I'll never look at a tree the same way again
- Sofia Livorsi
- Aug 29, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 15, 2021
This is a photo of our middle child, the gentle, steady one whose emotional antennae are so well tuned she could give most adults sensitivity lessons, myself included. During a snack break on a family hike in Georgia when she was two years old, my husband and I turned and saw that she was literally hugging a tree.
We laughed and took a photo, not knowing that as this little girl grew older she would grow into a young environmentalist who in second grade started an “Earth Savers Club,” made anti-littering posters for the school hallways, and put together an informational video with her friends about pollution.
No one has yet accused her of being a “tree-hugger,” but if her activist streak continues into adulthood and someone eventually does, she’s guilty as charged and we have photo evidence.
In Richard Powers's The Overstory, which I recently finished, some of the central characters also wrap their arms around trees, using their own bodies as shields to prevent centuries-old giant hemlocks and Douglas firs in Oregon and California from being cut down for timber.
tThree of the characters spend weeks camping out on a wooden platform 100 feet above the ground in the forest canopy, also known as the overstory. The spellbinding description of their life in this alien world up high--how they wake up to the sunrise over the treetops and spend their days climbing and exploring (attached to long safety cables), how they barely hang on as the tree gets whiplashed by the wind in a thunderstorm--was the most memorable part of the book for me.
Though The Overstory is a work of fiction, parts of it were likely inspired by real-life “tree huggers” and “tree sitters” protesting deforestation in the late 1980s. The characters are vividly drawn, each with their own distinct personality but still able to surprise me. At times irritating and at times deeply lovable. In other words, a lot like real people.
Their fight to save the old-growth forests lies at the center of the book's plot, which is structured, brilliantly, in the shape of a tree: Roots, Trunk, Branches, Seeds.
The first section, Roots, reads like a collection of short stories. Somewhere in each one there is a connection between the character and trees, whether obvious or subtle, positive or negative. In the next section, Trunk, all these separate plotlines are slowly brought together into one.
A dramatic climax sends the main characters scattering, and their stories diverge into separate paths again—Branches. Many of the people you've now grown to love are lonely; they're disappointed. They feel like they've failed. And then, in the final section, Seeds, the author gifts you with some beautiful little nuggets of hope for what may transpire in the future.
The four parts of the book each evoke a different emotional state, like movements in a work of classical music. When my husband asked me what I thought of the book after I finished it, I had to think for a moment to find the appropriate word. “It was magnificent,” I finally said. “It felt like reading a symphony.”
It was the gorgeous painting on the cover that drew me in, as I was looking for books to put on my birthday wish list this spring. Seeing those giant evergreens brought back memories of walking through Muir Woods during a brief visit to San Francisco with two dear friends, many years ago. After the bustle and excitement of the city it seemed we had stepped into an enchanted forest from a fairy tale; the light changed, the air was thick and fragrant, and the trees were impossibly tall. Would reading this book evoke the same awestruck feeling?
Yes, absolutely it did. Not only through the beauty of the author’s writing, but also through the incredible-but-true facts he shares about trees. More than once I had to put down the book and just sit for a moment dumbstruck, in awe of the masterful work of our Creator.
For example, a “grove” of aspens is actually one single organism, with multiple trunks that look like separate trees but are all genetically identical, spreading across acres and acres of land. The individual trunks may only last 100-150 years, but the entire clone-grove is ancient—at least 80,000 years old in one case according to scientists’ estimates. What????
When one of the characters described giant spreader figs, which are native to India and other parts of southeast Asia, I almost couldn’t believe it. I had to look it up… and what I found was stunning.
The banyan fig in this picture is so massive, it takes ten minutes to walk around the circle of shade made by its crown. In one part of India, people use the above-ground root networks of spreader figs as bridges across creeks or small rivers.
Some species of figs are considered sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism (it was reportedly under a giant Ficus religiosa that the man who became known as the Buddha received his enlightenment). They can grow to enormous size, with above-ground roots as thick as your average English or American oak tree reaching down from their branches toward the ground.
What The Overstory tells us over and over, in a myriad different ways, is that trees do not simply exist for the purpose of being useful to humankind. (As a Catholic, I would say they exist for the same reason we do—to give glory to God and to make visible some element of His character—but I’m not sure whether or not the author would agree with me on that.)
What we definitely do agree on is that trees are amazing creatures, alive and active in more ways than most of us realize, and worthy of our respect and protection. And… we need them.
Not just because they make the oxygen we breathe, but because deep down beneath the surface of things we are connected. Part of the one artwork, the one story.
Before reading The Overstory, I was aware, in an intellectual way, of Catholic teachings about the interconnectedness of all of Creation… but this book made me feel it. Like a little girl who wants to hug a tree, just because.
There’s a reason why it won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But as with a symphony, to fully appreciate its beauty you have to experience the whole arc, from beginning to end.
And yes, it’s long, but absolutely worth it.
Image/fact sources:
Redwood trees reach the sky in California's Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
(Image: © Felix Lipov | Shutterstock)
ML Harris/Getty Images
I love the picture of your daughter hugging the tree! This makes me want to go for a hike!