The Overstory

by

Richard Powers

The Overstory: Part 2: Trunk Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
An unnamed man sits at a desk in a cell. He is in prison because of trees—“trees and too much love of them.” He examines the wood of the desk, tracing its grain with his fingers and wishing that he could interpret the lines’ meanings. He feels “illiterate,” like he could learn everything about the tree that this wood came from if only he could properly understand its language.
As in the beginning of Part 1, Part 2 opens with an unnamed character alone with his thoughts. (It’s later implied that this man is either Douglas or Adam.) Again, the narrative makes the connection between trees and language itself, as if the grains of wood were letters that could be parsed and understood, like the word “book” deriving from “beech.”
Themes
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The narrative returns to Olivia Vandergriff. She is dead for 70 seconds, and then she falls off the bed, and her heart starts beating again. Davy finds her there—he had come over hoping to have breakup sex—and rushes her to the university hospital. There she revives, and she soon escapes from the hospital while the doctors are busy. She immediately returns to her house and shuts herself in her room for two full days, refusing to let anyone in. In her solitude, she sleeps and tries to remember what happened while she was dead. She can recall large, mysterious shapes calling her and pleading with her, but no more details. She tries to speak to them, asking what they want her to do, and she realizes that she is praying.
Part 2 of The Overstory frequently jumps back and forth between the main characters rather than following them one at a time. Here, the narrative immediately returns to the moment of Olivia’s death. Her experience upon waking—of being visited by mysterious non-human beings­—will be the first driver of the plot to bring the many disparate characters together. Olivia is entirely unreligious, but she realizes that she is essentially praying when she finds herself pleading to larger forces that she does not understand.
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Olivia skips her final exams and calls her parents to say that she isn’t coming home for Christmas. Confused and offended, they try to convince her to come home. Olivia tries to explain to them what happened to her when she died, and they have the longest conversation they have in years without fighting with each other. Over Christmas break, Olivia gets rid of all the drugs she owns, barely eats, and continues to wait for the mysterious voices to return. When her housemates come back, they seem afraid of her because of how much she’s changed.
Olivia has been drastically changed by her experience, and everyone else is concerned by this. For her part, she finally stops distracting herself and slows down, trying to find once more the voices that came to her in death.
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The semester begins, and at her very first lecture, Olivia senses the mysterious presences again. She follows their signals and heads outside, soon realizing that she’s being led to her car. She realizes that she’ll need to drive for a long time, so she stops at her house to get supplies, then gets on the highway and heads west. She has no plan and sometimes feels crazy and aimless, but then the presences return to reassure her, and she keeps going. Now in Indiana, she sleeps in her car that night.
Olivia has fully given up control of her life—which now only exists because of an apparent miracle—to the mysterious beings of light. She sacrifices her comfortable existence and immediately starts sleeping in her car and driving west.
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The narrator notes that Olivia is following the same path that Johnny Appleseed did centuries before, and that he once even owned the plot of land that is now the parking lot where she’s sleeping. When Olivia wakes up, she senses “beings of light” filling her car, just as they appeared when she was dead. They pass through her body and seem to speak to her. She asks what they want, but then the noise of a truck passing seems to drive them away.
Johnny Appleseed was a real historical figure named John Chapman, an American conservationist and nurseryman who famously introduced apple trees to the Midwest, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ontario. That Olivia is following the same path as Johnny Appleseed (unbeknownst to her) perhaps suggests that she is destined for a similar conservationist mission. The beings of light appear on Johnny Appleseed’s plot of land and are driven away by the sound of a truck, suggesting their connection to trees and their vulnerability to human technology.
Themes
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Olivia goes into a box store to use the bathroom and walks through a row of TVs, all playing the same news station at once. Suddenly, they show footage of people chained around a giant tree, in front of a bulldozer. One of the people talks to the camera, begging to save these trees that are older than Jesus. Olivia freezes, and the beings of light seem to say “this, this, this.” Then the program changes and the beings vanish.
The Overstory often uses the voices of its characters to make arguments against deforestation. It also frequently compares the ages of old-growth trees to markers of human history, like the birth of Jesus. The beings of light seem to want Olivia to join these people protesting the logging of these enormous trees.
Themes
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Olivia wanders back to her car in a daze, feeling like she must keep going west and find these trees and these people. At the Illinois border, she gets stuck behind a train, all of its cars filled to the brim with lumber. Soon, she loses count of how many train cars there are and starts to think about the endless flow of logged wood across the country at all times. After the train passes, Olivia sits in her car and seems to hear the message: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.” Finally, she starts her car and keeps driving, now knowing what her purpose is.
As when Douggie first saw the extent of the clear-cut mountains beyond the fringes of the highway, here Olivia also realizes what has been right in front of her all along: the constant stream of lumber that contemporary society demands. This message from the beings of light is a crucial one for the plot of the book, as Olivia thinks it makes her purpose clear: she must save the redwoods.
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The narrative shifts to years before Olivia’s trip, following Ray and Dorothy as they come home from a play that they’ve been performing in. They park in their driveway, Dorothy venting her dissatisfaction with her life. She is about to turn 42 years old, and over the past several years the couple has spent tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments trying to have a child, but none of them have been successful. Dorothy lashes out at Ray in her anger, while he has learned to just stay quiet.
Dorothy and Ray’s story runs alongside those of the other characters, but on its own timeline and in its own small, suburban world. The two are now frustrated with each other and their life, mostly because of their failure to have a child.
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The couple enters the house, and Dorothy soon breaks down crying. Ray comforts her and suggests that they could adopt a child instead, though Dorothy won’t consider this option. Suddenly she remembers their anniversary custom of planting something every year, which they have forgotten about in recent years. She stands up quickly and accidentally strikes Ray’s face with her shoulder. As she apologizes and he flails, the narrator notes that outside the house all the things Ray and Dorothy have planted over the years are busy growing, quietly “making meaning” from nothing.
Just like Patricia forgot for several years about her beech tree experiment with her father, the Brinkmans forget about their goal of planting something every year on their anniversary. It is difficult, the book implies, to reconcile the speed of regular human life with the slow pace of trees without actively paying attention. At the same time, the trees outside create their own kind of meaning, one entirely separate from the dramas of the Brinkmans’ marriage. With this, the book again highlights the divide between what is usually thought of as meaningful and a good story (marital troubles in suburbia, perhaps) and what is also a meaningful story: the slow growth of trees.
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The narrative returns to Olivia, who is now specifically heading for Northern California. She crosses into Iowa and stops at a giant truck stop, where she falls asleep in a chair, is chastised for doing so, and returns to her car. The next morning, Olivia finds a pay phone and calls her father. He is shocked to hear that she is in Iowa and begs her to go back to school, but she tells him that she has been “recruited” for important volunteer work in California. Olivia’s father argues and then begs her to at least come home, but Olivia reassures him that she is doing what she needs to do.
At this point, the characters exist in different timelines, just as all humans exist in a different timeline from trees. Olivia’s is most immediate at the moment, while the Brinkmans’ story is a years-long summary currently taking place in Olivia’s past (though all the storylines are still narrated in the present tense). Olivia has found a new sense of meaning and purpose from the beings of light, and her father is confused by the sudden change in her character.
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Olivia drives through a bleak and beautiful landscape, feeling in love with everything, including humanity. Suddenly, the mysterious presences alert her to a sign on the side of the road, hanging from an enormous, ancient tree: “FREE TREE ART.” Olivia pulls off at the next exit and finds her way to the giant tree. Near it is an old barn, its side painted with an enormous mural of flowering trees. Olivia pulls up and sees a man a few years older than she is, with long hair and a beard. He seems nervous and tells her that she’s the first person to stop because of the sign. He invites her into the barn to see his gallery.
This is the first meeting of two characters from Part One: Nicholas Hoel and Olivia Vandergriff, brought together by the Hoel chestnut tree. Nick has clearly still been living in his family’s house after their deaths, and he’s now totally isolated. The message from the beings of light suggests that Nick and Olivia’s meeting is part of their larger plan.
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Upstairs in the barn, Olivia is surprised to see an artist’s studio filled to the brim with paintings and sculptures of trees. She asks the man if he’s really giving these all away for free and suggests that he should be selling them in New York or Chicago instead. Olivia keeps looking at the art and then at the man, wondering how he fits into her new mission. The two introduce themselves to each other: the man is Nicholas Hoel. Nick then shows her the flipbook with the 76 years of pictures of the family chestnut tree. Olivia recognizes it as the tree she saw from the highway.
Living alone after his family members’ deaths, Nick has delved into his art, all of it based around trees. Olivia is still entirely concerned with the mission that the beings of light have imparted to her, and she wonders what she is supposed to do next. The important symbol of the chestnut tree and its book of photographs returns here, giving Olivia the same perspective of its growth that Nick also has.
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Olivia asks Nick why he is giving all his work away, and he explains that he is leaving his family’s farm within two months. He says that giving the art away feels like another piece of art in itself, or as if he’s acting like trees do, since they “give it all away” too. Nick then leads Olivia out to the chestnut tree. He explains about the chestnut blight on the East Coast, which is why she’s never seen a tree like this before, and about his family’s project of photographing the tree. She wonders why he’s leaving the tree now, and he shows her its bark—the blight has finally found it, and it is slowly dying.
Like Patricia, Nick sees trees as fundamentally generous and altruistic beings, giving away their gifts rather than competing with others. Even hundreds of miles from its native range, the Hoel chestnut tree is finally afflicted by the blight. Humanity’s effect on nature has become ubiquitous, and no corner of Earth is truly safe.
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Now, in the house where his family died 10 years ago, Nick makes tea for Olivia as she tells him all about her recent experience with death and the mysterious beings of light. They discuss the redwoods being logged, and as they talk, they seem to understand each other immediately. Olivia suggests that they were meant to meet each other, and that Nick should come with her to California. As Nick looks at Olivia, he realizes that he wants to follow her wherever she might go, but out loud he says that he’ll need to sleep on it first. That night, Olivia sleeps in his grandparents’ old room. The next morning, Nick agrees to go with her, saying only that he’ll need to clear out the house and dispose of his art first.
Nick and Olivia share an immediate connection, and Nick in particular feels bound to this stranger who appeared on his doorstep and now wants him to join her mission. Olivia often acts as a sort of Joan of Arc figure, inspiring others with her innocence, beauty, and confidence in her own calling. Nick is also physically attracted to her from the start.
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The narrative now shifts to follow Mimi Ma in the aftermath of her father Winston’s death. She throws herself into her work, traveling around the world and taking up many hobbies. She has love affairs with both men and women, and at one point she almost gets married. Eventually, she is moved to her company’s headquarters in Portland. Her new office has floor-length windows overlooking a stand of pine trees, and the sight feels to Mimi like the national parks where her family used to go on vacation. Mimi hangs her father’s arhat scroll on her wall, though it constantly reminds her of him and sometimes causes her to panic in the middle of the day. She calms herself by looking out over the pine grove.
The story again shifts to a different timeline years before Nick and Olivia’s meeting, as Mimi is professionally successful but emotionally floundering in the aftermath of Winston’s suicide. At last, she finds comfort in the pine grove outside of her office, as the forests of America’s national parks are now closely bound to happy memories of her father in Mimi’s mind.
