The Overstory

by

Richard Powers

The Overstory: Part 4: Seeds Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
The narrative describes the history of Earth as if it all happened in one day, from midnight to midnight. Life doesn’t begin until three or four in the morning, and plants and insects don’t arrive on land until ten at night. Humanoids appear just seconds before midnight, and what we think of as humans only in the last second. Yet a few fractions of a second after that, most of the planet has been irreversibly changed, and the tree of life begins to fall.
Part 4 is called “Seeds,” the products of the figurative tree that has structured the book and that in themselves hold potential for the future. Opening this section, the narrative now zooms out to an even broader sense of time. The imagery in this passage also recalls Patricia’s words about the tree of life, suggesting that she may be the speaker.
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Destruction, Extinction, and Rebirth Theme Icon
Complexity, Branching, and Interdependence Theme Icon
Nick Hoel wakes up in a tent in the middle of the woods. He rises with the dawn and sings to himself and to the birds, making a fire and then coffee. Meanwhile Mimi Ma sits in Dolores Park in San Francisco, reading the news about Adam’s prison sentence. She knows that Douglas is the one who betrayed him, and Mimi feels like she should be in prison too. As Mimi searches for terms related to Adam Appich, other “invisible eyes” read along with her, absorbing every pattern they can find.
Nick’s experience here echoes the passage at the beginning of Part 3, implying that he was the nameless man described there.
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Douglas is in his prison cell, though it’s the nicest place he’s lived in decades. He is listening to an audio course called “Introduction to Dendrology.” Douglas loves listening to the professor on the tapes, who has a speech impediment. The woman explains the “Day of Life,” imagining all of Earth’s history as taking place over the course of a single day. When she gets to the last second of the day, with humans and their factory farms, Douglas yanks out his earbuds and screams out loud.
This passage seems to show that Douglas was the unnamed man from the beginning of Part 2, and the woman discussing the day of life is Patricia. Faced with all the tragedy of humanity’s destruction of nature, Douglas simply cannot cope and has to scream.
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While Mimi, still in Dolores Park, feels like she will be arrested any minute, Adam waits to be sent to federal prison. Lying in his bunk, he thinks about how everything that he and his fellow activists hoped to save is already gone: “Humans are all that count, the final word,” and their endless hunger for more cannot be slowed. Adam knows that there is a catastrophe coming for humanity, though it likely won’t come soon enough to exonerate him of his actions.
Adam feels that he is on the right side of morality and life itself, though he might be on the wrong side of society and the law. Here, he comes to the same conclusion as others in The Overstory: that there is little hope for humanity’s future, as we seem incapable of making drastic change at the societal level, and the status quo is rapidly leading us toward extinction.
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As he listens to his audio courses, Douglas longs to see a tree again. He closes his eyes and waits until they appear in his memory; thinking of them feels that he has lived a very rich live after all. At the same time, he feels the “seed” of a tumor growing in his side. Meanwhile Neelay works on his new project, with new coders using all the information that his “creatures” can find. There is no need to write anything from scratch—the world they live in is already the most complex game there is.
Despite his apparent failures in life, Douglas gains joy just from thinking of trees and all the valuable moments he has shared with them. He recognizes his tumor as another type of life growing inside of him, a kind of seed that might be killing him but that also has its own value as a living thing. Neelay’s project also grows clearer in this passage: he is trying to use AI to gather information for a game based on the web of life on Earth.
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Quotes
More of Neelay’s bots (described as “learners”) watch Mimi as she searches related topics on her phone, finally coming to a video that holds her attention. It focuses on a massive stump that Mimi recognizes as Mimas. Gas burners then inflate an enormous balloon in the shape of a tree, rising from the stump and set against the background of countless other massive stumps—a single ephemeral tree in the wasteland.
This is another of Nick’s videos, as he has continued to make art in different mediums to share his message with others. The image of the tree as a balloon illustrates how fragile even these massive, ancient trees really are.
