Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2018), begins with a woman listening to trees. The woman, a former ecoterrorist named Mimi Ma, leans against a pine, which speaks to her in “words before words.”1 The tree’s monologue swells into a chorus of alders, poplars, and other species who insist that she “[l]isten. There’s something you need to hear” (O, 4). This message turns out to be the novel’s most urgent imperative. In the face of imminent ecological catastrophe, we must learn to “grasp the Earth’s intentions” (O, 455) and discover “what life wants from people” (O, 494). The novel concludes with the promise that AI algorithms will figure out what trees are trying to say, learning “to translate between any human language and the language of green things” (O, 496).

This conceit—that trees speak a language that we might understand—has much to do with The Overstory’s ecstatic critical reception. The novel distills key ecocritical ideas that have gained traction in the humanities since the 2000s. In particular, the novel responds to the New Materialism and deep ecology, ontological frameworks that imagine alternatives to anthropocentrism by jettisoning distinctions between subjects and objects.2 The novel endows its trees with what Jane Bennett calls “thing power,” envisaging them as agentive beings.3 Much of the novel’s critical assessment hinges on Powers’s success in evoking what Birgit Spengler calls a “tree ontology,” prodding the reader “to imagine how the world may ‘look’ or ‘feel’ from the perspective of trees.”4 Critics who love the book, like Berthold Schoene, celebrate The Overstory’s attempt to make trees talk, arguing that the novel “begin[s] to speak in the voice of the arboreal” while avoiding “crassly anthropomorphic appropriation.”5 Critics who dislike the book argue that it does not go far enough, that it remains wedded to a realist aesthetic that “reinscribes humans as uniquely conscious beings.”6

In this essay, I push back against this desire for a tree ontology, arguing that it represents a lapse into despair in the face of climate change and mass extinction. This lapse is reflected in The Overstory’s evocation of a post-human, arboreal world that survives the extinction of the human species. “‘Saving the planet,’” Marco Caracciolo writes, “involves letting go of humankind as we know it, embracing radical societal change and even the possibility of species extinction.”7 When characters listen to trees whose forests are disappearing, the trees, predictably, think it would be best if human beings went away. “What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?” the novel asks; the answer, it turns out, is suicide (O, 456). Whenever Powers ventriloquizes trees, he bypasses his novel’s most pressing challenge: how to politically mobilize human beings to use trees in more responsible ways that do not threaten the survival of our own species. He also short-circuits the novel’s critique of global capitalism, embodied in its generic resemblance to a 1930s strike novel, as a diverse cast of activists face off against faceless corporations bent on unchecked resource extraction. The desire for a deep ecology, in which human beings listen to the earth’s intentions, distracts from the slow and painful work of anti-capitalist political activism—a form of politics which, as far as we know, must be carried out by human beings.

Natural Language

Powers’s model of tree language builds on but must be disentangled from two ideas that Powers draws from the New Materialism and recent tree science. The first is the idea that trees are what Bruno Latour would call actants, any human or non-human entities that influence other entities.8 Although The Overstory brings together stories about human beings, it refuses to push trees into the background, instead showing how they influence the novel’s human characters. Second, drawing on the work of ecologist Suzanne Simard, the novel insists that trees share chemicals through fungal networks, protecting each other from insect infestation and other threats. Patricia Westerford, the novel’s tree biologist, theorizes that forests are cooperative networks, allowing trees to “feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive” (O, 142). They are endowed with distributed intelligence, forming what Simard calls the “wood wide web.”9 This forest network is just one example of distributed intelligence in the novel. The scientific community that at first rejects then embraces Patricia’s research is another example; Powers describes it as a “spreading worldwide web of researchers … happily swapping data through faster and better channels” (O, 142). Other examples include the ant colonies that inspire Adam Appich’s career in psychology and the AIs that will discover the clue to preventing climate change.