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Mimi’s colleagues usually use her office to gather during lunch breaks, eating and playing cards together. One day, they are discussing the pines outside her window, and they start debating what their bark smells like. Mimi leaves their card game to go outside and collect some “data.” She enters the pine grove and feels like she is returning to her “childhood’s only untouched days.” She stands for a while, breathing in the smell of the pines and remembering her trips to the national parks with Winston. Mimi turns toward the trunk of a pine and then sees a poster inviting her to a town hall to protest what’s about to happen—the city is going to cut down this pine grove and replace it with “cleaner, safer” trees. Mimi turns again and sees her colleagues looking at her and laughing from her office window.
Mimi’s connection to trees first comes from her father, both through his mulberry tree and their family trips to the national parks. The pine grove outside her office then comes to represent those happy parts of her childhood—memories that are “untouched” by the trauma she’s experienced later in life. Right in the middle of this moment of nostalgia, however, Mimi learns that the pine grove is to be cut down. This also shows the practical application of forestry theories like those that Patricia’s professors taught—they are eager to clear out the old pine forest and replace it with something more economically valuable and easier to manage.
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The narrative now turns to Douglas Pavlicek, who is at a bar in Damascus, Oregon, buying drinks for strangers to celebrate planting his fifty-thousandth tree after almost four years of work. He plays pool with the random men at the bar, losing badly but enjoying the company and his own sense of having completed something worthwhile. Several people praise his accomplishment, but then one man says that the logging companies use his work of planting seedlings to raise their own allowable cuts. He is “putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers,” the man says. This kills Douggie’s good mood, and he ends the festivities.
In planting the seedlings, Douggie has again tried to find redemption through hard work, and he celebrates his accomplishment in his usual way by drinking and talking to strangers. What the man at the bar says ruins his celebration, however. The idea of “putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers” suggests that Douggie has just been a pawn of the logging companies this whole time, and all his hard work is essentially making things worse in the long run.
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The day after seeing the poster in the pines, Mimi skips her usual lunch card game and instead returns to her pine grove. There she sees a woman nearby and tells her that the city is planning to cut these trees down. Though Mimi herself hates activists, she can now hear herself sounding like one.
Mimi’s love for these particular trees makes her act in a way that she sees as out-of-character.
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Douggie awakens in a motel room, despairing not because of the money he lost the previous night but because of what the stranger said—that all his hard work has only helped the logging companies he was trying to fight. He goes to the local library to look up information and finds that the stranger was indeed right.
This shows just how difficult and complex the problem is—even honest attempts to help can end up doing more harm than good. Under the law, a seedling is the same as an ancient tree, so the logging companies can get away with cutting down old-growth forests as long as they replace them with new trees.
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Hopeless and depressed, Douggie goes for a walk that continues on for miles, trying to think of what to do next. On a bulletin board at a grocery store, he sees the same poster that Mimi did, advertising the town hall to protect the pine trees. Douggie asks the grocery’s cashier for directions and then walks the extra miles to the pine grove itself. The town hall meeting is supposed to be in four days. Still among the pine trees, Douggie lies down on the ground and sleeps, dreaming again of his plane crash in Thailand.
The narrative now starts to bring Mimi and Douggie together, as they both plan to fight to save the pine grove. Douggie is feeling aimless and depressed again, and so he latches onto the town hall meeting as a concrete piece of action that he can look forward to.
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Douggie is awakened by the sound of machinery. It is still the middle of the night, but men have come with chain saws to cut down the pine trees. Douggie tries to stop them, saying that the town hall hearing isn’t for several days, but the men insist that he leave. Panicking, Douggie starts climbing a tree until someone pulls him down and strikes him. Soon, the police arrive and handcuff him. Douggie gives his name as “Prisoner 571” as they take him away.
The logging companies are willing to do anything—even cut in the middle of the night—to preserve their profits and keep the public from turning against them. Arrested for the first time, Douggie immediately flashes back to his days as a participant in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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Later that same morning Mimi arrives at work, looks out the window, and howls in despair. All her pine trees are gone. She rushes outside and stands among the wreckage, smelling all the fresh-cut wood and raging within herself over “the old loss that will never, ever be answered.”
Many times, The Overstory lingers on the great tragedy of an old forest being cut down. The idea that this is an “old loss that will never, ever be answered” suggests that cutting down trees is not just destructive in the present moment. It also destroys the trees’ long, unique histories and immense potential for growth—the fallen trees will take centuries to be replaced, if they can be at all. And, in the same way, there is no obvious remedy for Mimi’s sorrow—the wound may never heal.
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The narrative returns to Neelay, who finishes his space opera game and now needs to invent a company to sell it. He thinks of redwoods and decides to name his one-man company “Sempervirens.” The first game he releases is called The Sylvan Prophecies. Soon, he sells out of discs and needs to hire employees and rent an office, and then he has to actually incorporate his company. At night, though, Neelay still dreams of “branching and spreading,” thinking of his work’s “unlimited growth curve.”
Sempervirens is part of the Latin name for the coast redwood tree. Once again, the narrative and Neelay himself compare his work of coding to the branching of a tree. The book also comments on the exponential growth of technology, as Neelay realizes that he cannot even imagine the limits of what he might create next.
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Neelay continues working, both learning how to run a company and coding new worlds. His game’s sequel, The New Sylvan Prophecies, is an even bigger hit with the public. Everyone loves the game’s open-ended world, interacting with its environment, plants, and animals as much as following its plotline. After releasing a third game, The Sylvan Revelation, a large publishing company offers to purchase Neelay’s brand.
Neelay’s games are similar to other world-building and role-playing games of recent years, like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or Minecraft. These games take advantage of the human desire to explore, build, compete, and find new things.
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Neelay plans to agree to the deal. He can’t sleep that night, however, and eventually goes through the ordeal of getting out of bed, dressing himself, and mechanically hoisting himself into his (now joystick-operated) wheelchair. He then makes his way down to his van, which has a hydraulic floor that he can roll onto and pedals that his hands can operate. He drives to Stanford’s inner quad, to the wild terrarium where he first experienced his inspiration for his life’s goal six years earlier. Tonight, the trees are silent, though he waits in complete silence and isolation for a long time.
Neelay’s rapid success allows him the resources to maintain his mobility even with his paralysis. He thinks of the trees at Stanford’s inner quad as his muses and wants to hear them speak again, but now they are silent. Powers thus suggests that Neelay wasn’t only inspired by the trees but actually received a message from them—one that they have now stopped sending.
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After a while, the waving of the branches towards the south makes Neelay think of finding a particular gigantic redwood with his father as a child. He feels that this is the tree that he must have subconsciously named his company after, and that he must now consult it. Neelay then drives the van back and forth up a steep road into the Santa Cruz Mountains, finally finding a spot that he recognizes and stopping. He gets out and maneuvers his chair down the trail, but after a hundred yards, the wheels get stuck. Neelay yells aloud, but no one is around to hear.
Like Mimi, Neelay has fond memories of his father and childhood that are related to a tree. He has learned to follow his whims and look to trees for inspiration in his work, so he takes this spontaneous nighttime trip that now seems to have ended in disaster.
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As his eyes adjust to the dark, Neelay realizes that the redwood tree he was seeking is just in front of him—he missed it because it was too large for his eyes to even conceive of in the darkness. Suddenly Neelay feels like a child again, standing under the tree with his Pita, who reminds him of the banyan fig and all the “code that made this gigantic thing.” Neelay is then struck by inspiration again, recognizing that “the branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing.” He realizes that he can’t sell his company but must continue to pursue his own dream. He throws his cloak under the wheel of his stuck tire and is able to free his chair, and then slowly makes his way back to his office.
Once more, the book connects the act of coding and world-building to the growth of a tree, emerging from a tiny seed and then endlessly branching upwards and outwards. It is also notable that Neelay experiences his life-changing inspiration from a direct experience with a tree.
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The next day Neelay breaks off the deal to sell Sempervirens. He gathers his staff together and describes what the company’s new project will be: a game in which players will enter into a “freshly assembled Earth,” where they will explore, gather resources, cut down trees, build towns, and construct anything they can imagine. At the same time, players all over the world will be playing in the same game, interacting with each other and competing for the same resources. Nine months later, an early copy of the game makes even the staff at Sempervirens stop working—and even stop eating and sleeping—because they are so obsessed with playing it. This new game is called Mastery.
In creating Mastery, Neelay feels like he is pursuing his vision from the trees. But it’s noteworthy that he also incorporates an element of competition in the game from the very start. The very name, Mastery, also implies that the player must control and exploit the world of the game in order to be successful. This, The Overstory suggests, is similar to how humans treat the Earth.
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Back at the Hoel farm, Nick and Olivia spend two weeks cleaning out and selling the property. Nick still finds the whole situation extremely strange—that he is upending his life to go along with this stranger who randomly appeared just days ago. But he also feels like “their obsessions interlock” and this is the right thing for him to do. At night, Nick reads about the redwoods, and also about mental disorders. He notes a section on schizophrenia that says, “Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.
The quote about schizophrenia is another example of the book’s focus on human psychology and groupthink. According to the quote’s author, “delusional” beliefs depend entirely on how well they fit with “societal norms.” The point that is gradually developed over the course of The Overstory, however, is that society’s beliefs are the delusional ones. Thus, the only truly “sane” thing to do is to go against such norms and risk being labeled crazy.
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Nick and Olivia have now spent two weeks together in the house. Nothing romantic has happened between them, though Nick is distracted by Olivia’s presence, especially when she walks around half-dressed. She teases that she’s seen evidence of another woman in the house, and Nick admits that there was someone recently, but she left because of his single-minded obsession with the chestnut tree.
Nick is very attracted to Olivia but also feels almost in awe of her and her sense of purpose, and for now the two share a spiritual connection that has not yet become physical. Nick also suggests that his obsession with trees has gotten in the way of past relationships.
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Olivia comes up with the idea to bury Nick’s art in the yard bound up in bubble wrap, and they do so. The next morning, they leave, heading west and hoping to find the people protesting the logging of the redwoods. As they drive, Nick tells Olivia about coming home to find his family dead, years before. Later they discuss how comfortable Nick is with silence, and how Olivia seems to Nick like she’s atoning for her past life—“for the attentive person I wasn’t,” she says.
This passage again emphasizes the importance of simply being patient, silent, and paying attention. Olivia is filled with a sense of mystical purpose after her death, but she also feels like she must make up for the person she was before her accident—“the attentive person [she] wasn’t.” This means undergoing the slow and difficult process of learning to be humble and observant.
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Nick and Olivia stop at a motel that night and sleep in separate beds. The next day, they cross through Nevada, awed by its wide emptiness. A snowstorm hits, and at one point they almost crash. Nick is shaken, but Olivia seems sure that they’re not meant to die yet. At last, they cross the border into California.
Olivia feels confident in her mission, even if she still isn’t sure of its details. Her certainty contrasts with Nick, who has entirely upended his life for someone he just met—and who the book has implied might be delusional.