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The balloon-tree lingers for a moment, and then around its base Mimi sees the arhats from her father’s scroll, and the words of the scroll’s poem. Mimi is stunned, and then she remembers Nick Hoel spending hours sketching in her house. He must have been drawing the arhat scroll as well. In the video, the balloon tree starts to go up in flames, ending with just a wisp of smoke over the clear-cut hillside. Seeing it, Mimi feels an old desire to “bomb something.” The video ends with a verse from the Bible about trees—how they can always regrow from the roots, while humans waste away and disappear.
Here, Nick becomes another character connected by the poem and the arhat scroll. Seeing the beautiful image of the balloon-tree destroyed makes Mimi feel all the old rage and frustration that led her to arson so many years before. Nick, like others in the book, takes comfort in the fact that trees will outlive humanity. As individuals the trees might seem fragile in the face of human destruction, but as a whole they will survive and thrive once again.
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Nick himself is working on another art project out in the northern woods, but this one will not be for any cameras. He is constructing an enormous sculpture in the middle of nowhere, to eventually fade away into nature. His materials are only fallen wood, some pieces small enough for him to carry by hand, while others that require a block and tackle. As he works, Nick thinks about how the sculpture must look when seen from above. He stops for lunch, and then is surprised to see another human being, a man in a red plaid coat who says he had heard that there was a “crazy white man” working nearby. Nick says it must be him, and the stranger shakes his head and starts helping him to move the wood.
Nick continues to use art in many different ways to try and reach viewers through a story rather than an argument. This particular piece is meant to be seen from above, in an echo of The Overstory’s general goal of trying to take a wide view of humanity and the web of life. Like Patricia and other enlightened characters, Nick, too, has learned to look beyond himself and even beyond his species.
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Human Nature, Psychology, and Storytelling Theme Icon
Complexity, Branching, and Interdependence Theme Icon
Neelay’s bots travel the world, looking through the eyes of phones, cameras, and satellites, learning about forests and the clear-cut lands that grow every minute. As Neelay absorbs the information they gather, he feels a sense of grief that he will not live long enough to see the future that his creations will make. Neelay thinks of the sci-fi story he loved as a child about the aliens who moved so quickly that “human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans.”
Neelay connects the sci-fi story of his childhood to his own experience, recognizing that it illustrates how humans perceive time versus how time passes for trees and other kinds of life. He, too, recognizes his smallness and temporality in the larger scheme of life on Earth.
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Mimi still sits under the same pine tree, twisting her jade ring—Fusang, the tree of the future—around her finger, but unable to remove it. Then she remembers Adam saying that the only thing that can change people’s minds is a “good story,” and she realizes what he is trying to do: “he has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers.” Meanwhile, Adam himself replays his latest fight with Lois and wonders what exactly he has saved by taking the actions that he has. All the while, Neelay’s watchers cross the world, trying to learn “what life wants from humans.”
Adam gives up the rest of his life to tell a story that might catch the attention of others. Nothing else seems to be working, so here he makes one last desperate sacrifice to try and save humanity. As non-humans themselves, Neelay’s bots can better observe other kinds of life and consciousness beyond the human. They see nothing foreign about the idea that life itself might have its own conscious desires.
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Mimi looks around at the trees of the park and the city surrounding her as the day fades. She leans back against the pine tree and tries to reach Douglas in her mind. Suddenly she realizes that he, too, has made a sacrifice for her sake, one even more terrible than Adam’s. Douglas gave up his own life and incriminated Adam as well, just to save her. Mimi wants to scream upon realizing this. She knows that Douglas will torture himself if he doesn’t hear from her, but she has no way to reach him and say what she now wants to say: “that his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.”
Mimi and Douglas search in their minds but cannot find each other, yet Mimi has at least come to realize that both Adam and Douglas are truly good and have tried to do the right thing.
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Douglas returns to the audio lectures, as the professor describes seeds that only open when exposed to fire and then returns to her theme of the tree of life. At one point she says, “Let me sing to you, about how creatures become other things.” The professor then asks why we didn’t do more to stop the tree of life from toppling again. At this point, Douglas has to stop the tape and lie down. Again, he feels the tumor in his side and feels guilty for sending Adam to prison for the rest of his life. He cries out aloud and apologizes, though he knows that no forgiveness is coming.
