The Overstory contains many tragic examples of people destroying nature and harming themselves in the process, and the book ultimately presents a rather bleak view of our prospects on this planet. People cannot seem to stop commodifying everything, destroying it for immediate profit with no thought for a long-term future or for the rights of beings other than themselves. This mass destruction and extinction are simple facts of life at this point in history, but the novel tries to step back from a narrow human point of view and look at Earth’s living environment as a whole. Though humanity has disrupted the usual cycles of nature, these cycles will adapt and adjust. The Overstory ultimately concludes that humanity’s destructive character will likely result in our own extinction—unless we are able to make a drastic change—but that nature and life itself will persevere, continuing on through its slow cycles of death and rebirth.
The clearest point the novel makes in this regard is that humans are causing the extinction of countless other species, at a rate unprecedented in all of Earth’s history. Patricia Westerford spells it out clearly to her husband, Dennis: “A third to a half of existing species may go extinct by the time I’m gone […] Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we’ve barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once.” The end of this quote shows how such destruction is harmful not only to the species going extinct, but to humans as well. So much value—medicines, knowledge, inspiration, history—comes from the natural world.
Some of the book’s characters react to this dire situation with despair, even going so far as to hope that humans go extinct soon in order to save nature. Living in the branches of a redwood tree called Mimas, Nick Hoel hopes that “green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.” Douglas Pavlicek tells the seedlings that he plants, “Hang on […] You just have to outlast us.” Indeed, the book makes the point again and again that the destruction of nature will inevitably lead to human extinction, and in the face of these failures, some characters feel that humanity deserves it. The hope that they derive from this situation is that though humanity may perish, nature will not. Trees just have to “outlast us” and they will be able to recover, however long it may take.
This leads to the idea of seeds and rebirth: that there is still hope for both nature and humanity despite the destruction that has already taken place. Though Patricia is one of the most pessimistic and pragmatic characters regarding the state of nature (she goes so far as to plan to commit suicide in public, saying that the best thing humans can do for nature is simply to die), she also takes action to prepare for a better future by starting a seed bank. She travels all around the world, gathering seeds from different species of trees and keeping them in a frozen vault, hoping to one day replant them even if they go extinct in the wild. These seeds then become physical symbols of hope for the future.
Further, the book describes all the different ways that seeds survive, and how some of them must even undergo traumatic processes in order to germinate. When she receives her “enlightenment” beneath the pine tree at the novel’s end, Mimi Ma is comforted by the idea that “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.” This implies that destruction is an inherent part of new creation—some things must be “smashed open” before they can bloom—and both are aspects of the same natural cycle. There is hope for nature even in the midst of tragedy, The Overstory suggests, and by the same logic, there is even hope for humanity. If we, too, can make a dramatic change and stop destroying nature at such a reckless rate, we also will survive and adapt.
Olivia’s last words to Nick as she dies are, “This will never end—what we have. Right?” It is ambiguous what she is asking about, and these words haunt Nick for decades to come, but they also speak to the question of endings and beginnings, destruction and rebirth, that threads The Overstory. Even when it seems that all is lost, nature has the potential to “never end.” Despite human destruction and even possible extinction, nature continues to adapt and be reborn.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Destruction, Extinction, and Rebirth ThemeTracker
Destruction, Extinction, and Rebirth Quotes in The Overstory
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.
"I want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees in the world as there were before we came down out of them. […] Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we've barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once."
"You want to start an ark."
She smiles at the word, but shrugs. It's as good as any. "I want to start an ark."
"Where you can keep . . ." The strangeness of the idea gets him. A vault to store a few hundred million years of tinkering. Hand on the car door, he fixes on something high up in a cedar. "What . . . would you do with them? When would they ever…?"
"Den, I don't know. But a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years."
"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—"
On his fourth night in the cell, Nick dreams about the Hoel family chestnut. He watches it, sped up thirty-two million times, reveal again its invisible plan. He remembers, in his sleep, on the cot's thin mattress, the way the time-lapse tree waved its swelling arms. The way those arms tested, explored, aligned in the light, writing messages in the air. In that dream, the trees laugh at them. Save us? What a human thing to do. Even the laugh takes years.
"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.
“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
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.
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.
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.