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Meanwhile, Douglas is in court after being arrested. He tells the judge his own story—how he is an injured veteran who has planted 50,000 trees in an attempt to undo the logging company’s damage and simply thought that what the city was doing in the middle of the night was wrong. He is given options for his sentence, and he chooses a fine and three days of labor, planting ash trees for the Portland city arborist. Douggie talks with the arborist about the logged pines, and he considers aloud that the environmental activists might be right about everything.
This passage makes the point that if what society is doing is immoral and illogical—cutting down old forests in the name of immediate profit and destroying ecosystems in the process—then the right thing to do might be to break with society. This leads Douggie to consider that the environmental activists whom he previously considered crazy might be sane after all.
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His sentence complete, Douggie returns to the devastated pine grove. He grows enraged at the sight of the sawn stumps and starts counting the rings of the trees, comparing them to the years of his own life and then years and even centuries before that. With a marker he writes the dates onto the rings of the stump itself, and on the outer ring he writes, “CUT DOWN WHILE YOU SLEPT.”
Once again Douggie is driven to take concrete action in the face of helplessness and despair. He knows that his own small actions can do little against the power of corporate greed, but he feels compelled to act, nonetheless. His examination of the tree rings and comparison to human history also directly illustrates how time can pass in different ways for different beings.
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Douggie is still writing when Mimi Ma finds him on her lunch break. At first, she thinks that he is with the logging company, and she rants at him furiously. For his part, the first sight of Mimi reminds Douggie of a woman he loved back in Thailand. When she stops berating him, Douggie tells Mimi that he was there the night the trees came down and that he was arrested trying to protect them, and the two commiserate over the injustice of it all. Struck by an idea, Douggie asks Mimi if she has some money or a car he can borrow.
Douggie immediately falls in love with Mimi, in part because of how she reminds him of a past romance. Like Nick and Olivia, Douggie and Mimi are brought together by trees and decide essentially on a whim to take a journey together.
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The narrative returns to Dorothy and Ray Brinkman again, in the years after their last play. They stop acting and instead take up reading and collecting books. Ray reads hopeful nonfiction books about the rise of technology and civilization, while Dorothy enjoys dramatic novels and old works. Slowly they convert their house into a library, even the room they had once reserved for the child they hoped to have.
Dorothy and Ray move through various hobbies as they try to fill the void in their lives. Dorothy’s love of dramatic novels shows that she is entirely captivated by the stories of humanity, while Ray prefers a wider and more practical view of the world.
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At Christmas, Ray and Dorothy give each other books, and at New Year’s they make a resolution to take adventures together. They already have books “full of previous resolutions” about cooking, hiking, birdwatching, or traveling. As they read together at night, Dorothy weeps over the trials of fictional characters and wonders why she does so. Ray and Dorothy’s anniversary passes, and they once more forget to plant something.
Ray and Dorothy are still close, but they also increasingly live within their own worlds of reading. The fact that Dorothy gets so emotional over the stories she reads suggests that she is longing for aspects of the human experience that she is currently lacking.
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Nick and Olivia enter California and arrive at the redwoods, where they are awed into silence at the majesty of the trees. Olivia asks Nick to pull over. She wanders among the trees and soon starts crying, feeling that she is finally where she is supposed to be. They keep driving and eventually reach a group of environmental activists, and from there they make their way to Humboldt County and a ragtag group called the “Life Defense Force.” Nick and Olivia eat with a man named Moses, and the next day they meet a woman named Mother N, whom Olivia recognizes as the person she saw on the TV screens at the store in Indiana.
The Life Defense Force and other activists in The Overstory are based on real-life groups (mostly “Earth First!”) during the “Redwood summer” of 1990, in which environmental activists tried to prevent logging companies from cutting down old-growth redwood forests in Northern California. Olivia feels like she is now truly fulfilling the wishes of the beings of light.
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That night Mother N speaks to the assembled group, encouraging those still volunteering and asking for nonviolent protesting tactics. She then explains about what they’re up against: Humboldt Timber, which used to be a family business who cut trees responsibly, but now has been bought out. The new owner is trying to cash in on every bit of lumber they can cut, trying to log all the old growth before environmental legislation can stop them. As Mother N speaks, Nick looks over at Olivia and sees that she is crying.
As in real life, there is disagreement among the activists about the best tactics to achieve their goals. Mother N represents those who are strictly non-violent, although she also doesn’t try to stop her peers who take more direct and destructive action. Here, Mother N’s speech also gives more background about why these redwoods are being logged. A capitalist system has no concept of a forest as valuable other than in the immediate monetary benefit it can provide.
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Afterward, a group prepares to sabotage some logging equipment, despite Mother N’s discouragement. Before they go, Nick paints everyone’s faces in fantastical designs. Olivia takes his arm and praises his work, saying that she has it “on good authority” that he has done well. Other members of the group have aliases, and that night, Nick and Olivia give names to each other as well. Olivia christens Nick as “Watchman,” and Nick gives Olivia the name “Maidenhair.” Later that night, Nick and Olivia sleep side by side, and Nick can see the tattoo on her shoulder reading, “A change is gonna come.
Olivia’s sense of purpose is bolstered by finding these fellow activists and feeling like she is fulfilling the wishes of the beings of light. Olivia names Nick “Watchman” because she feels like he is her protector. “Maidenhair,” Nick’s name for Olivia, refers to the ginkgo biloba tree, which dates back millions of years and has many uses in traditional medicine.
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The narrative returns to Patricia Westerford, who sits at her table writing. All winter, she has been working on a book about how trees communicate with each other, and how all aspects of a forest are necessary parts of its complex and interdependent system. She writes about mycorrhizal systems—how networks of fungi disperse nutrients between trees and other organisms—and claims that “there are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” and that forests themselves are like “enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.”
Another real-life figure to inspire Patricia’s character is Peter Wohlleben, author of the bestselling book The Hidden Life of Trees, which covers similar topics to the book Patricia is working on here. Once again, Powers uses Patricia’s narrative to give readers scientific knowledge that they might be otherwise unaware of, as well as the important idea that forests are like one complex, interdependent organism.
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Patricia’s husband Dennis lives 14 miles away, and they see each other every day for lunch. Otherwise, Patricia is surrounded only by trees, and she spends her days working on writing her book or articles for scientific journals. This particular night she finds it hard to write and goes for her usual walk, breathing in all the compounds that the trees release and thinking about their many meanings.
Patricia and Dennis have settled into a routine that works for both of them, and they seem very happy in their marriage. Once again, Patricia’s character joins scientific knowledge with a personal and emotional connection to the forest.
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Patricia sits down in her usual spot on a fallen log and then realizes what she needs to write next: how when Douglas-firs are about to die, they will send all their nutrients out into their roots, giving their “riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.” She decides to call these trees “giving trees.” This is the phrase that the public will latch onto later when they read her book, because “people see better what looks like them.”
Here, the book again makes the point that most trees are fundamentally generous rather than competitive, in contrast to humanity and the way we generally think about nature. Trees give away their nutrients “to the community pool in a last will and testament,” generously donating their resources in a way that we might think of as an exclusively human behavior. This passage also returns to the idea that people best understand stories in their own terms—that is, about other people—and so anthropomorphizing the trees a bit helps Patricia to win over her readers. This is Powers’s project in The Overstory as well: to make trees “look like” people, so that we might better notice and empathize with them.
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The next morning Patricia rereads what she has written, and then tries to start on her book’s final chapter. She wants to seem hopeful about the future, but she also recognizes that “the truth is somewhat more brutal.” She decides to end her book with the Buddha’s words about a tree’s generosity: how it “even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”
Though Patricia has perhaps the book’s most positive and complete relationship with trees, her view of humanity and the future is a “brutal” and pessimistic one. She tries not to scare her readers but truly believes (as it seems that Powers does too) that humanity is quickly destroying itself with no remedy in sight. Human competition will “win” against the forests’ generosity, but that victory will lead to our own extinction as well.
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Dennis arrives for lunch that day, bringing his latest offering of delicious, foraged cooking. Patricia thinks again how lucky she is to have a relationship like this, with a patient and generous man who lets her spend most of her time alone. At lunch, Patricia reads him her latest chapter. He claps and tells her that he thinks she’s finished with her book. Patricia knows that he’s right, but she’s anxious about what she needs to do next. She can’t decide on a title and is still traumatized from her last time publishing something. Dennis tries to comfort her, but Patricia still can’t tell him about how she almost committed suicide because of her experience.
Patricia has created a life that she is very satisfied with, but publishing her book will mean finally returning to the public eye—and the last time she was there, she was driven to the verge of suicide. Again, the narrative shows that Patricia and Dennis’s unconventional relationship is actually perfect for them both.
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Patricia finally types up a draft of her book and mails it off to her publisher. Six weeks later, she gets a call from her editor praising the book and all that it taught him about trees. He claims that she’ll become rich from it. But Patricia feels melancholy hearing this. What she really wants is to have her solitude back, though she feels that it is now lost forever.
Patricia essentially sacrifices her solitude for what she sees as the greater good: helping the public to better understand and love trees. She has no real desire for fame or fortune— she writes her book simply to share her passion and knowledge with others and hopefully effect some kind of change.
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Meanwhile, Neelay’s game Mastery comes out, and Sempervirens explodes in popularity. Neelay has a new office overlooking the redwoods, high above the rest of the company. He works day and night, usually sleeping in his chair, constantly tormented by new ideas. On this particular day he logs into Mastery and assumes a new identity. Though he recognizes the game’s many flaws, he still can’t help being drawn into its world of potential. At last, he recognizes that back in “Real Life” he is hungry, but he only takes time for an energy drink and a cold chicken puff.
Even as a child, Neelay felt like his physical body was just an avatar for his mental self. Now, in the world of Mastery, he fully embraces this idea, though it means neglecting himself in the real world. Like Mimi, Neelay’s office overlooks a forest—but unlike Mimi, Neelay had the power to specifically choose this position.
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Neelay is still absorbed in the game when a reporter calls to interview him. The man, who sounds not much older than Neelay, introduces himself as Chris and is clearly starstruck to be talking to Neelay. He asks Neelay about the success of Mastery and admits that he himself is addicted to the game. Neelay answers his questions while thinking to himself about how the appeal of the game is the simple sense of meaning that it offers: its lack of ambiguity and “human-on-human darkness.”
Neelay knows what makes his games so successful: they satisfy the basic human desires for control, exploration, and competition, but without the moral ambiguity and boredom that can accompany real-life interactions.
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The interviewer Chris asks about the future of Neelay’s company, and Neelay promises even bigger and richer worlds to come. Chris then tries to ask Neelay about himself and his immigrant family, but Neelay deflects these questions. The sound of Chris’s confident laughter fills Neelay with desire, but he also feels that anyone who sees him would be disgusted by his appearance. Neelay must instead be content to know that the code he wrote “is changing this other man’s brain.” Neelay ends the interview musing about the future and how he thinks that soon “Real life” will essentially become a game on a screen.
This is the only hint the story gives of Neelay’s sexuality, as he is overcome with desire simply by the sound of Chris’s laughter but immediately quashes this feeling. He seeks to totally escape the physical world and live only in his brain, and this means giving up his sexuality as well. Just as Neelay predicts that real life will soon be like a game, Neelay’s game is a microcosm of real life.
