The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “Not dollars, Patty. The other thing.”

  And yes, she admits, hauling her feet out onto the cold floorboards. This one is about the other thing. The very opposite of dollars. The thing that needs all the testifiers it can get.

  DENNIS DRIVES HER the hundred miles in his decaying truck. Her ears are throbbing by the time they reach the courthouse. During her preliminary statement, her childhood speech defect flowers forth like a great May magnolia. The judge keeps asking her to repeat. Patricia struggles to hear every question. And yet, she tells them: the mystery of trees. The words rise in her like sap after winter. There are no individuals in a forest. Each trunk depends on others.

  She fights off personal hunch and keeps to what the scientific community agrees on. But as she testifies, science itself starts to seem as flighty as a high school popularity contest. Unfortunately, the opposing counsel agrees. He produces the letter to the editors of the journal where her first major scholarly article appeared. The one signed by three leading dendrologists, crushing her into the earth. Flawed methods. Problematic statistics. Patricica Westerford displays an almost embarrassing misunderstanding of the units of natural selection. . . . Every part of her flushes with blood. She wants to vanish, to never have been. To have folded some poison mushrooms into the omelet she made herself this morning, before Dennis drove her to this tribunal.

  “Everything in that paper has been confirmed by later research.”

  She doesn’t see the trap until it’s sprung. “You overthrew existing beliefs,” the opposing counsel says. “Can you guarantee that further research won’t overthrow yours?”

  She can’t. Science, too, has its seasons. But that’s a point too subtle for any court of law. Watching—the watching of many—will converge on something repeatable, despite the needs and fears of any one watcher. But she can’t swear to the court that the science of forestry has finally converged on new forestry, that set of beliefs she and her friends have helped to promote. She can’t even swear that forestry is really a science, yet.

  The judge asks Patricia if it’s true, what the expert witness for the opposition has earlier claimed, that a young, managed, fast-growing, consistent stand is better than an old, anarchic forest. The judge reminds her of someone. Long car trips through newly plowed fields. If you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?

  “That’s what my teachers believed, twenty years ago.”

  “Is twenty years a long time, in these matters?”

  “It’s nothing, for a tree.”

  All the warring humans in the courtroom laugh. But for people—relentless, ingenious, hardworking people—twenty years is time enough to kill whole ecosystems. Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that’s for another trial.

  The judge asks, “Young, straight, faster-growing trees aren’t better than older, rotting trees?”

  “Better for us. Not for the forest. In fact, young, managed, homogenous stands can’t really be called forests.” The words are a dam-break as she speaks them. They leave her happy to be alive, alive to study life. She feels grateful for no reason at all, except in remembering all that she has been able to discover about other things. She can’t tell the judge, but she loves them, those intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to all life long. She loves her own species, too—sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it—yet chosen by creation to know.

  The judge asks her to elaborate. Dennis was right. It is like talking to students. She describes how a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree. “I sometimes wonder whether a tree’s real task on Earth isn’t to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time.”

  The judge asks what living things might need a dead tree.

  “Name your family. Your order. Birds, mammals, other plants. Tens of thousands of invertebrates. Three-quarters of the region’s amphibians need them. Almost all the reptiles. Animals that keep down the pests that kill other trees. A dead tree is an infinite hotel.”

  She tells him about the ambrosia beetle. The alcohol of rotting wood summons it. It moves into the log and excavates. Through its tunnel systems, it plants bits of fungus that it brought in with it, on a special formation on its head. The fungus eats the wood; the beetle eats the fungus.

  “Beetles are farming the log?”

  “They farm. Without subsidies. Unless you count the log.”

  “And those species that depend on rotting logs and snags: are any of them endangered?”

  She tells him: everything depends on everything else. There’s a kind of vole that needs old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs, no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading fungus; no spreading fungus, no new trees.

  “Do you believe we can save these species by keeping fragments of older forest intact?”

  She thinks before answering. “No. Not fragments. Large forests live and breathe. They develop complex behaviors. Small fragments aren’t as resilient or as rich. The pieces must be large, for large creatures to live in them.”

  The opposing counsel asks whether preserving slightly larger forest tracts is worth the millions of dollars it costs people. The judge asks for numbers. The opposition sums up the opportunity loss—the crippling expense of not cutting down trees.

  The judge asks Dr. Westerford to respond. She frowns. “Rot adds value to a forest. The forests here are the richest collections of biomass anywhere. Streams in old growth have five to ten times more fish. People could make more money harvesting mushrooms and fish and other edibles, year after year, than they do by clear-cutting every half dozen decades.”

