be wrong – but I do think we are in for a big shake up – and figuring out how to balance our growing populations against the abilities of the planet to sustain us will be difficult.  We may be the most precarious creatures on the planet – dependent in ways that we have worked to keep ourselves unaware of on many layers of creatures and plants.  But I don’t think that my going on shouting from this soap box is going to do to you (or me) what the book did.  The biggest surprise is that this book got under my skin.  I realized, in a creepy way – it itched and I wanted to scratch it  - that I am a part of the problem.

I’m not quite sure how that happened.  I think that one aspect is that I came to care about the characters.  But another thing happened.  As one character was listening to the trees – and then, much later, another character was listening to other people on a profound level while neither she nor the other person were talking – they were just staring into each other’s eyes – somehow the book started talking to me.  Partly this was based in the chance ways in which the characters realized their relationship to the organic world.  It wasn't just one story about this, but it happened for each character in their own unique way, from one perspective and then from another, and a part of me had identified with each of these characters.  Part of it was the idea that these tree huggers were actually rational people of all different sorts (and one who was not so rational, but was seen by the other tree huggers as being the most rational of all – the one who could hear the trees talk - a character I fell in love with on top of a very tall tree), and that each of them got broad sided.  As I identified with them and then got hit when they did, I got uprooted.  Of course it didn’t hurt that the book is incredibly well written – and that it is filled with fascinating facts about trees and the relationship between trees and people – but I think it was the cumulative effect of sucker punch after sucker punch – and it is, of course, man's sucker punches that have led the trees to be in their besieged state - so that I was toppling and, on my way down, identifying with the trees.

But it wasn't just the sucker punches that they received, it was the blows that they gave.  This group of people was wide in terms of gender and personality style.  Though there was some ethnic diversity, they were all members of our culture - but also counter-cultural in their identification with the trees.  They were, I think, embodying something even deeper than the hippie credo, whatever that is.  They were each, in their own way, living a life that, despite the pressures of the culture around them, was true to who it was that they were.  I think I was envious of that clarity of self - that clarity of purpose.  I think part of my desire was not to be them, but to be myself, doing what it is that I could do to live more purposefully - to live a life that was more focused and therefore more effective.  That each of them was focused on trees made that seem attractive - and it is a worthy cause - we all should be more focused on trees.  And if this books makes better ecologists of those of us who read it, so much the better.  But I think its clarion call, if I can adequately hear it, has to do with hearing our own calling - not the calling of the trees - and following that.  As a wannabe hippie, I was joining with others who were identifying against a culture.  As a professional, I am identifying with those who are following a particular current.  I think the itch this book introduced was one that I need to keep scratching - who is it that I am and how is it that what I am doing at this particular moment is consistent with that? 

As I think about this, and about the central activities of the tree huggers, which were violent activities that I recoiled against – and that were ultimately not particularly effective – I think about the process of helping someone to change (or find) their mind.  To move from what we call in therapy the precontemplation stage to the contemplation stage.  When we are in the precontemplation stage, we don’t see that we are part of the problem.  We might go to treatment to complain about someone else and have a weird kind of magical idea that the therapist will change the other person.  At some point in treatment, if treatment is to become effective, we have to realize that we are part of the problem – and this empowers us, then, to address the ways in which we are.  This is, this book suggests, a violent process.  We have to be sucker punched out of our feelings to complacency.  We have to discover, in ways that are uncomfortable – that topple the world as we know it – that our sense of rootedness is, in fact, shallow and that despite having felt solid in the ways that we think about things, there are other ways to think of them.  Fortunately, we are more capable of quick transformations than the trees.  Fortunately, we are able to adapt more quickly.  I hope, just as I do in therapy, that we are able to translate our increasing awareness into actions that will have an impact.  I am appreciative of Powers' ability to get my head a bit off the dime on this.

I think the strand that unites the characters is that they live in the most affluent nation on earth and that each of them is able to chart his or her own course.  They could make choices that would endear them to others, they could make choices that would lead them to be more - to have more - but they, by and large, do not.  They choose to live for some other reason than consumption.

As I neared the end of the book, I wondered, as I often do, how the various threads would come together and what the ending would be.  But then I noticed that what happens in the book isn't what really matters.  What happens in the world - how trees - and the human race - fare - is what really matters.  This book, as beautifully painted as the characters are, is not about the characters in the book, nor is it about the trees there.  It is about us and our relationship to the organic world.  Are we going to recognize that to address our anxieties about surviving - those dark corners of our soul that we would rather keep hidden mostly from ourselves - we will have to trust ourselves and the environment to support us - to learn to live with less so that we can all have more?  That question was not going to be addressed in the book, but in our lived world - so what happened to these imaginary creatures who had so fired my mind became less important that what happens to us... Or, perhaps more importantly, what we do to make the world the kind of world that it will be.

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