Powers’s parallel between the forest and the scientific community that studies it suggests that when he imagines trees talking, he conflates the exchange of chemicals with the exchange of information. As Pieter Vermeulen points out, this conflation runs throughout the environmental humanities; writers like Suzanne Simard, Rob Nixon, and Jane Bennett consistently draw “[a]nalogies between information processing and biological flourishing.”10 This conflation seemingly underlies the novel’s conclusion, in which AI learns to decode tree chemicals, turning them into human speech. The parallel, however, disguises the fact that Powers imagines tree language as a superior, purer form of communication—one that human beings have lost and must recover. Admiring an ant colony, Adam contrasts ant communication with human speech. Human language confuses him because it’s marked by deceit: “They say things to hide what they mean” (O, 54). Ants, in contrast, exhibit purposeful action without deceit, a kind of awareness “so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.”11 This insistence that nature speaks to us in a pure language that we might learn to understand draws on a Transcendentalist lineage that Powers signposts in the novel’s epigraph to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.” While studying her trees, Patricia also reads Emerson’s disciple, Henry David Thoreau: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (O, 129). For Emerson and Thoreau, the human soul and nature, man and vegetable, are fundamentally the same. We only see them as different because we’ve been corrupted by rationalism, which draws a sharp boundary between human subjects and non-human objects. To prove this thesis, Emerson turns to language, arguing that all language is metaphorical and that all metaphors are drawn from nature. He posits the existence of a lost original language, in which all words were identical to the things they named: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.”12 This language became corrupted over time, leading to a schism between word and thing; at the culmination of this process, “old words are perverted to stand for things which are not.”13 This theory of language is at odds with most twentieth-century theories of language, which, starting with Ferdinand de Saussure, insist that there are no natural signs, that all language is arbitrary and differential. Emerson’s theory does, however, prefigure New Materialist conceptions of language, which push against Saussure’s linguistics, arguing that it replicates a subject/object dichotomy inherited from Immanuel Kant. In Matthew Mullins’s terms, the New Materialism no longer perceives an “impassable chasm” between “word and world.” Instead, it considers the materiality of language itself, treating it as “a thing, a mediator, an object.”14

In Emerson’s work, this conception of an original language made up of natural signs leads to unfortunate consequences, some of which recur throughout The Overstory. Emerson perpetuates the racist myth of the noble savage, associating natural signs with so-called primitive people who have not yet fallen prey to the corruption of white civilization. “Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts,” Emerson writes, “savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures.”15 There are very few Indigenous characters in The Overstory; as Stuart Cooke complains, Powers consistently “refers to Indigenous knowledges without reference to the cultures to which they belong.”16 The only exception occurs near the novel’s end when an unnamed Indigenous man helps conceptual artist Nicholas Hoel create a work of land art, arranging dead logs in the forest so that they spell the word “STILL” (O, 502). As Cooke points out, Powers does not name the Indigenous language that the man speaks, commenting only that it is “so old it sounds like stones tossed in a brook, like needles in a breeze.”17 From Powers’s perspective, the language does not need to be named because it is the language of nature itself, which nullifies differences between specific tribes. Indigenous people, in other words, have an unmediated relationship with nature that white people have lost; they already speak the language of trees. When Nicholas comments, pointing to the trees, that “[i]t amazes me how much they say, when you let them,” the man replies, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492” (O, 493).

Emerson’s theory of language also leads him to believe in magic. Because natural signs admit no distinction between sign and referent, they allow the speaker to directly change nature. “Nature” concludes by evoking the poet’s ability to transform the world through the force of her imagination: “As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.”18 In The Overstory, Powers’s belief in the magic of natural signs leads him to affirm the possibility of telepathy and mind control. The novel’s trees communicate without words, seizing control of listeners’ minds and forcing them to do what they say. Drawing on Simard’s research, Powers insists that trees primarily communicate through odor. When Mimi presses her nose against a pine tree, she smells “the tree’s real name,” which “grips her brain stem” and forces her to remember her dead father (O, 185). Through a mysterious mechanism that the novel never elucidates, the trees also communicate over long distances. The novel’s chief tree listener is Olivia Vandergriff, a college student who undergoes a near-death experience when she is electrocuted in her apartment. When her heart stops, she is visited by “powerful, but desperate shapes,” the spirits of the redwood forests who guide her to the activist encampment in California and turn her into Maidenhair, the leader of an ecoterrorist cell (O, 157). This wordless communication, the novel suggests, can be appropriated by humans who become attuned to the language of trees. After the ecoterrorist cell dissolves, Mimi becomes a therapist; her therapy consists of long sessions in which she and her subjects stare at each other and have wordless conversations:

I’ve lied to my closest friends.

Yes. I let my mother die unattended.

I spied on my husband and read his private letters.

Yes. I cleaned bits of my father’s brain off the backyard flagstones. (O, 404)

The conversations’ ontological status is ambiguous; they are in the same italics as the novel’s tree speech. However, they suggest that Powers takes the possibility of communication without signs literally, imagining that humans, like trees, may seize control of other people’s brain stems and tell them what to do.

Consensus and Persuasion

The reasons for Powers’s turn to natural speech are not especially obscure. As the novel underscores, people in wealthy countries like the United States have developed a consensual worldview that privileges property relations, perceiving trees as resources to be cultivated for human profit. This worldview insists on the viability of the planet’s unchecked exploitation, and according to the novel, it is hardwired into Western thinking and institutions. The narrator quotes Kant’s Critique of Judgment: “As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man” (O, 251). This consensus is so well established that challenging it, as the characters in this novel attempt to do, can only be seen as a form of madness. Indeed, the novel suggests that the consensus may be hardwired into human biology. When Adam reads his first psychology book, he realizes that “humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution” (O, 61). They possess “hidden but knowable patterns as beautiful as anything he once witnessed in insects” (O, 61), especially instincts towards mutual policing and social climbing. If human beings are skilled at “herding each other” but unable to “execute simple acts of reason” (O, 61), then there is no way that they can be persuaded to care for something bigger than themselves.

