The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 November 2024
by Richard Powers
I cannot tell a lie, said young George Washington, It was I who cut down the cherry tree.
Or so goes the legend. It is a parable of the honesty displayed by the Father of Our Country (would that present day leaders were anywhere near this honest). Perhaps, though, the story could also be told from the point of view of the tree. Innocent, and unable to escape, the young tree became an unwilling victim in this childishly wanton act of destruction, living now forever as a footnote to a human story.
Humans evolved about two million years ago, more or less, depending on your ultimate definition of human. In days gone by, our evolution was often described as when we "descended from the trees." Trees themselves started out a few hundred million years before us. They've had the better part of half a billion years to refine their existence. Do any of us truly believe that humans will be here still in a million years, let alone four hundred million years? Will humans ever be able to say of themselves that we nurtured and sent forth a whole hopeful species of sentient monkeys the way that trees could "say" of themselves? We owe our origins to trees and to a greater extent than we ever truly acknowledge, we owe our lives to trees to this day. Humans aren't all that good at honoring the natural environment in which we live. Today, our natural sciences are full of depressed individuals merely cataloging the natural world that we're losing on a daily basis. Which brings us to this epic novel.
Richard Powers assembles a complex and deeply realized cast of characters in the opening third of this novel, sprawling over decades and across the country. We meet a long-lived family of Iowa farmers and their tiny family of American Chestnut trees, eventually doomed together by the blight that will one day decimate the great chestnut forests of this continent. There's a young boy of Indian parents, who grows up with the computer industry, and whose life is shaped by an accident in which a tree caused him grave injury. There's a woman who grew up with a love of the natural world, became an academic whose career is shattered by its sheer innovation, only to be vindicated by time. And there are others. Each whose life is shaped by their relationship to the natural world and, particularly, the nurturing vibrance of arboreal life. They are all eventually drawn closer together by the redwood wars of the Pacific Northwest. Not widely recalled, but a critical moment in the environmental movement, these political and actual battles took place in the 1980s and early 1990s, when activists tried to counter the collapse of sustainable lumber practices brought about by the culture of Wall Street raiders, the kind of actions that decimate businesses large and small to this day.
It was the time of the critically endangered Spotted Owl. It was a time when we came to realize that saving one species could mean we needed to save an entire ecosystem. That is still true, but the moral imperitive to preserve a species or a primeval forest has wavered back and forth. Back then, the joke was to eat spotted owl for Thanksgiving. The forces of traditional forestry fought the environmentalists, while the Wall Street bankers avoided accountability. It was fierce, ugly, and occasionally fatal. And here's the deal: did anything really change? Did Wall Street raiders stop raping the environment for short-term profit? Of course not. If anything, environmental destruction has only accelerated and the entire world now faces climate collapse beneath the weight of the demands of wealth (but not prosperity). Bowers places his characters in the middle of this fight, and introduces a psychology researcher who asks the question: what makes a person go against the inertial pressure of his social group to sound the alarm on something nobody really wants to question, especially if it means we have to change?
Fateful events follow. Lives are changed. Movements come and go. Radicals are finally chased down by the FBI. The trees persist in trying to teach their lesson. Believe it or not, there's a whole cohort out there that thinks AI could be the answer. If only AI itself wasn't laying waste to the climate and consuming vast stores of clean water. Could it be that the answer lies in humanity's extinction? Because, given another billion years of existence, a new global ecosystem will evolve, as complex and beautiful as the one falling to collapse right now. Trees will endure, somehow. And without humans, their greatest threat might just be the next big meteor impact.
The book is a challenge to its readers. But it is also beautifully written and compelling. Highly recommended.
(For this novel, Powers was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)