While The Overstory attempts to base its sense of time on the concentric growth of rings on a tree, it also structures its story around the endless branching and complexity of a tree’s limbs and roots. There are nine main characters, each with their own storylines, yet all are inextricably connected. This then gestures towards a paradox at the heart of the book, and of trees themselves: how beings can be both complex and ever-dividing while also being bound to each other and interdependent. Through both the style of the novel and its various subjects, The Overstory suggests that trees, like the actions of humans, are simultaneously full of complex division and ultimately bound to each other.
The novel’s structure reflects the nature of a tree. Each character is first introduced in a section called “Roots.” This is when they are all still divided (none of them know each other yet), but drawing closer together, just like the branched roots of a tree leading up towards the single trunk. The next section, “Trunk,” tells of when many of them are actually in the same place, working as an activist unit against the logging companies. “Crown” then describes them splitting off from each other again (after Olivia’s death) like new branches. “Seeds” looks towards the future, showing what might fall from these “branches” and sprout someday. Further, the book’s nine protagonists are each narrated in the present tense, which immediately creates the sense of nine different branches with the potential to divide in further ways through any future action they might take. Any choice they make beyond the current present tense represents a new branch.
Within the novel’s actual story, many characters also muse on time and human action as a kind of branching. Neelay in particular deals with branching in his software programming (“branching” is also a technical term, as the novel points out), and is inspired by the structure of the trees at Stanford’s wild terrarium to create his incredibly complex and immersive game Mastery. He is described as “reincarnating himself” to live thousands of other lives through the alternate reality he creates, and he even dreams of branches at night. Once Dorothy starts finding joy in identifying and nurturing trees, she looks out on their chestnut tree and sees in “[its] branching the several speculative paths of a lived life, all the people she might have been, the ones she could or will yet be…”
Intertwined with this motif of branching and division is another, seemingly contradictory image: that of connection and interdependence. Among trees, this is mostly illustrated through Patricia’s studies and discoveries. Her first great breakthrough—which is initially mocked but later makes her famous—is that trees actually communicate with each other and with other species. Then she writes a book, The Secret Forest, all about the subject. “There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” she writes. “Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.” This connects the two images elegantly: the forest is ever spreading and branching, but it is also all one interconnected whole, a single, infinitely complex organism. Similarly, though the novel’s characters undergo their own divided stories, they are all connected in some way, however tenuously. The most obvious example is in the “Trunk” section, when Olivia, Nick, Douglas, Mimi, and Adam all join together, first with Free Cascadia and then as their own arsonist group. But more tangential characters also share the same story. All the characters read Patricia’s book The Secret Forest at some point, Ray and Dorothy follow the stories of the activists on the news, and Neelay seemingly prevents Patricia’s suicide by waving his arms and shouting to her when no one else in the room will act. Like trees, which seem divided and ever-dividing within themselves, people are also connected at their roots and constantly in communication with each other, affecting others with their own actions.
Living among the trees, Patricia observes that “when the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse […] and become one.” They are still two separate trees on the surface, but deep underground they join together and share nutrients. Similarly, both the structure and the characters of The Overstory are both unique entities, divided and branching, and intimately bound together, even in ways no one else can see.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Complexity, Branching, and Interdependence ThemeTracker
Complexity, Branching, and Interdependence Quotes in The Overstory
The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
She controls for everything she can, and the results are always the same. Only one conclusion makes any sense: The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They're linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.
She can't quite let herself believe. But the data keep confirming. And on that evening when Patricia finally accepts what the measurements say, her limbs heat up and tears run down her face. For all she knows, she's the first creature in the expanding adventure of life who has ever glimpsed this small but certain thing that evolution is up to. Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.
These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.
Years from now, she’ll write a book of her own, The Secret Forest. Its opening page will read:
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes….
Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.
The reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It's something she learned long ago from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is something any generous person can understand and love.
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.
"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.
"People are so beautiful."
He turns to her, horrified. But he's a man of faith, and waits to hear whatever explanation she cares to deliver. And, Yes, she thinks. The thought makes her stubborn. Yes: beautiful. And doomed. Which is why she has never been able to live among them.
"Hopelessness makes them determined. Nothing's more beautiful than that."
"You think we're hopeless?"
"Den. How is extraction ever going to stop? It can't even slow down. The only thing we know how to do is grow. Grow harder; grow faster. More than last year. Growth, all the way up to the cliff and over. No other possibility."
“I see.”
Clearly he doesn't. But his willingness to lie for her also breaks her heart. She would tell him—how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man…Unless man.
"It's so simple," she says. "So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt." Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking. "Is the house on fire?"
A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. "Yes."
"And you want to observe the handful of people who're screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn."
A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam's observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. "It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . ."
"…the harder it is to cry, Fire?"
"Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—"
"—lots of people would already have—"
"You're a psychologist," Mimi says to the recruit. "How do we convince people that we're right?"
The newest Cascadian takes the bait. "The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story."
Maidenhair tells that story that the rest of the campfire knows by heart. First she was dead, and there was nothing. Then she came back, and there was everything, with beings of light telling her how the most wondrous products of four billion years of life needed her help.
He looks up at the peaked roof of the construction office and thinks, What the hell am I doing? The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world's most wondrous creatures: all these abandon Adam, and he's left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
Species disappear. Patricia writes of them. Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.
More people are born in twenty years than were alive in the year of Douglas's birth.
Nick hides and works. What's twenty years, to work that's slower than trees?
We are not, one of Adam's papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.
The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end. It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
One passage keeps springing back, every time fear or scientific rigor makes her prune it. Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
[…]
As soon as she seals the carton with packing tape, she cracks it open again. The last line of the last chapter is still wrong. She looks at what she has, although the sentence has long since burned itself into permanent memory. With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.
“A forest knows things. 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.”
Her words sound far away, cork-lined and underwater. Either both her hearing aids have died at once or her childhood deafness has chosen this moment to come back.
“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn't even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we've always wanted things from them. This isn't mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other.”
The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
Neelay’s shouts come too late to break the room's spell. The speaker raises her glass, and the world splits. Down one branch, she lifts the glass to her lips, toasts the room—To Tachigali versicolor—and drinks. Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience. She bumps the podium, backs away, and stumbles into the wings, leaving the room to stare at an empty stage.
The words Neelay writes add to a growing organism, one that has just now begun to add to itself. At other screens in other cities, all the best coders that several hundred million dollars can hire contribute to the work in progress. Their brand-new venture into cooperation is off to the most remarkable beginning. Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There's so much digital germplasm already in the public domain.
The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look. Then the new creations head off to scout the globe, and the code spreads outward. New theories, new offspring, and more evolving species, all of them sharing a single goal: to find out how big life is, how connected, and what it would take for people to unsuicide. The Earth has become again the deepest, finest game, and the learners just its latest players.
Although he should just shut up, so much time has passed since Nick has had the luxury of saying anything to anyone that he can't resist. His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. "It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear."
The man chuckles. "We've been trying to tell you that since 1492."
The man has jerked meat. Nick doles out the last of his fruit and nuts. "I'm going to have to think about restocking soon."
For some reason, his colleague finds this funny, too. The man swivels his head around the woods as if there were forage everywhere. As if people could live here, and die, with just a little looking and listening. From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands what Maidenhair's voices must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
Not them; us. Help from all quarters.
In silence, he walks his lifelong partner through old and central principles of jurisprudence, one syllable at a time. Stand your ground. The castle doctrine. Self-help.
If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.
[…]
He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.
[…]
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet's lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they'll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
