The Overstory dives into the psychology of human beings as a species in order to explain their destructive impulses. Primarily, the novel questions how humanity can grow to recognize the life-or-death matter of saving the trees considering what has proven again and again to be inherent to human nature: the unstoppable desire to “grow harder; grow faster.” The Overstory acknowledges the many flaws in human nature and psychology—the need for always “a little bit more,” and to fit in with the group consensus, no matter how wrong it might be—but the novel also suggests that storytelling and the empathy that accompanies it can encourage people to act more morally and responsibly.
The Overstory emphasizes how psychology has proven that most people will become easily corrupted by power and also go along with whatever the rest of their immediate group is doing. Douglas Pavlicek first enters the story as a participant in the infamous (and historical) Stanford Prison Experiment. In this 1971 psychological study, the participants were randomly divided into prisoners and prison guards, with the latter group given total power over the former. Within only a few days, the guards were abusing and torturing the prisoners—who also turned against each other—and the study had to be shut down.
The character of Adam Appich further develops the idea that human beings follow predictable patterns. Adam becomes intrigued by psychology after reading a book called The Ape Inside Us, which contains many examples of how humans often fail at logical problems but are excellent at “herding each other” and “figuring out who’s in and who’s out […] who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy.” Later, Adam’s class lets his professor die of a heart attack while doing nothing to help. Adam blames this on the “bystander effect,” which says that people in a group are unlikely to help a victim, as they will follow the group and assume that someone else will take care of it.
This idea is then later applied to the destruction of the forests. As Adam talks with Olivia and Nick among the branches of the redwood called Mimas, they discuss how easy it is to ignore the deforestation crisis when six billion other people are also ignoring it. In this way, the novel suggests that human nature actively prevents us from taking positive action as long as the majority of our “group” remains apathetic or ignorant. This makes it all the more important to make the environmental crisis more prominent in the public mind.
Neelay Mehta’s game Mastery highlights a different aspect of human nature important to the book: the desire for endless growth and control. In the game, characters explore, harvest resources, and build, all while competing with other players for limited resources. Later versions of the game add new elements—new continents, new resources, better graphics—but keep the same idea of potentially limitless growth and consumption. Similarly, when Neelay himself tries to change the game to something more like actual nature, his staff revolts. All they want to do is keep expanding the world of the game and keep it about “mastery,” and thus continue making more and more profits. This is an extended analogy for how humans act in the real world: treating trees as renewable resources with no limit, and cutting them down much faster than they can grow back. The logging companies demand immediate profits and cannot account for the complexity of an interdependent environment or the centuries needed to build up an old-growth forest. And while the group agrees that this is an acceptable state of affairs, the majority will remain passive bystanders.
Despite this grim outlook on human nature, the novel does offer a way to get around humankind’s herd mentality and selfishness: storytelling and art. When Adam first joins the environmental activists, he is skeptical about changing the public’s mind because of what he knows about group psychology. Olivia asks him what they can do, and he responds: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Later Adam puts this into practice by making a story out of his very life—accepting more than a century in prison instead of giving up his fellow activists, and even claiming responsibility for crimes he didn’t commit. Mimi Ma realizes that “he has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers”—it is only a story like this that might actually change people’s ingrained opinions. Likewise, Nick continues to make activist art for the rest of his life after Olivia’s death. Other characters often see this art in person or on the internet, and they are moved by its passion. At the end of the novel Nick is constantly moving about, creating installations and graffiti, and though he is still haunted by loneliness and regret over Olivia’s death, the book presents his actions as a positive influence on the world: an attempt to use art for the sake of activism.
Overall, the novel suggests that “a good story” is what is needed to break through the biases of human nature—and that is exactly what The Overstory itself aims to be. Richard Powers essentially takes his argument about the importance of defending trees and turns it into a novel, in the hopes that the “good story” will connect with more people and change more minds than a scientific tract or essay would.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Human Nature, Psychology, and Storytelling ThemeTracker
Human Nature, Psychology, and Storytelling 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.
“They see every answer. Nothing hurt them anymore. Emperor come and go. Qing, Ming, Yuan. Communism, too. Little insect on a giant dog. But these guy?” He clicked his tongue and held up his thumb, as if these little Buddhas were the ones to put money on, in the run of time.
At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.
Adam can’t stop reading. Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they're fast and fantastic at figuring out who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant. Whole new rooms open up in Adam's brain, ready to be furnished.
In fact, it's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.
Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
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.
"I'd like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . ."
"…while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties. Now we get somewhere. This could be a topic. With much more narrowing and definition. You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness. Study those people who support a position that any reason- able person in our society thinks is crazy."
"For instance?"
"We're living at a time when claims are being made for a moral authority that lies beyond the human. […] You've seen the news. People up and down this coast are risking their lives for plants. I read a story last week—a man who had his legs sheared off by a machine he tried to chain himself to."
Adam has seen the stories, but he ignored them. Now he can't see why. "Plant rights? Plant personhood." A boy he knew once jumped into a hole and risked live burial to protect his unborn brother's sapling from harm. That boy is dead. "I hate activists."
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.
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.
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.