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Back in the redwood forest, members of the Life Defense Force block Highway 36 with a row of black coffins. Olivia, dressed as a mountain lion, climbs out along a line strung above the coffins and unfurls a banner that reads “Stop Sacrificing Virgins.” Cars stop and people get out, some laughing but most of them angry. Then the coffins open, and more people dressed as woodland creatures emerge, all of them beautifully painted. They start into a wild dance until the police appear, and then all the animals flee into the forest. Two days later, footage of the stunt is shown on the national news. Some people think the activists are heroes, and some think they should be locked up.
It's implied that Nick played a major role in planning this protest, painting the members of the Life Defense Force to look like woodland creatures. While the stunt divides the public, it also shows how art can be used to shake up people’s worldviews and help them pay attention to issues that society usually tries to ignore.
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Adam Appich is now in his last year at Fortuna College. At his last lecture with Professor Rabinowski, the professor discusses surveys that the current and previous classes took and shows how their answers present consistent patterns that basically show that humans are inherently illogical and operating “in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement.”
The book again reinforces the idea that human beings are extremely influenced by whatever group they are a part of, and they will almost always choose going along with the group over whatever is actually logical. This is what Rabinowski means by a “dense fog of mutual reinforcement.”
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Rabinowski prepares to make another point but then suddenly excuses himself from the class, grimacing. He steps out of the room and the students can hear him collapse in the hallway. Adam scans the room—no one does anything. He then leans in to talk to a woman next to him, whispering that he thinks Rabinowski is demonstrating the “bystander effect.” The woman looks concerned and asks if they should go and get help. Finally, someone in the hallway finds Rabinowski and calls for help, but by the time the ambulance arrives, he has died of a heart attack.
The bystander effect (the idea that a person in a group is less likely to take action than if they were alone) was made famous by the case of Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in a public space in 1964. Many onlookers witnessed her murder, but allegedly none of them tried to intervene or call the police. Here, Adam assumes that Rabinowski is faking a heart attack as a way to test his students—but in reality, the heart attack is real, as is the bystander effect that overtakes his students. This is another example of the herd mentality that The Overstory emphasizes as being so crucial to human psychology: if people see that no one else is intervening, they are less likely to do so, even in the case of a clear emergency.
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Afterwards, Adam gets coffee with the woman from the lecture, and she asks why he didn’t help Rabinowski. Adam defends himself, saying that he thought Rabinowski was just demonstrating the bystander effect and Adam was playing along. Adam gets angry when the woman presses him, but then he deflates and realizes that this really was Rabinowski’s last lesson: that “learning psychology is, indeed, pretty much useless.”
Adam becomes even more pessimistic about humanity after his professor’s death, as he realizes that all his years of study did nothing to help him overcome his natural impulse to apathy. In his mind, psychology is essentially “useless” because it doesn’t prevent the or remedy the phenomena that it observes.
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Adam goes on to graduate school in Santa Cruz, where he becomes known as “Bias Boy” because of his tendency to bring up how humans’ cognitive blindness keeps them from acting in their own best interests. Adam is also very attracted to his advisor, Professor Mieke Van Dijk. He meets with her to discuss his thesis, as he hasn’t decided on a topic yet. Van Dijk presses him to figure out what truly interests him, and eventually she narrows it down to a study about “people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.” As an example, she lists the people currently risking their lives to defend trees. Adam is skeptical, but something also draws him to the subject of studying trees rights activists.
Adam still has a less-than-ideal relationship with women, much like he did in high school, as he is often presented as sexualizing and objectifying them in his own thoughts. Here, Professor Van Dijk leads Adam toward the thesis that will connect him to The Overstory’s other characters. This thesis is also a distillation of one of the book’s main goals: to show that just because society as a whole considers something to be crazy doesn’t mean that it objectively is, because humans are overwhelmingly influenced by the opinions of others.
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Mimi and Douglas arrive at the Life Defense Force camp, which has the feel of a party more than a protest. Douggie is delighted, but Mimi is still surprised that she has made it all this way when she never liked activism or activists before. The camp is full of people of all ages and from all walks of life. They gather together for a march that day, and Mimi recognizes that she is now going against everything her parents taught her—she is making trouble and making herself be seen by the world. As the group walks, they sing and chant, passing devastated areas that have already been logged and then entering a grove of enormous redwoods.
Just as Adam decides to start studying environmental activists, Mimi reflects that she has become an activist herself. Her parents always taught her to keep her head down and blend in—essentially to go with the flow of society—but she is finally swimming against the current and taking a position that goes against societal norms. She is now one of those people choosing logic and morality over “mutual reinforcement.”
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As Mimi walks beside Douggie, she thinks about their relationship. She knows that he is in love with her, and though she feels very close to him and trusts him, she also considers him “a little wacked,” more like a child than a romantic interest. The group reaches the edge of the logging area, and a woman with a megaphone (who is part of the group) warns them that they are about to trespass, so anyone unwilling to be arrested should stop. Some stay back, but the rest continue on, Mimi and Douggie among them. They can hear the roar of logging equipment nearby.
Mimi and Douggie’s relationship is an interesting one, as they have very different goals and personalities but still care deeply about each other almost immediately. Even though Mimi thinks Douggie is “a little wacked” (a bit crazy) and childlike, she’s still instinctively drawn to him. Meanwhile, the woman with the megaphone is likely Mother N, whom Nick and Olivia met when they arrived at the activist camp.
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Now in the logging zone, the protesters quickly lock arms and chain themselves together to block the road. Two loggers approach and argue with them, and one of them kicks mud into Douggie’s face. Soon police arrive, cut the chain, and handcuff everyone, leaving them to sit in the muddy road. Mimi has to urinate and can’t hold it, and she starts crying as Douggie tries to comfort her. Finally, the protesters are arrested and booked.
The protesters are technically trespassing but also act entirely peacefully, while the loggers and police treat them brutally, attempting to intimidate them more than to serve any kind of justice. Mimi is now truly invested in her cause, as she’s willing to undergo psychological abuse and arrest to defend the trees.
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The narrative returns to Ray and Dorothy. Dorothy, now 44, has taken up singing in a local choir as her latest hobby and distraction. She kisses Ray on the top of his head before she leaves for rehearsal, which she never misses. She asks Ray about what he’s working on, and he says he’s reading a case claiming that trees should have their own rights to intellectual property—that the law is wrong to only recognize “human victims.” On her way out, Ray tells Dorothy to bring a coat because it’s cold out, and the comment makes her freeze up. “I’m not your property, Ray,” she says, and leaves. Ray is left alone, knowing that Dorothy is actually off having an affair.
Ray’s character often portrays the book’s ideas about non-humans having value and rights under the law, and this argument is first brought up in the paper that Ray reads here. Still dissatisfied with their lives, Dorothy is now attempting to fill the void—and making sure that she doesn’t feel like a piece of Ray’s property—by having an affair.
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 Dorothy parks her car at the auditorium where her rehearsal will be. She knows that she’s about to do a bad thing, but it also feels exhilarating. She gets into a black car that drives her to her destination, where she has wild sex that she can barely remember. Then the nameless man drops her off at rehearsal, and she sneaks in and joins the choir.
Dorothy feels stifled and boxed in by her life, and she’s now acting out some of the wild fantasies of the novels she loves.
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At home, Ray tries to distract himself with his reading. He is intrigued by the idea that other beings on Earth could have rights, rather than just humans. Soon he returns to thoughts of Dorothy, though. She doesn’t know that he knows about her affair, and he wants to keep it that way. Ray feels like his whole life is dissolving as he continues to read the essay’s arguments.
Ray is a strait-laced lawyer, but he is openminded to the idea that the law could be flawed. By ignoring any other kind of intelligent or conscious beings, the book suggests, the law severely limits itself and can even be a destructive force in the world.
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Later, Dorothy returns home, feeling disgusted with herself but also very free. She enters and makes her usual small talk with Ray, and then she gets in the shower—though she also showered before she left for rehearsal, as Ray notices. In bed that night, Dorothy asks Ray more about the essay he’s reading. He says that the essay’s author “wants to give rights to everything alive.” As Ray wrestles aloud with this idea and what it would mean for his career, Dorothy drifts off to sleep.
Dorothy assumes that Ray is unaware of her affair, and his commitment to keeping things that way causes him to retreat further into his studies. His newfound interest in the idea of “giv[ing] rights to everything alive” clashes with Dorothy’s assumption that Ray is trying to objectify and control her.
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Nick and Olivia, now referred to as Watchman and Maidenhair, are now camping out with the other activists among the redwoods. Nick asks Olivia if she’s scared of what the multi-billion-dollar logging companies might do to them, but Olivia says that she is sure everything will turn out okay—she has it “on the highest authority.” The next day, the two walk among the redwoods until they find a grove spray-painted with numbers, ready to be logged. Olivia starts filming as Nick removes his own set of spray cans and starts painting over the numbers.
In important sections of the book, the narrator refers to characters only by their chosen aliases. This is a kind of literary metamorphosis—like Baucis and Philemon becoming trees in Ovid’s myth, Nick and Olivia become trees in the narrative world of The Overstory. Olivia continues to feel confident in her mission and in the power of the beings who guide her.
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Soon Nick has transformed all of the logging numbers into beautiful paintings of butterflies. He and Olivia know that this will only slow down the logging companies, but they will also edit and release the footage to the public and hope that it will spread their message. After the filming is over, Nick and Olivia have sex for the first time there on the forest floor.
Nick again uses his artistic skills to help his cause and attempt to better reach the public. Nick and Olivia’s relationship has previously been based around their common goals and obsessions, but now it finally becomes romantic as well.
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Patricia and Dennis still have their usual routine: Patricia lives and works alone, and Dennis brings her lunch every day. Today he arrives with mail from the outside world, including a packet from Patricia’s agent. Patricia is nervous to open it, but Dennis encourages her. Inside among other papers is a check for far more money than Patricia was expecting. She feels like there must be some kind of mistake, and there’s no way that her book has made so much money. Along with the check are also reviews of the book and letters from fans, all of them praising her. Dennis reads them aloud, and next finds an invitation to speak on the largest public radio program in the country. He’s clearly excited and proud, but Patricia worries about losing her solitude and being dragged back into the world of other people.
Patricia’s new bestseller is again inspired by Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees. Patricia’s words have reached many people, showing that the public is willing to hear her point of view and that some people can indeed look beyond humanity and see the value in other beings. Patricia has essentially sacrificed her solitude and peace to achieve this goal, and she must continue to do things that she dislikes if she wants to further her mission.
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Back in the redwood camp, Moses asks if anyone feels like doing “a brief stint up top”—continuing the group’s sit-in atop a redwood tree set to be logged. Maidenhair (Olivia) immediately volunteers, and Watchman (Nick) agrees to go with her, knowing that he has no real choice but to keep following this woman who has upended his life. Moses assures them that they’ll only be in the tree for a few days.
Nick is hopelessly in love with Olivia, and he has bound his life to hers and to her spiritual mission. This tree-squatting protest—camping out in a tree to keep it from being logged—echoes many similar cases in history, as activists put their bodies in harm’s way to save old-growth trees.
