“Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”
― Richard Powers, from The Overstory (2018)
Roughly half the earth’s humans belong to the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While differences abound between and among these groups, they seem to share a few basic understandings of humanity. The followers of each believe in only a single God. They also believe that messengers/prophets have been dispatched to reveal what He expects from us. From these divine interactions with humans, sacred texts are written to reveal His will. While interpreting these divine messages differently, followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam also believe that human beings have a responsibility to live according to His will. And it is from His will that humans are to determine what is right and what is wrong; human morality. Those who get it right are off to heaven and those who get it wrong… well, you know…
In my own experiences, many individuals who claim connection to these religious groups do not necessarily ascribe to these teachings with the same degree of faith as others.
Missing from this rather constricting religious assessment of humanity is the 4.5 billion year-old Earth and the vast and abundant forms of other life that have evolved on it; beginning about 3.5 billion years ago. Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims think a great deal of what it means to be human is that we, alone, among all living things, have been directed by a divine power in the manner in which we should behave.
Unfortunately, for the masses of the faithful, so insignificant is humanity’s place on Earth that if we were to condense the time of Earth’s existence into a single 24 hour day, human beings as we know them/us today have been around for only the last four seconds of that day. And in those four seconds, all the world’s religions have been created. It is only in those four seconds that a handful of humans claimed that God had spoken to them. It is only in the last four seconds of that long Earth day that others were inspired by these messengers to write the necessary books; books that inform over three billion people, through allegory and anecdote, how to conduct their lives.
And in those four seconds, half of humanity —or at least that part of the half that really believes these things—has decided that humans alone are endowed with the potential for immortality and that all other living things on Earth are subordinate
How is it that over three billion human beings on the planet today arrived at the conclusion that they should evaluate their place in the world this way? That they, as humans, were meant to serve as stewards over all living things? And, most remarkably to me, how did so many humans come to believe that they are meant to hold dominion over a planet that had done remarkably well without them for billions of years?
I think of this now after reading The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers, who writes about trees. If that seems a rather trivial subject upon which to dwell when pondering the purposes of human existence, consider that trees as we know them today have been on Earth roughly 300 million years; or, one thousand times longer than homo sapiens who made their first appearance on Earth only 300 thousand years ago… four seconds ago, if you will…
Richard Powers writes elegantly that “[Humanity] found that trees could communicate [albeit in ways we cannot fully comprehend] over the air and through their roots… We found that trees take care of each other… how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly.… how trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. He writes that trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks… a forest knows things. He writes that they wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
Just as many humans mistakenly see themselves as holding dominion over nature, we should not imagine that the single tree outside your window, growing in your landscaped yard holds these qualities as Powers describes. For, it is not so much the tree of which Powers writes, but the forest; and in this case, the evolution of old-growth forests over thousands of years into rich and intricately interconnected ecosystems exhibiting dazzling powers of communication, interdependence, and efficiency.
The Overstory portrays the magnificence of old-growth forests while simultaneously decrying their humanity driven destruction. Something like 70 percent of old-growth forests have been cut down globally. Despite claims from logging companies and other capitalists, planting individual trees for future cutting does not a forest make. (See here for a dramatic video demonstrating the extent of clear-cutting in old-growth forests across the globe.)*
Dr. Patricia Westerford is one of several protagonists in The Overstory who come to understand the beauty and complexity of the forest: “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 micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.”
If one can begin to see a forest in this way, it becomes much more difficult to see humanity as isolated beings whose primary pursuit in life is to preserve one’s soul. Of course, beyond those touched by the West and its peculiar—albeit incredibly popular— way of thinking about humanity, there are those who not only see the forest this way; they see themselves as part of a comprehensive and interconnected web of life on Earth. Among these are Buddhists, Hindus, Animists, Pantheists, and others.
Instead of looking out for one’s immortal soul by treating other humans according to God’s will, this “Eastern” thinking about humanity tends to open up a broader understanding of the living Earth and man’s place in it.
“People,” Powers writes, “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.”
As far as the fictional humans in this wonderful book, the nine protagonists emerge from several different backstories and then converge during the late twentieth century as logging companies are ravaging the landscape in the Northwest United States. So divergent are these early tales that The Overstory at first appears to be a collection of short stories, each with trees playing an important role. Indeed, as the individual characters begin to meet one another it seems as if their gathering is actually due to the summoning of the trees themselves.
This nature-driven spirituality is a refreshing antidote to our troubled times, especially when much of the trouble we now live with is the manner in which human beings interact with one another. Richard Powers deftly situates this troubled humanity within the larger scope of the rhythms and interconnectedness of life on Earth.
For instance, protagonist Adam is a doctoral student in psychology who joins the environmental activists in order to understand what motivates them and their increasingly reckless ways. “That’s when Adam realizes,” Powers reveals, “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.”
This revelation occurs to others because, as Powers adds, “When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways.” The thoughtful author’s love of planet Earth is on par with his disgust for human activity: “Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.”
If you’re smart enough to imagine a divine being looking out for you, Powers asks us to consider, in relation to a vibrant and enduring Earth, that you are also “[s]mart enough to see that you’re a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?” Ouch!
Of course, Powers’ misanthropy is driven by human beings wreaking havoc on planet Earth. While the clear-cutting of old-growth forests is the dramatic vehicle with which Powers tells his tale, it is the comprehensive destruction of our planet that he wishes us to consider.
Unfortunately, as stewards and caretakers of the planet, the human track record is not good, especially in the extremely short time that our species has adopted industrial capitalism thoroughly dependent upon continuous economic growth as the end-all of human existence.
The widespread extraction of natural resources began less than three hundred years ago. During the last 80 years, the pace of that extraction has dramatically accelerated as the booming global economy has been fueled largely with the fossilized remains of all that life that came before us. The oceans are warming. The climate is changing. Species that once thrived have been vastly diminished. Entire ecosystems have been vanquished. And at the heart of this in The Overstory is deforestation, which Powers describes as “a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together.”
We often speak of climate change in terms of human populations and the effect that a changing climate will have on human habitability. This approach proceeds from the same erroneous thinking that drives the myth of human exceptionalism; that humans hold dominion over the planet. As Richard Powers writes, “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
As delivered by Dr. Patricia Westerford: “It’s so simple… so obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.”
It is in the Old Testament, the foundation of all three Abrahamic faiths, where we find a fundamental misunderstanding of life on Earth: “When the world was ending the first time,” Westerford advises a group of scientists hoping to somehow save the Earth from humanity, “Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!”
It’s not as if we’ve had no example or warning about the fragility of life on Earth. In a single moment of enlightenment, while working alongside a Native American, another protagonist, Nick, says of the trees, “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.” In reply, his companion says, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.”
*Time Lapse deforestation of planet Earth, 1984-2020
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