  “Really? Or is that a metaphor?”

  “We have the numbers.”

  “Then why doesn’t the market respond?”

  Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite. But she’s smart enough not to say this. Never attack the local gods. “I’m not an economist. Or a psychologist.”

  The opposing counsel declares that clear-cutting saves forests. “If people don’t harvest, millions of acres will blow down or burn in devastating crown fires.”

  It’s out of her field, but Patricia can’t let it go. “Clear-cuts increase windthrow. And crown fires only happen when fires are suppressed for too long.” She lays it out: Fire regenerates. There are cones—serotinous—that can’t open without flame. Lodgepole pines hold on to theirs for decades, waiting for a fire to spring them. “Fire suppression used to seem like rational management. But it costs us much more than it has saved.” The counsel for her side winces. But she’s in too deep for diplomacy now.

  “I’ve looked at your book,” the judge says. “I never imagined! Trees summon animals and make them do things? They remember? They feed and take care of each other?”

  In the dark-paneled courtroom, her words come out of hiding. Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the microclimate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.

  The judge frowns. “What grows back after a clear-cut isn’t a forest?”

  Frustration boils over in her. “You can replace forests with plantations. You can also arrange Beethoven’s Ninth for solo kazoo.” Everyone laughs but the judge. “A suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm!”

  “How much untouched forest is left?”

  “Not much.”

  “Less
than a quarter of what we started with?”

  “Oh, heavens! Much less. Probably no more than two or three percent. Maybe a square, fifty miles on each side.” What’s left of her vow of circumspection blows away. “There were four great forests on this continent. Each was supposed to last forever. Each went down in decades. We barely had time to romanticize! These trees out here are our last stands, and they’re disappearing—a hundred football fields a day. This state has seen rivers of logjam six miles long.

  “If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you’ll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century’s soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.”

  When she finishes, she falls back into blushing silence. But the counsel pressing for the injunction is beaming. The judge says, “Would you say that old forests . . . know things that plantations don’t?”

  She squints and sees her father. The voice is wrong but there are the rimless glasses, the high, surprised eyebrows, the constant curiosity. All those first lessons from half a century ago cloud around her, days in the beaten-up Packard, her mobile classroom, tooling around the back roads of southwest Ohio. It stuns her to recognize all her own adult convictions, there in embryo, formed by a casual few words with the window rolled down on a Friday afternoon and the soy fields of Highland County unspooling into the rearview mirror.

  Remember? People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures—bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful—call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

  But the judge wasn’t in that car. The judge is another man.

  “It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out.”

  The judge chews on her statement, the way her father used to chew on sassafras, those root-beer-scented twigs that stay green all winter.

  THEY RETURN after recess for the decision. The judge places a stay on the contested cut. He also issues an injunction on all new timber sales of public land in western Oregon until the impact of clear-cuts on endangered species is assessed. People come up to Patty and congratulate her, but she can’t hear. Her ears shut down the moment the gavel hits the desk.

  She leaves the courtroom in a bank of fog. Dennis is by her side, leading her down the hall and out onto the plaza, where two crowds of demonstrators face off in a gauntlet of banners on each side of her.

  YOU CAN’T CLEARCUT YOUR WAY TO HEAVEN

  THIS STATE SUPPORTS TIMBER; TIMBER SUPPORTS THIS STATE

  Enemies shout at each other across the gap, stoked by triumph and humiliation. Decent people loving the land in irreconcilable ways. They sound to Patricia like quarreling birds. A tap on her right shoulder, and she turns to face the opposing expert witness. “You’ve just made lumber a whole lot more expensive.”

  She blinks at the accusation, unable to see how that might be a bad thing.

  “Every timber firm with private land or existing rights is going to cut as fast as they can.”

  THEIR HANDS FREEZE and their legs stiffen up, in space too cramped to turn over in. Nights are harsh enough to frostbite their sap-covered toes. The constant wind and flapping tarps shred their attempts to talk. Sometimes fat branches crash down from above. The quiet can be even more unnerving. Climbing is all the exercise they get. But in the changing light and floating days, things that would have seemed impossible on the ground become routine.

  Mornings are a game of cat and mouse. Or, say, owl and vole, with Watchman and Maidenhair peering down from their damp, freezing aerie onto the tiny mammals scurrying on the floor far below. The crews show up before the fog diffuses. One day, there are only three. The next, twenty, loud in the cockpits of their machines. Sometimes the loggers wheedle: “Come down for ten minutes.”

  “Can’t right now. We’re busy tree-sitting!”

  “We have to scream. Can’t even see you. This is breaking our necks.”