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Maidenhair, Watchman, and a man named Loki arrive at the tree, which is called Mimas. Its size and majesty overwhelm Nick and make him think of Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology. Olivia approaches it and embraces its vast trunk. High above them, two people are camped out, excited to come down. They lower a rope down, and Loki explains how they will climb up the tree using a harness and carabiners. Nick is anxious about what seems to be a very unsafe process, but Olivia starts climbing confidently upward. She makes it to the top in 20 minutes, and then it’s Nick’s turn.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is an enormous ash tree binding the universe together. The Overstory often lingers on descriptions of trees’ size and age, trying to convey through language the majesty and power of these living beings. Nick would clearly never do this on his own, but his love for Olivia drives him forward.
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A hundred feet up, Nick starts to panic, but then he can hear Olivia’s voice in his ear encouraging him, though she is actually far above. He eventually makes his way up. Buzzard and Sparks, the two people they are replacing, are eager to get back on the ground. They climb down the rope to Loki, who assures Nick and Olivia that he’ll be back in a few days.
Olivia acts like a spiritual guide and inspiration for several characters, but most notably for Nick. Buzzard and Sparks’s eagerness to climb down from the trees foreshadows a difficult (and perhaps longer-than-expected) experience for Olivia and Nick.
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Now alone, Olivia takes Nick’s hand and expresses her gratitude to have finally made it to the end of their journey: here, to Mimas. Their living situation consists of two wooden platforms (which Buzzard and Sparks called “the Grand Ballroom”), a hammock, and some supplies. Darkness falls, and they light their kerosene lamp. Olivia calls Nick to her, and they have sex. Nick is then awakened in the middle of the night by flying squirrels scratching at his face. He bolts up and screams, and the creatures scatter. Nick realizes that these squirrels had never had to learn to fear humans, but that he has now taught them to.
Nick and Olivia will have to adapt to an entirely new way of life among the branches of Mimas. The presence of the flying squirrels shows that they are in a different world now, one that is much older than humanity.
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At dawn, Nick and Olivia are awed by the view that greets them. They are surrounded by other giant trees, all swaddled in fog. Nick remembers reading about how the trees even help create the fog, while also absorbing its water through their needles. As the fog clears, the whole forested valley is revealed below them. Nick and Olivia then use the bathroom with the bucket available, and they don’t look away or try to be private at all. The raw humanness of this feels very intimate.
Nick and Olivia start by embracing their natural functions and trying to rid themselves of the limitations that embarrassment and shame place on people. They are totally alone in nature now, and they want to become a part of it. The book also offers another lyrical description of the forest in order to convey Olivia and Nick’s fantastical new environment.
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After a breakfast of nuts and dried fruit, Nick and Olivia go off in different directions to explore Mimas, both of them wearing the safety ropes that they are now tied to at all times. They are amazed by what they find: huckleberries, a tiny pool with a salamander in it, insects they’ve never seen before, and a hemlock sapling growing out of soil on a branch. Afterward, Olivia writes, and Nick sketches her. He can tell that she is adjusting from a life of constant stimulation and human contact, though he himself has grown used to solitude and silence.
All of Nick and Olivia’s discoveries show that they’re truly living in a new world, one that seems alien but is also beautiful. This also shows how old-growth trees support all kinds of life in a forest. Cutting down Mimas wouldn’t just kill the redwood tree itself, but also the countless other organisms that depend on it. Meanwhile, Olivia continues to struggle to move past her old life and learn to slow down and pay attention.
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Later, the two can hear the sound of distant logging, and the crashes of falling redwoods. In the camp’s library, Olivia finds a book called The Secret Forest. She reads some of it aloud to Nick, starting with Patricia’s opening passage about humans and trees sharing a common ancestor. When the sun goes down, they just sit and talk, and they zip their bags together when they sleep. Olivia remarks that if one of them falls the other will be dragged down too, and Nick says, “I’ll follow you anywhere.”
The opening passage that they read reveals that The Secret Forest is actually Patricia’s book, again emphasizing Patricia’s point about trees and humans being fundamentally connected. In their stripped-down existence atop Mimas, Nick and Olivia grow even closer.
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Meanwhile, Mimi is out of jail with a $300 fine. Though her job hears about her arrest, they don’t seem to mind as long as she gets her work done on time. Mimi and Douggie continue to attend protests, one morning driving to an “action” in the California Coast Range. When they arrive, they are frustrated to see that no TV trucks are there—without media coverage, the protest will have no real effect. 
The activists recognize that their real power is in getting the public to see their actions and start to care about an issue that they might otherwise not even know about. The logging companies have wealth and power on their side, but they want to avoid any bad press.
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Mimi and Douggie join the group already gathered there, surrounding a crane and facing off against a group of loggers. The loggers start up their chainsaws and threaten the protesters and then threaten to cut down trees so that they fall on them. Douggie and a few others start climbing into the trees. Mimi joins until someone grabs her leg and pulls her down, and then sits on the back of her legs. Mimi begs the man to get off of her, and he says he will if she promises to stay down.
The loggers are enraged by these people that they see as threatening their livelihoods. The protestors, however, prove that they will put their bodies on the line to save these trees.
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The loggers gather together, trying to figure out what to do next. Then, they start up their saws and make a cut in a tree near to the one where a protester is squatting. Most of the protesters then drop down from their trees, knowing that the loggers mean to knock them down with other falling trees, but Mimi stays on the ground, and Douggie stays in his tree. The police arrive, and all the protesters come down—except for Douggie, who climbs higher and handcuffs himself to a branch.
The loggers prove their willingness to use violence to achieve their ends, weaponizing the cutting of trees in order to put the protestors directly in harm’s way. Without television cameras there, they have fewer inhibitions about causing physical harm.
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Despite Douggie’s best efforts, the police eventually climb logging ladders and reach him, but he positions himself so that they can’t cut off his handcuffs without injuring him. Then, an officer starts to slice off Douggie’s pants. Mimi watches in horror as the police expose his genitals to the air and then spray them with pepper spray. Even the loggers call up for the police to stop. Douggie can barely stay conscious, and finally the police cut the handcuffs off of him and carry him down from the tree. After another ordeal of being arrested and processed, Mimi drives Douggie home. His skin is raw and orange, but he won’t let Mimi see. She checks in on him every evening for a week.
This violent passage shows several things: first, Douggie is willing to undergo literal torture for a cause that he sees as fundamentally right and moral. Second, the law defends the loggers, not the protestors: because the law only considers humans valuable and deserving of rights, it treats the activists (who are advocating for trees’ rights) as a threat. Thus, the police (the law’s defenders) use maximum force to mitigate these threats. (Notably, this hearkens back to Ray’s interest in extending rights to all living beings, not just people.) Finally, this passage shows that Mimi truly cares about Douggie as she tends to him after his torture, though he still thinks of her romantically and doesn’t want to feel embarrassed in her presence.
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The narrative returns to Neelay, whose successive games Mastery 2, Mastery 3, and Mastery 4 grow ever more successful, profitable, and technologically advanced. Meanwhile the Internet grows alongside it, just as Neelay had predicted years before. Mastery 5 is as complex as anything yet coded. Neelay is now a multi-millionaire, and he still lives above his company’s headquarters, surrounded by screens and constantly working on new ideas. He often visits the Stanford trees that first inspired him, but their voices are silent.
Neelay feels that he is still fulfilling the vision he received from the trees, but the trees themselves no longer seem to speak to him, which raises the question of whether or not he has actually gone astray in his work. As the tech world explodes, Neelay stays ahead of the curve and reaps the financial benefits.
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While his digital empire grows, Neelay’s physical body decays: he often breaks bones performing simple tasks, and his skin is plagued by bedsores. He has now completed Mastery 6, in which players can create entire self-operating civilizations within the world of the game. He constantly sends memos to his team with ideas for how to improve their next game, as employees come and go in his office.
Again, Neelay’s brilliant mind is contrasted with the body that he entirely neglects. As the worlds of Mastery grow ever more complicated, they also increasingly resemble the real world in all its complexity and ambiguity.
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Feeling suddenly depressed one day, Neelay does what he usually does and calls his parents. His mother answers, delighted to hear from him. She quickly brings up the subject of finding a wife for him. Neelay tries to deflect by lying and saying that he is dating one of his caregivers—this elates Ritu. He names his imaginary girlfriend “Rupal.” Ritu immediately wants to tell everyone she knows and even plan for a wedding. After hanging up, Neelay strikes the desk in anger, and can tell that he has broken another bone. He wheels himself to the receptionist and says that he needs to go to the hospital.
Neelay’s mother loves her son and is delighted by his success, but she also continues to pressure him to become someone that he fundamentally is not. There is a divide between them in this sense, though they are otherwise bonded by love and affection. Again, Neelay forgets about his body’s fragility, treating it like an avatar in a video game.
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Meanwhile, Patricia has been invited to Portland to act as an expert educating witness in a hearing regarding “an injunction to halt logging on sensitive federal land.” She is reluctant to go, but Dennis encourages her, implying that the forests need all the defense they can get. Later, Dennis drives her the hundred miles to the courthouse.
Judges may call expert witnesses when confronted with cases beyond the realm of common knowledge. Patricia once more sacrifices her happy solitude in order to speak on behalf of the trees.
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In her preliminary statement before the court, Patricia describes how trees in a forest all depend on one another. She is nervous, and her old speech disorder of slurring her words comes back. The opposition argues that her findings might be temporary and soon overturned, just as she herself overturned previous science. They claim that a young and managed forest is better than an “old, anarchic forest.” Patricia answers with her own knowledge, and the judge seems genuinely interested in learning about what she has to say—Patricia feels like she’s teaching again.
Again, Patricia’s voice represents the book’s arguments about forests and their value, as well as the importance of incorporating scientific information into literary storytelling.
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Patricia goes on to describe how everything in a forest is interdependent, and no single part can be removed without affecting everything else. The opposition argues that preserving old growth is not worth the millions of dollars that can be made logging it, but Patricia retorts that “rot adds value to a forest.” She also has the data to back this up: old-growth forests provide more resources, even when speaking in strictly monetary terms. The only reason the market doesn’t accept this is because it demands immediate growth and specialization, not diversity and patience.
The book continues to elaborate on the idea that forests are both complex and interdependent, even adding in the economic argument that old-growth is ultimately more profitable in the long term than clear-cutting. The Overstory uses a variety of tactics to present its arguments, and here it appeals to even the most practical and profit-oriented members of his audience.
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The judge says that he has read Patricia’s book, and he questions her further about the nature of forests and how trees communicate with each other. Patricia claims that tree plantations are the opposite of forests, and that “a suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm.” She concludes with a market-based argument, knowing her audience. The judge asks one last question about what forests might “know,” and for a moment he seems to Patricia to look like her own father Bill, questioning her about her knowledge of trees all those decades ago.
The idea that “a suburban backyard” could become its own wild space will return through the characters of Ray and Dorothy. It’s also noteworthy that the judge asks about the knowledge of forests, seeming to recognize that both individual trees and the entire organism of the forest have a sort of consciousness.
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After the recess, the judge places a stay on the logging that was being contested. People congratulate Patricia, and she leaves the courthouse to face a mass of demonstrators, some supporting logging and some opposing it. The expert witness for the opposing side finds Patricia and tells her that she just made lumber more expensive, so every company that already owns land is going to “cut as fast as they can.”