At the same time, the novel insists that time is running out for the world’s forests, which are disappearing at an unsustainable rate. Persuading people that they must change their consumption habits, persuading them that extractive capitalism must end, doesn’t seem to be working. Indeed, persuasion seems beside the point. When Patricia is called on as an expert witness and successfully argues that what’s left of the West Coast public lands’ redwood forests should be preserved, her victory is pyrrhic. “You’ve just made lumber a whole lot more expensive,” the opposing lawyer tells her; “Every timber firm with private land or existing rights is going to cut as fast as they can” (O, 285). Trying to protect trees turns them into a more valuable commodity to be used up even faster. When the protestors attract the attention of the President of the United States, the logging companies move in more quickly to disperse the protestors before anything can happen. “Action from Washington isn’t the answer to this showdown,” Adam reflects; “It’s the cause” (O, 340). The other tactic that the characters use—violence—also doesn’t work very well. No amount of ecoterrorist violence will seriously impact the novel’s logging companies. After the protestors’ most audacious act of sabotage—the explosion at a logging camp that accidentally kills Olivia—another cell member drives back to the scene and finds “[h]ard hats swarming all over, repairing the damage. Capital’s answer to a slipped schedule is simply to add more shifts” (O, 364).

Because persuasion and violence don’t work, Powers turns to a magical solution—the idea that nature might penetrate our flawed consensus through mind control, as occurs when the redwoods, telepathically reaching Olivia, force her to become an activist. This fantasy of natural mind control, however, is a point of contradiction in the text. Although the trees speak throughout the novel, much of what they say turns out to be wrong. “I’ve been assured that this story has a good ending,” Olivia tells Nicholas as they camp out in Mimas’s canopy, protecting the ancient tree from loggers (O, 293). This reassurance is misguided; the loggers drive Olivia and Nicholas from Mimas and cut it down. As she lies dying after the explosion at the logging camp, Olivia stares into Mimi’s eyes and telepathically communicates, “Something’s wrong. I’ve been shown what happens, and this isn’t it” (O, 351). One of two things is possible here. Either Olivia’s trees are lying, or their speech is a hallucination, a product of Olivia’s near-death experience. Both possibilities undercut Powers’s model of pure communication. If trees can lie, then their language is no better than ours. It is just as susceptible to the arbitrary severance between sign and referent, signifier and signified that defines every human language. As Walter Benn Michaels observes, Powers’s “self-loathing” characters want to escape their humanness to become more like trees.19 Characters like Adam hope that the world will soon “be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones” (O, 56). However, if the collective intelligences are capable of deceit, then they too are unhealthy. Similarly, Powers underscores the fact that we can never be sure whether we are projecting human meaning onto nature when we think it is speaking to us. When Patricia is in Brazil, collecting seeds from rare tree species along the Amazon River, she finds a tree whose trunk is shaped like “a person, a woman, her torso twisted, her arms lifting from her sides in finger branches” (O, 393). The Brazilian rubber tappers comment that the woman is “the Virgin, looking on the dying world in horror”—wordlessly condemning human destruction of the rainforest (O, 393). However, the tree is also an example of “[p]areidolia … the adaptation that makes people see people in all things. The tendency to turn two knotholes and a gash into a face” (O, 393–94).

Even as The Overstory insists that nature, if we listen to it properly, will compel us to do things on its behalf, the novel can’t help but return to persuasion, public discourse, and activism as the only vehicles for possibly averting climate catastrophe. This possibility is embodied in the various forms of storytelling that the novel explores, all of which rely on ordinary signs in fallible human languages. This possibility is embodied, for instance, in the story of Patricia’s career. After publishing her work on tree intelligence, she becomes a victim of the herd instinct that Adam describes. “No other animal closes ranks faster than Homo sapiens,” the narrator comments when she’s fired from her job as an adjunct professor (O, 127). However, her published words go “drifting out on the open air, lighting up others, like a waft of pheromones,” eventually attracting other researchers who confirm her findings (O, 137). Powers’s language equates scientific research with tree emissions, but it evokes a different kind of communication than the one that the redwoods force on Olivia. Patricia’s research acts on other biologists by persuading them that their discipline’s consensus is wrong—by presenting evidence that counteracts what the discipline has taken for granted. In other words, her revived reputation is a consequence of the scientific method working properly. She then writes a popular book, The Secret Forest, which communicates her discipline’s changed consensus to a broader public.