  “Come on up. Lots of room up here!”

  It’s an impasse. Different men show up on different days, trying to break it. Crew boss. Foreman. They yell hoarse threats and reasonable promises. Even the vice president for forest products pays a visit. He stands underneath Mimas in a white hard hat, like he’s orating on the floor of the Senate.

  “We can send you to prison for three years for criminal trespass.”

  “That’s why we’re not coming down.”

  “The losses we’re incurring. Huge fines.”

  “This tree is worth it.”

  The next day, the white-hatted VP is back. “If you two come down by five p.m. this evening, we’ll drop all charges. If you don’t, we can’t guarantee what’ll happen to you. Come down. We’ll let you walk. Your records will be clean.”

  Maidenhair leans out over the edge of the Grand Ballroom. “We’re not worried about our records. We’re worried about yours.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, she’s debating one of the loggers again when he stops in midsentence.

  “Hey! Take your cap off for a second.” She does. His shock is obvious from two-thirds of a football field away. “Shit! You’re gorgeous.”

  “You should see me up close! When I’m not frozen and have taken a bath in the last month or two.”

  “The hell you doing, sitting up in a tree? You could have any guy you want.”

  “Who wants guys when you can have Mimas?”

  “Mimas?”

  It’s a small victory, just getting him to use the name.

  WATCHMAN RELEASES A SALVO of paper bombs onto the loggers below. Unfolded, the sheets reveal pencil sketches of life at two hundred feet. The loggers are impressed. “You drew these?”

  “Guilty.”

  “For real? You got huckleberries up there?”

  “Thickets!”

  “And a pool with little fish in it?”

  “There’s more.”

  DAYS PASS, wet and icy, each more miserable than the last. The sitters that were to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never show. The standoff enters week two, and the ring of workers at the foot of Mimas turns angry.

  “You’re out in the middle of nowhere. Four miles from the nearest person. Things could happen. Nobody would know.”

  Maidenhair beams down on them, beatific. “You guys are too decent. You can’t even make a credible threat!”

  “You’re killing our livelihood.”

  “Your bosses are doing that.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years. More trees cut, fewer people working.”

  Stumped, the loggers wander into other tactics. “For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back! Have you seen the forests south of here?”

  “It’s a onetime jackpot,” Watchman shouts down. “A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”

  “What’s the matter with you two? Why do you hate people?”

  “What are you talking about? We’re doing this for people!”

  “These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”

  “Great. Let’s grind up your grandfather for dinner, while he still has some meat on him.”

  “You’re insane. Why are we even talking to you?”

  “We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives.”

  One of the loggers revs up his chain saw and whacks the branches of one of Mimas’s largest basal sprouts. He steps back and looks up, brandishing a limb like a sailboat mast. “We feed people. What do you do?”

  They shout at Maidenhair, tag team. “We know these forests. We respect these trees. These trees have killed our friends.”

  Maidenhair holds still. The idea of
a tree killing a person is too much for her to think about.

  The men below press their advantage. “You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”

  Watchman has seen the numbers. Hundreds of board feet of timber, half a ton of paper and cardboard per person per year. “We need to get smarter about what we need.”

  “I need to feed my kids. How about you?”

  Watchman sets to shout some things he knows he’ll regret. Maidenhair’s hand on his arm stops him. She’s gazing downward, trying to hear these men, attacked for doing what they’ve been asked to do. For doing something dangerous and vital that they’ve learned to do so well.

  “We’re not saying don’t cut anything.” She dangles her arm, reaching out to the men from two hundred feet away. “We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .”

  She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too.

  THERE ARE DAYS despondent with sleet. Afternoons that rise into muggy chill. Still the replacement sitters don’t show. Watchman improves the rain catchment system. Maidenhair builds a urinal that works for women. Late in week three, the loggers set up to do some nearby cutting. But they’re stymied after a couple of hours. It’s hard to drop trees the size of skyscrapers when a pop of the saw and a slight breeze might lead to manslaughter.

  That night, Loki and Sparks arrive at last. Loki ascends into Mimas’s upper camp. Sparks stays below as sentry. “Sorry we took so damn long. There’s been a little . . . infighting back at the camp. Also, Humboldt and their troops have the whole hillside cordoned off. Two nights ago, they chased us. They got Buzzard. He’s locked up.”

  “They’re watching the tree at night?”

  “We waited for the first chance to slip through.”

  The scout hands over precious supplies—packets of instant soup, peaches and apples, ten-grain cereal, couscous mix. Just add warm water. Watchman studies the goods. “We’re not being spelled out?”