Like with Douggie planting his seedlings, Patricia’s best efforts to save the trees ultimately lead to more logging. The capitalist market demands the immediate resources of lumber, and this outcome suggests that until we address the root of this problem, those seeking to profit off of clear-cutting forests will always be able to do so.
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Up in the branches of the redwood Mimas, Watchman and Maidenhair adjust to a wholly new pattern of living. Sometimes loggers and logging company executives show up at the tree’s base and argue with or threaten them. One logger is struck by Olivia’s beauty and says that she could have any man she wants—so why live in a tree? Sometimes Watchman folds up his sketches and drops them onto the men below, who are amazed to see what he has depicted. Days and weeks go by, and the tree-sitters who were supposed to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never appear. One day, the loggers grow angrier in their arguments but also press a genuine debate. Maidenhair finally answers that she’s not saying people should end all logging—they should just “cut like it’s a gift.”
Nick and Olivia adapt to a new rhythm of life atop Mimas, experiencing the passage of time differently now that they’re alone in nature. While The Overstory condemns logging companies, this passage does present the individual workers as mostly just trying to do their jobs and survive. However, these particular loggers direct their anger only at the activists rather than the corporations using their labor to destroy the environment. Olivia’s comment that we should “cut like it’s a gift” also seems to reflect the book’s broader idea of how we might improve our relationship to nature. Humans will always need to use wood and cut trees, but with a drastic change of mindset, we could stop cavalierly clear-cutting forests in the name of profit and convenience.
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After three weeks, Loki and Sparks finally appear at the base of Mimas. They say that there’s been infighting at the camp, and that Buzzard is now in jail. They ask if Maidenhair and Watchman can stay another week, and Maidenhair eagerly agrees. Days pass, and neither the loggers nor the Life Defense Force returns. Maidenhair and Watchman develop a new rhythm of living, based only around nature, each other, and their own thoughts. Nick worries that Olivia’s beings of light have abandoned them, but she reassures him that the loggers “can’t beat nature.” The next day, Nick asks if Olivia’s parents know where she is, in case something bad happens. She says that she hasn’t spoken to them since she left Iowa, but she knows that the story of Mimas will have a happy ending.
This passage continues to show how time passes differently for different beings, as Nick and Olivia slow down to the pace of the natural world around them. Olivia still wholeheartedly trusts the beings of light and believes that the logging companies are destined to lose. She is even willing to entirely ignore her family to continue with her mission.
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Nick and Olivia spend hours reading, going through everything previous sitters have left behind. They re-read The Secret Forest, amazed by all the ways that trees communicate with each other and other species. One night a powerful storm strikes Mimas. Nick panics until Olivia tells him to stop fighting the wind, and together they ride out the gale along with Mimas, who has survived thousands of such storms. Surfing on the swaying branches, Nick and Olivia start laughing and yelling, feeling wild and free. The next morning, three loggers appear to check on them, saying that they were worried.
Another way that Olivia and Nick adjust to life in the wild is learning to trust Mimas itself and to not try to control or subdue nature. When they stop fighting the storm they become like a tree: flexible yet resilient. The fact that the loggers check on them the next day shows that these men are fundamentally decent and have even come to care about the activists opposing them—but the jobs that they depend on demand that they continue to clear-cut.
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Mimi and Douggie are at a new protest at a logging company headquarters, an event that will be filmed and eventually leaked to the public. Mimi tries to convince Douggie to be more cautious this time, but he is easily distracted by the crowd of activists. The group passes onto corporate property, chanting and holding signs. Soon nine people, including Mimi and Douggie, have entered the corporate headquarters and chained themselves around a pillar in the building’s foyer. Their arms are inserted into steel tubes and then linked together, and the police can’t cut the tubes like they can a chain. Mimi and Douggie are separated, but they’re both part of the circle.
This protest seeks to strike closer to the heart of the problem—the corporate power that drives the logging because of its demand for constant growth and profit. Mimi and Douggie again show how willing they are to put their lives on the line in defense of the trees. The protestors link themselves together, becoming stronger as a connected unit.
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The protesters start to sing as a sheriff orders them to depart. He says that if they do not leave, the police will use pepper spray to force them to. Douggie tries to tell them that Mimi has asthma, and that pepper spray could kill her, but the officers only repeat their ultimatum. When the group refuses to unlock their arms, the police go to one of the protesters, dip a Q-tip in pepper spray, and wipe her eyes with it. The woman moans and screams, and the other protesters and many onlookers cry out for the officers to stop, but instead they move on to the next person, a burly man, wiping his eyes with pepper spray as well.
This passage again shows that the police are willing to use brutal torture to defend corporate interests. The protestors are seen as dangerous because they disrupt the status quo—if they are right, then logging companies are committing fundamentally evil acts while the public stands by. Unable to even consider that this might be the case, the enforcers of state and corporate power will do anything to silence the activists.
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When the police come to Mimi, Douggie again begs them to stop because she is asthmatic. Mimi still won’t let go, and as they swab her, Douggie panics. He unlocks his arms and rushes at the police officer, but he is quickly subdued. The circle broken, the protest is over—but that night, the person filming the scene leaks the video to the press.
The only thing that Douggie cares more about than the forests is Mimi. While it seems that the protest has totally failed, the fact that it was filmed and leaked to the media actually makes it a success. They have been able to tell a story with their actions, and that story might make the broader public pay attention.
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Soon afterward, Dennis tells Patricia about what has happened: the judge’s injunction was ruled to not apply to the Forest Service, and cutting is going to begin again. He describes the protests and said he saw footage of one where the police wiped pepper spray in the protesters’ eyes. Patricia can’t even believe it, but Dennis assures her that he saw it himself.
The characters see their best efforts fail again and again, crushed by the power of greedy corporations, the state, and an apathetic public.
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Dennis and Patricia eat their lunch in silence as Patricia despairs, wondering how the forests can survive humanity’s need for endless growth. At the same time, she finds the desperate protesters beautiful. She muses aloud to Dennis that humans only know how to “grow harder; grow faster,” and can’t seem to live any other way. What she doesn’t tell him is what she truly believes: that humans have disrupted the environment so drastically that the entire “Tree of Life” is slowly falling again. Meanwhile, Dennis admits that watching the protest scene made him want to hurt the cops involved.
Patricia again acts as a mouthpiece for The Overstory’s author, Richard Powers, as she lays out the argument that human psychology—our need for constant growth—is essentially condemning us to extinction and bringing the rest of the planet down with us. She only hopes that the forests can survive long enough to outlast us. At the same time, Patricia manages to see the beauty in individual people.
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After lunch, Patricia continues their discussion, saying that what people are doing now clearly isn’t working, and the extinction of nature is only speeding up. She has an idea, then, to at least preserve a few specimens of all the trees that will soon be gone: a seed vault. Dennis is intrigued by the idea. Patricia doesn’t have a plan for what the future might hold for the vault, but she says that “a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.”
Patricia’s pessimistic view of humanity and the future leads her to begin a hopeful project: starting a seed vault. She recognizes that trees operate on a different sense of time than people do, and that the seeds she saves could potentially outlast humanity itself. Trees are endlessly patient, The Overstory suggests, and the potential life held within seeds can wait as long as it needs to.
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In the digital world of Neelay’s newest Mastery game, two avatars stand together looking out over the sea. One, a blue-skinned god, is being played by Neelay’s father Babul, who is 2,000 miles away from his son in real life. Neelay himself is in the character of an old beggar. Babul is amazed by what he sees and delighted to see his son. As Babul exclaims with delight, Neelay leads him through beaches and jungles, past fantastical trees that Neelay says are based on real species. Neelay explains that other players will be arriving in this world soon to start building and exploring, but he wanted to show it to his Pita first.
Neelay continues to thrive in the alternate realities that he creates, and he and Babul are still very close despite their physical separation. This passage also shows how Neelay’s love of the natural world is a key aspect of his success, as the worlds of his games feel so fantastical and exciting because they are based on nature itself.
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Neelay reminds Babul of their first computer kit, and how all the trees that now surround them came only from the banyan seed the size of his fingertip, as Babul had told him years before. Babul thanks his son, and Neelay promises to see him soon, though he knows that he won’t—Babul is dying. They bid farewell in the world of the game, and Babul promises that “We’ll be home soon.
The image of the seed returns as the source of both the enormous banyan tree and the expansive worlds that Neelay has built: something tiny that contains the potential for endlessly branching possibilities. Father and son say goodbye in this poignant scene, returning to their happy times together many years before.
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In the Brinkman home, Ray and Dorothy have just had an explosive fight. Dorothy is in the bathroom as Ray watches the news—much of it about trees being cut down—and thinks about their relationship. He remembers their first date auditioning for Macbeth, and then also thinks about the fight that just occurred. He finally confronted Dorothy about her infidelity, saying that he has known for more than a year but still wants to stick with her. She responded that she doesn’t belong to anyone, and that Ray needs to let her go.
Ray and Dorothy continue to live on the periphery of the other characters, caught up in their own world of marital discontent and suburban isolation. Meanwhile, Dorothy’s assertion that she doesn’t belong to anyone connects to Ray’s interest in extending rights to all beings. The trees being reported on aren’t respected or given rights, and Dorothy doesn’t feel that she’s respected or free in her marriage either.
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Still watching the news, Ray has a sudden realization, one echoing the thoughts he had months before when reading the essay about intellectual property rights for trees. He realizes that humanity has always been stealing from its “neighbors” and must eventually repay all of it. As he thinks this, he falls to the ground. Dorothy emerges from the bathroom and screams his name as Ray’s brain floods with blood.
Ray’s epiphany is another of one of the book’s arguments: that trees and other non-human beings have value and should therefore have rights as well, and thus, the law is severely limited in both its scope and its morality. This mindset means that human exploitation of nature is literal theft and should be discouraged and punished as such. As Ray has this thought, he suffers what appears to be a ruptured brain aneurysm.
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After her latest arrest, Mimi arrives at her job Monday morning to find a man waiting for her—he introduces himself as Brendan Smith and explains that he is there to help her leave the company. Mimi expected to be fired, but she is insulted by the presence of the “professional ejector.” She angrily packs up her belongings, including photographs of her sisters, her father, and her grandparents in China whom she has never met. At last, she leaves the office, but then she makes Brendan reopen it so she can get the arhat scroll. Mimi exits the building, and Brendan posts himself at the door, making sure she doesn’t come back.
Mimi has finally gone too far in her activism in her company’s eyes, and in response, it deems her a liability and disposes of her. Mimi feels disgraced to be treated this way. The photograph of her grandparents suggests that Ma Shouying and his wife survived the prison camp, though they never met their grandchildren in America.
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That night, Douggie gets drunk by himself at a bar, loudly bemoaning the state of humanity until the man next to him gets annoyed and punches him. Douggie falls and passes out, and when he comes to, he feels a “mushiness” in his head that wasn’t there before. He makes his way out to his car and decides to go visit Mimi, though he knows she probably won’t want him to. Once, when they were chained together for hours, she had told him about all her past love affairs with both men and women. Douggie doesn’t expect her to love him, but he does want to be her “trusted confidant” or even her “manservant.”
