The Overstory

This book is like a fictional, tragic rhyme with Braiding Sweetgrass.

I started it in the summer, read the first chapter or two and was taken aback by the tragedy and put it down. Weeks later, I was chatting with friends at a party and Ryan reinforced to me that this book, while sad, was worth the work. Ryan was, of course, right. But don’t read this unless you’re ready to be very sad; hopeful, tranquil, but sad.

You’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for every else is other people. You should be studying everyone who thinks that only people matter. (p. 319)

This book will make you see the flora around you in new detail and gratitude. It will make you realize that wood is a book, recording the seasons past (p. 155). It implores you to see your furniture and home as built of these books, reaching back beyond your own time.

Important

Ultimately, this book is about expanding the scale of the time you appreciate.

It’s about recognizing the scale of trees and the rest of the earth and how you fit into it and how you should act as a constituent piece of that whole.

One of the big seeds of the story is planted early, as told to a young child:

Aliens land on Earth. They’re little runts, as alien races go. But they metabolize like there’s no tomorrow. They zip around like swarms of gnats, too fast to see - so fast that Earth seconds seem to them like years. To them, humans are nothing bug sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck into the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home. (p. 97)

And so:

It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. […] Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. (p. 424)

And thus I have been spending more time outside, trying to listen to the trees. And act as I think would benefit all of us.

Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm. […] harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge _imminent at the speed of trees._ (p. 498)

Another theme of this book is death and rebirth, that life is longer than any of us, and the best of life is in continuing to branch, at peace with the rest of living life.

Note

A question I wrote in the margins: What about doing A Big Year but for trees instead of for birds?