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.”