Despairing at the torture he and the other activists endured, as well as the seeming failure of their protest, Douggie again turns to alcohol to drown his sorrows. He knows that Mimi doesn’t return his affections, but he is still entirely devoted to her.
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Douggie knows he’s too drunk to drive, but now his face is bleeding, and he feels that he has nowhere else to go. As he heads toward town, an empty logging truck starts to follow him—and then suddenly rear-ends him so that he swerves off the road. The truck strikes him again and keeps following until Douggie manages to skid away. Afterward, he idles his car in the middle of an intersection, panicking. The attack feels worse than the police torture, or even his plane crash in Thailand. Finally, Douggie starts driving again, and arrives at Mimi’s condo. When she answers the door, she is obviously drunk, her belongings strewn about and a scroll unrolled on the floor. Mimi pulls Douggie inside, and “the trees bring them home at last.”
This frightening scene shows the lengths that people are willing to go to protect their livelihood. The loggers demonize activists like Douggie instead of the system that keeps them living hand-to-mouth off an unsustainable logging practice. Both Mimi and Douggie have hit rock bottom on this night, and in their mutual despair, it’s implied that they find comfort in each other and are physically intimate for the first time.
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Adam Appich is now climbing the same rope ladder that Nick and Olivia did many months before—he’s ascending Mimas. The height makes him panic, but he eventually makes his way to the top, where Maidenhair and Watchman greet him. Adam notes how easily they move about among the branches, to the point that just watching them makes him nauseous with vertigo. When he recovers enough, Adam surveys the view from Mimas’s height. Mimas is now the only redwood left in the area—everything else has been clear-cut and burned.
Adam’s research has at last united him with some of the other characters, as he plans to interview Nick and Olivia as part of this thesis. The initial beautiful view from Mimas’s top is contrasted with the tragic destruction that has occurred in the last few months. Only Nick and Olivia’s physical presence has saved this one tree, and they cannot stay there forever.
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Watchman and Maidenhair have now been camped out for 10 months, and Adam considers them ideal subjects for his psych study. Watchman sees approaching logging vehicles and suggests that Adam ask his questions quickly and then get back down, but Maidenhair invites him to stay the night. As they talk, Adam’s nausea suddenly becomes too much, and he vomits off the edge of the platform.
What was supposed to be a stint of just a few days has now turned into nearly a year, but Olivia and Nick have adjusted to an entirely different sense of time as this experience has gone on—one that’s more similar to the slow way in which trees experience time. Adam, however, is still very much a part of the human world on the ground.
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When he recovers, Adam gives Watchman and Maidenhair his questionnaire. They ask him about his research, and Maidenhair notes that instead of studying environmental activists, he should be studying “everyone who thinks that only people matter.” That is what is really “pathological,” Watchman agrees. Maidenhair flips through the questionnaire and then suggests that Adam just talk to them instead. Adam knows he shouldn’t ruin his data, but he really does want to talk.
This passage reiterates one of The Overstory’s most important points: that when society as a whole is doing something wrong or illogical (in this case, assuming that only people matter in the scheme of life on Earth), those who go against the status quo will be labeled as pathological. This is because, for most people, what makes something sane versus insane is based on what their larger group believes.
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Adam explains that what he is really interested in is the idea that “group loyalty interferes with reason.” Watchman and Maidenhair look at him like this is obvious, and Adam is again intrigued by these people who have managed to resist “consensual reality.” Maidenhair then makes Adam affirm what they all know: that humans are using resources faster than they can be replaced, and that the rate of this growth is only rising, not falling. There is no way this trend can end except with total collapse. So what Adam is really studying, Maidenhair says, is the few people who are screaming to put out the fire, while the main group has decided that the fire isn’t happening at all.
Author Richard Powers makes his argument clearer here, as the three characters essentially lay out his main points. His project in The Overstory is essentially to convince readers that they, too, are lost in a “consensual reality” that is unsustainable and will lead to the destruction of human life. The activists who are screaming about the metaphorical fire might not be acting in ways that everyone agrees with, but they are at least doing something at a time when inaction means extinction.
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Adam starts to wonder if Maidenhair is right, and if instead he should be studying “illness on an unimaginable scale.” Maidenhair then tells him that humanity is not alone, and that she can sense the voice of something else: the trees, or a life force, like a “Greek chorus” in her mind. Adam knows he should be skeptical, but then he admits that sometimes he talks out loud to his sister Leigh, who disappeared when he was a child. He feels as if he has been drugged by the tree and given a new perspective. As the three continue to talk, they can hear giant trees falling in the distance.
Adam is rather easily convinced, but the narrative suggests that he is also immediately smitten by Olivia, the new perspective atop Mimas, and even chemicals from Mimas itself (via the processes that Patricia studies and writes about). In this strange new environment, Adam lets his guard down and reveals a secret: that he still sometimes talks aloud to his lost sister. He recognizes that most people would consider this pathological, but perhaps no more so than Olivia’s claim of communicating with the trees.
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Late that afternoon, Loki returns to retrieve Adam. He climbs up to the platform and then delivers bad news: Mother N and Moses are dead. Someone bombed their office, but the police are saying that they blew themselves up in a terrorist attack. Maidenhair and Watchman mourn this loss and tell stories about their experiences with Moses and Mother N. Afterward, Loki gets ready to descend, but Adam says he would like to spend the night in the tree.
Mother N is likely based on the real-life figure of Judy Bari. Bari was a leader in the Earth First! activist group (which played the primary role in the Redwood Summer), and she was badly injured when a bomb in her car exploded. She was initially accused of setting off the bomb herself but was later found to have played no part. This event is another example of how the police and FBI in the novel automatically take the side of corporate power, assuming guilt on the part of the environmentalists.
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At night, the flying squirrels arrive to inspect Adam, as Watchman sketches them by candlelight. Adam is amazed by everything he can hear in the darkness. The next morning the three are awakened by the sounds of machinery. A logger yells up at them that “shit’s coming” and they need to get out, and then they hear the sound of an approaching helicopter. Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair grab their possessions and cling to whatever they can as the enormous machine approaches, the wind from its blades slamming against them. Up close, Adam sees the helicopter as an evil thing and thinks about how many thousands of more there are all around the world.
Adam experiences a similar first night to Olivia and Nick, adjusting to the alien environment atop the redwood. The logging companies suddenly escalate their attack here, using a vehicle designed for warfare in order to drive the activists from the tree. Notably, the loggers themselves try to warn Adam, Olivia, and Nick and keep them safe—it is the corporate higher-ups that order the attack.
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A megaphone blares from the helicopter, demanding that the three come down from the tree. Meanwhile, bulldozers ram the base of Mimas’s trunk. The violence escalates, until finally Adam screams that they are done and will come down. Sobbing, Maidenhair lets go of her branch, and she and Watchman admit defeat. The helicopter leaves, and Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair are taken down by harness and arrested. As they’re driven away in a police car, they can hear the deep crash of Mimas falling.
Despite all their efforts, Mimas is cut down anyway. This tragic scene seems to undercut all of Olivia’s confidence in her mission to save the tree, and it also serves as another example of the wanton destruction brought about by human greed. Again and again, the environmental activists in the novel are defeated, and ancient trees keep getting cut down.
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The narrative touches on what other characters are doing while Adam, Nick, and Olivia are in custody. Patricia gives talks about the seed vault she is starting, Neelay sends memos about adding even more complexity and beauty to the world of his game, and Dorothy starts a prison sentence of her own as the caretaker of a man who has just undergone brain surgery. All she can think of is how just before Ray’s aneurysm, she had told him that she wanted a divorce.
Passages like this one emphasize how each character is both connected and independent, following their individual storylines but also existing in relation to one another. At the moment she tried to truly break away from Ray, Dorothy becomes more trapped than ever.
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Adam, Watchman, and Maidenhair are held in a jail cell for several days—longer than they are legally allowed to be held. Watchman notes that the authorities don’t want the bad press of a trial, so they are instead just trying to hurt and intimidate them. On his fourth night in jail, Nick dreams of the Hoel chestnut tree. In the dream, the tree laughs at humanity for trying to save it, and “even the laugh takes years.” Meanwhile, Mimi and Douglas attend a protest condemning a new logging company practice: hiring an arsonist to “lightly damage” forests owned by the Forest Service so that they can then sell them off to be cut.
Again, the narrative shows how the law and its enforcers work to protect corporate interests, even breaking their own rules (like about how long someone can be held in jail) in order to enforce their larger mission, which is that only humans matter under the law. Nick’s dream of the chestnut tree is another illustration of the idea that trees experience time at a different rate than we do, as even something as brief as a laugh to them “takes years” in human time. The dream’s sentiment is also important: that we need saving more than the trees do.
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After five days, Adam, Nick, and Olivia are released from jail without charges. Olivia immediately says that she wants to go see Mimas, and they take Adam’s car along the logging road. The loggers are all gone, as there’s nothing left to cut. Olivia approaches the massive stump, touches it, and starts to weep. Later the three have breakfast, and Adam asks about their plans. Nick and Olivia are going to head north to Oregon where there is more resistance happening. They invite Adam to come with them, but he says that he has to finish his dissertation.
The loss of Mimas is obviously a huge blow to Olivia and Nick, but they try to remain hopeful and continue in their activist work. Olivia seems especially disoriented after this experience, as everything the voices told her seems to have been wrong. Adam is changed by his brief experience as well, but he also still feels bound to his research and life back at the university.
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Adam returns to Santa Cruz, where Professor Van Dijk thinks he’s joking when he tells her that his fieldwork led him to spend five days in jail. He works on his data, but he finds that something drastic has changed within him, and his heart isn’t in it anymore. That night, he gets drunk and wanders the streets of town until he is struck in the head by a falling eucalyptus seed pod. He examines the strange object and then looks up at the tree itself, asking “What?
Adam tries to return to his regular life, but he finds that he can no longer dispassionately research the destruction that he has now witnessed in person. The trees again seem to have agency, intervening in Adam’s destiny with the falling seed pod.
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Adam gets a year-long fellowship to work on his dissertation, and he immediately heads north to Oregon, awed by the forests that he drives through in the Pacific Northwest. At last, he reaches his destination: a community of around a hundred activists labeling themselves “The Free Bioregion of Cascadia.” Adam drives up and is met by a man who introduces himself as “Doug-fir” and a woman who calls herself “Mulberry.” Adam insists that he’s not a federal agent, and then he introduces himself as “Maple.” He asks if Maidenhair and Watchman are there. In response Mulberry says, “We don’t have leaders here. But we do have those two.”
Adam officially breaks with his previous life and decides to join the activists, just like Nick, Olivia, Mimi, and Douglas all did in their own way. Adam takes his name from the maple tree planted at his birth. It’s implied that “Mulberry” is Mimi (because of her father’s mulberry tree) and “Doug-fir” is Douglas, both because of his name and his job planting thousands of Douglas-fir seedlings. Again, the paths of seemingly disparate characters begin to overlap and move toward a common goal of conservation, which is a testament to humans’ interconnectedness with one another and with their environment.