The hope of disrupting the consensus view that consigns trees to a purely instrumental status is also embodied in the novel itself. Indeed, it’s the only hope that justifies the novel’s existence. Powers is intensely aware that his novel is part of the extractive industry that is destroying the world’s forests. The book is made from recycled paper, and a note from the publisher tells you how many trees were saved by the first printing. But the book is also a commodity, sold primarily via a company with one of the biggest carbon footprints on the planet: Amazon. The book, in other words, still uses resources and therefore trees; it must fulfill Patricia’s demand that “[w]hat you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down” (O, 464). The novel reminds us of this fact by having Nicholas find work in a vast “Fulfillment Centre” that resembles an Amazon warehouse, filled with piles of books. As the warehouse’s name suggests, “[t]he product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience” (O, 379). At the same time, “[s]omewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper … there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death” (O, 380). Once again, Powers tropes storytelling’s impact in terms of the natural language that he associates with trees; the right kind of story will break the spell that has ensnared his readers, countering one kind of mind control with another. However, he’s describing something much more unfashionable and mundane: persuasion unfolding in the public sphere through the medium of the printed word, what Jürgen Habermas would call communicative action.

Indeed, the narrative of two of the novel’s central characters—Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly—is structured around scenes of communicative action. Ray and Dorothy are the novel’s two most politically conservative characters. Ray is an intellectual property lawyer, and Dorothy is a stenographer; they are agents of the legal system that defines nature as property. For both, “trees mean almost nothing”; they cannot tell “an oak from a linden” (O, 64). The couple’s narrative arc is disconnected from that of all the novel’s other major characters; they are observers of the drama that unfolds elsewhere in the book, watching the logging protests on television. They function as figures for the reading audience whom Powell hopes to persuade with his novel. Especially after Ray is paralyzed by a stroke, the couple devote most of their time to reading, and they come across Patricia’s book. Inspired by her claim that the best strategy for returning cultivated land to the forested wild is to “do nothing” (O, 460), they stop mowing their suburban lawn, provoking a showdown with the city over bylaws requiring citizens to care for their property.

As this act of defiance highlights, persuading middle-class professionals like Ray and Dorothy to care about trees will not do much to end the climate crisis. The couple’s militancy is confined to their lawn, amounting to a green consumerism that does little to challenge the extractive capitalism responsible for the death of the world’s forests. Indeed, by imagining Ray and Dorothy as the novel’s model readers and as the audience who must be persuaded by environmental activists, The Overstory further neutralizes its ostensible anti-capitalist politics. In “Trunk,” the novel’s central section, Powers appropriates many of the narrative techniques of the strike novel, one of the most enduring literary forms for dramatizing anti-capitalist politics. In the scenes in which activists try to protect the redwood forests, the men who beat and humiliate them are dehumanized. Powers usually refers to them as “hard hats,” unnamed synecdoches for capital who “swarm” in imitation of the novel’s ants (O, 364). However, as the hard hat epithet signals, The Overstory is a curious kind of strike novel, one in which the working class is on the other side, fighting for rather than against their bosses. Apart from Douglas Pavlicek, a Vietnam veteran turned itinerant laborer, all the novel’s environmental activists are college-educated members of the professional managerial class (PMC). As one of the activist leaders points out, responsible forestry and worker rights are not incompatible. The company that the activists are fighting used to be a family business that “ran the last progressive company town in the state and paid incredible benefits” until Wall Street financiers took it over (O, 213). However, for the most part, Powers ignores West Coast loggers’ concerns about their livelihoods.20 Instead, he imagines a PMC communication loop running from the activists through the media to educated middle-class viewers with the working class serving as the unreflective thugs of capital. This communicative loop oversimplifies the class divisions that shaped the West Coast timber wars of the 1980s and 1990s.21 However, it accurately reflects Trump-era liberals’ tendency to write off the white working class as, in Hilary Clinton’s terms, a “basket of deplorables” rather than generate an inclusive politics that would enlist that class by reversing its multi-generational economic decline.

Even The Overstory’s tepid promise that the educated middle class might be persuaded to use trees more responsibly betrays the radical ecological imagination that has made the book so popular with reviewers and critics. It betrays the idea that we can know what it feels like to be a tree. Instead, the novel falls back on something like the legal argument that Ray embraces after Patricia’s book arouses his ecological imagination. According to this argument, trees have legal rights: “It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them” (O, 250). Trees enter public discourse insofar as they are beings that deserve representation. Whenever this novel ventriloquizes trees, it is doing this—speaking on behalf of the world’s trees since they cannot speak on their own behalf, trying to persuade readers that despite trees’ voicelessness, they are rights-bearing beings. Trees cannot speak for themselves in a language that humans will ever understand; Powers can only persuade other people that they are precious by turning some of them into books.