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Watchman and Maidenhair greet Adam excitedly and say that the group usually has a ceremony when someone new joins. That night, everyone dresses up and sings songs, as Adam tries to tamp down his natural cynicism regarding anything overly earnest. Still, he goes through with the ceremony, and as “Maple” he pledges to defend “the common cause of living things.” When he’s done, everyone applauds. Around a fire later, Maidenhair asks him what his advice is, as a psychologist, for changing people’s minds. Adam says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Afterward, Olivia tells her own story of dying, and a Native Klamath man chants and teaches everyone a few words of his language.
Again, the narrator refers to the characters by their tree aliases as they leave behind the human-centric world and instead try to fight for “the common cause of all living things,” particularly trees. Furthermore, Adam’s quote here is crucial to understanding The Overstory’s message. The book has made it clear that human psychology means that we are very unlikely to go against our group or change our minds once they are set. But here, Adam provides a potential way out: storytelling (and other forms of art) can sometimes get through to people when logic or reasoning won’t. This, then, is what Richard Powers himself is trying to do through The Overstory: present his arguments in the form of a “good story.”
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The next day, the group works hard digging trenches and securing the makeshift wall around their encampment. At night, Adam eats with Doug-fir, Mulberry, Watchman, and Maidenhair, observing to himself that together they seem like a “Jungian archetypal family.” He especially watches Maidenhair and notes that she is like the glue holding everyone together. That night, he joins their group as a “fifth wheel” and officially becomes “Professor Maple.”
Adam still sees everything through a psychologist’s lens, comparing the group he’s a part of to a “Jungian archetype.” Psychiatrist Carl Jung was the founder of analytical psychology, and the concept of “Jungian archetypes” refers to universal themes and symbols that Jung theorized were part of humanity's collective unconscious. With this comparison, Adam is combining the science of psychology with the more spiritual idea that all beings are interconnected. At the same time, Adam is no longer trying to be detached and objective, instead joining the people he once studied. Despite the loss of Mimas, Olivia seems firm in her convictions and still holds a kind of spiritual power that affects those around her.
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The occupation of Free Cascadia lasts for many days, as sympathizers send supplies and journalists visit to interview them. Eventually, two men from a congressional representative’s office come by and promise to bring the group’s demands to Washington—this seems like a hopeful turn of events to everyone, even Adam. Yet someone also shoots at the group one night, and three days later, someone leaves deer entrails just outside the encampment as a threat.
There is once again hope that something will change, as the activists’ failures have at least become well-known around the country. At the same time, they face immediate threats from those who see them as an enemy of humanity.
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One day, a truck pulls up with two men in hunting jackets. They argue with the activists, and the elder man says that he lost his arm cutting trees. Maidenhair talks to them, finally saying that people need to “stop being visitors here” on Earth and “become indigenous again.” One man shakes her hand, but as they drive off, the driver calls out insults.
Olivia is a mouthpiece for the book’s arguments here, offering possibilities for a way that humans might survive on this Earth. She suggests that people should respect the environment as their home rather than acting like “visitors” who mistreat Earth. This passage also points to Indigenous societies that were able to thrive without destroying their natural environment.
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The protest continues into its second month. There are even rumors that the President has heard about it and is ready to take action. One morning, however, a guard for the activists warns them that federal agents are on their way. Everyone takes action as they’ve trained to do, raising the drawbridge over their moat and manning their walls. A caravan of massive equipment arrives, and a Forest Service man gets out and demands that the protestors exit. Everyone shouts, and then Adam tries to tell the man that the President himself is going to make an executive order. The men ignore this, and Adam suddenly realizes that Washington isn’t going to help them—in fact, Washington is behind this sudden invasion.
Once again laws—here represented at the highest level by the President himself—are only designed to protect human systems, not anything non-human like forests. This also means that the full military power of the law is against the activists, so they don’t stand a chance of really doing anything other than offering a “story” to the media that others might see.
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When the protesters refuse to leave, an enormous excavator rolls up and smashes down the wall, taking seconds to destroy months of work. It then rolls into the camp, and the activists scatter. Douggie and Mimi try to stay, each having chained themselves down, but soon even Douggie admits that they’ve lost. Mimi has been locked atop a tall tripod of poles, and when she won’t leave, the excavator tears at the poles themselves. Mimi falls and impales her cheek on the end of a pole, then tumbles all the way to the ground. The driver of the excavator jerks the machine back and it strikes Douggie, who collapses to the ground. Suddenly the action ceases, and everyone rushes to Mimi and Douggie’s aid.
Mimi’s face is scarred in this attack. It is much easier to destroy than it is to build, the narrative suggests, as the excavator immediately destroys their encampment—similarly, a tree that took centuries to grow can be cut down in seconds. The book once again pits humanity’s brutal machinery against the natural world.
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Adam finds Watchman and Maidenhair afterward. Maidenhair is convinced that they haven’t lost yet, and that Washington will soon take action. Adam doesn’t have the heart to tell her the extent of their failure. Mimi and Douglas are airlifted to a hospital and treated, and no one is charged except for four women who manage to remain locked down for another 36 hours. The rest of the Free Bioregion of Cascadia disbands, and “the extraction of wealth continues.” Yet despite this, the narrator notes, four weeks later a shed full of logging equipment is burned down.
All of the activists’ work ended up being just a blip on the radar for these gigantic corporations and their need for constant growth through the destruction of nature. With this latest disaster, it seems that the characters’ efforts have truly failed once and for all. In the end, “the extraction of wealth” through harvesting the forest’s resources prevails. The ensuing arson is not immediately connected to the characters themselves but described as if it were a detached and spontaneous event.
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The narrative follows only the aftermath of this event; the perpetrators are Olivia, Nick, Mimi, Douglas, and Adam. It feels unreal to them to see the damage on the news, but they all feel like they needed revenge against the equipment that has wounded them and the people who have tortured them.
The activists’ latest defeat is the last straw for them. Feeling like they have nothing else to lose, they turn the physical destruction of their enemies against them. The book doesn’t explicitly condone their actions, but it does encourage readers sympathize with them because of all that they’ve been through and what is at stake.
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This act of arson leads to more, as the group next targets a sawmill in California. They all work together, using their respective skills to burn down the building, with Nick leaving behind a painted message: “NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY; YES TO REAL GROWTH.”
Nick’s words are an encapsulation of one of The Overstory’s central ideas: that our current economy, which is based on ceaseless growth and exploitation of natural resources, will ultimately lead to our own destruction. By killing the Earth for profit, humanity is slowly committing suicide.
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Afterwards they sit together at Mulberry’s table, discussing how disillusioned they’ve all become. Adam knows that there are many psychological biases at play among them, but that he, too, has “thrown in his lot with the need to save what can be saved.” This, he realizes, is his ultimate thesis. Olivia, who still holds everyone else under her spell, says that they really have no choice—if they’re wrong, they only lose their lives, but if they’re right, they should be doing everything they can to help “the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation.” As she speaks, Adam realizes that the group will do one last job and then part ways.
Here, the characters justify their actions as the logical conclusion of what they believe. If the planet and humanity itself is being destroyed, then they should do everything they can to “save what can be saved”—and if violence is the only way to achieve anything in that regard, then that violence is justified. The Overstory leaves it up to the reader whether or not to agree with this argument.
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Adam finds the subject of their last attack: thousands of acres of public forest across multiple states being sold to developers. In planning their mission, the group never writes anything down, talking only face-to-face and paying for everything with cash. Watchman and Maidenhair surveil the site they plan to hit: construction equipment at a patch of forest in Idaho that’s scheduled to be cleared for a four-star resort. Watchman sketches everything, and later the five work together in Mulberry’s garage, building explosives and finalizing their plans. They hope to at least plant a seed with their actions—“the kind that needs fire to open.”
Each member of the group uses their unique skills to carry out their plan. This passage brings back the image of the seed, here as something resilient and hopeful but also requiring some kind of “fire” or violence to achieve its full potential.
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On the night of their mission, everyone is prepared and dressed in black, their van loaded with explosives. As they drive, they talk, quiz each other, and listen to a tape of Native American myths and legends. They reach the Bitterroots of Idaho at night and pull up to the site. Mimi stays in the van with a police scanner, while the rest set to work setting up their devices and timers.
Though they are on their way to carry out a violent act, the group members try to remind themselves of their cause. That they listen to Native American myths in the van hearkens back to Olivia’s point that contemporary people should strive to be more like Indigenous cultures that respected and lived in harmony with nature.
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Watchman’s job is to paint messages that will hopefully soon be seen by millions of people. On a trailer’s wall he writes, “CONTROL KILLS; CONNECTION HEALS” and “COME HOME OR DIE.” Meanwhile, Adam accidentally spills fuel all over himself and suddenly panics, wondering what he’s doing—there’s no point to their actions, he thinks, as humanity’s need for “property and mastery” will always win, expanding until the last forest is gone.
These messages are the kind of “story” that, as Adam previously said, can possibly change people’s minds. In his slogans, Nick emphasizes the idea that we need to entirely rethink our ways of interacting with the natural world: instead of trying to control it (which leads to the “suicide economy”), we must recognize how connected we are to all the other kinds of consciousnesses out there.
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Watchman keeps working, now painting a poem about five trees that he composes on the spot. Suddenly, something explodes at the detonation site, long before the timers should have gone off. Watchman and Douglas rush toward the blaze and see two figures on the ground. One of them is Adam, who gets up. Olivia is the other. Nick picks her up and sees that her whole torso is bleeding. Her voice slurs, and she can barely speak. Douglas panics, spinning around and cursing to himself. Adam pulls Olivia away from the approaching flames, and Nick bends down beside her again but then has to turn away and vomit. Mimi appears and gives Adam the keys to the van, urging him to go get help. Olivia protests, trying to say that they need to finish the job, while Adam weighs his options.
This tragic accident is the climax of the book’s plot, as something goes wrong and an explosive detonates early, severely injuring Olivia. Olivia herself is still focused on their mission, even as most of the others panic. Nick has devoted his life to Olivia, and his body physically cannot handle seeing her like this.
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Mimi tries to snap Douglas out of his panic and then bends down to tend to Olivia. Olivia asks for water, and Nick and Douglas rush to find some. They gather up a bag full of water from a nearby stream, knowing that it’s probably toxic but that Olivia just needs the immediate comfort. Olivia drinks the water as Mimi cleans her face and cradles her. Olivia then locks eyes with Mimi and seems to share thoughts with her, saying that “I’ve been shown what happens, and this isn’t it.”
In this time of crisis, Mimi is the only one who remains relatively calm and decisive, perhaps because seeing the aftermath of her father’s suicide desensitized her to this type of situation. As she stares intently into Olivia’s eyes, messages seem to pass between them without words. This is an example of a different kind of consciousness and communication, similar to the signals that Olivia herself received from the trees.
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Two new explosions go off, and Olivia again seeks out Mimi’s gaze, staring desperately into her eyes. Adam reappears—too soon to have gone to get help and returned—and Nick attacks him in a rage until Olivia speaks Nick’s name. Nick goes to her side as she cries out, bleeding from her mouth. At last, she asks him, “This will never end—what we have. Right?” Nick cannot answer, and Olivia dies.
Olivia’s last words are this haunting question. It is unclear if she is asking about her and Nick’s relationship, the group’s commitment to saving the forests, or life on Earth itself. She never gets an answer either way, and she dies tragically without ever achieving the victories that she believed were her destiny.
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