This passage returns to the image of seeds that require some kind of trauma to open. It also brings back the quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which could be interpreted as referring to life itself changing and adapting beyond humanity. Many characters in the book come to a relatively tragic end (like Douglas here), as the book continues to emphasize the bleakness of humanity’s future.
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The man in the red plaid coat continues to help Nick with his project. They don’t exchange names, but only work together to roll the logs into place. They stop for dinner and finally Nick comments on how much the trees speak when one is simply quiet and open to hearing them. The man laughs and says, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.” Nick then remarks that he’ll need to restock on food soon, and the man laughs again, looking around the forest as if it is full of food for the taking. Nick suddenly understands what the beings of light were trying to tell Olivia: “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life” that need help are not the trees, but humans.
The mention of 1492 (the year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas) suggests that the nameless man has Native heritage. The Overstory mentions Indigenous culture several times but doesn’t go into much depth about it, other than offering examples of a different way of interacting with nature—one not based on capitalistic exploitation but connectedness and sharing. Just as in his dream where the chestnut tree laughs at humans for trying to save it, Nick realizes what the beings of light meant: humans are the ones that need saving. While The Overstory seeks to decentralize humans and shift people’s focus onto other forms of life instead, ultimately the book is for humans—and so we must recognize that we are the ones that truly need help.
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Quotes
Neelay continues his work, sending his watchful algorithms everywhere to absorb everything about nature that they can. Elsewhere Adam is finally sent away to federal prison, where he meets his new peers. These men will beat Adam up many times, the narrator notes, “not for being a terrorist, but for siding with the enemies of human progress.” As Adam enters the prison, he imagines all the destruction and extinction that will happen beyond the building’s walls during the time of his sentence. Adam checks in with an official and notices a seed stuck to his own shoulder. Somehow it found its way there, though he has only moved from one prison to another. Adam feels that he, along with his four co-conspirators and all of humanity itself have always been like this: vessels for life to use.
Like the police, loggers, and the neighbors in the Brinkmans’ suburb, Adam’s fellow prisoners find themselves hating him for apparently being a traitor to humanity by defending other kinds of life against “human progress.” Adam is now facing a different perspective on time as well, but he also knows that people will continue to operate at the same frantic pace beyond his prison’s walls. Again, life itself (mostly through trees) is personified as something much greater than humanity, and as having its own desires for what is best for humanity.
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Eventually Neelay’s creations begin the process of translating between “human language and the language of green things.” Neelay himself watches them, knowing that he will not live to see the end of this new game—a game about life itself beyond the limits of humanity—but that he has at least helped it grow. Overwhelmed, Neelay drives his wheelchair out to his usual grove of trees and breathes in all their various aromas. At last, he hears them speak again, in his father’s voice, asking “what might this little creature do?
This passage shows other kinds of life—Neelay’s bots—translating for humans. Neelay is trying to make a new kind of game that’s not about mastery, but about connection. Neelay too sees himself as something small and temporal, like the banyan seed or the first computer processor his father brought home. The trees at last speak to Neelay again, using his father’s voice and the language of seeds and their limitless potential.
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Dorothy reads aloud the news about Adam’s sentence to Ray, who moans in anguish. “Self-defense,” he says, and Dorothy asks him how that could have been Adam’s legal argument. Ray cannot say all the words he wants to, so tries to relate his argument only through his eyes. “If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.” Dorothy cannot understand him, though Ray tries his best to communicate: our collective home has been broken into, and so we are allowed to use all necessary force to defend it.
Ray’s old job as a property lawyer has been leading up to the realization that he has here. This is, again, a way for The Overstory to make the point that the law should encompass a broader view of property and rights beyond the human world. If this were the case, then it would be legal and justified to defend one’s property—that property being the Earth, which would have rights beyond its ownership by people—using any means necessary, even violence.
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Ray reaches a new realization, that the law must judge “imminent harm” not using human time, but at the rate of trees. As he thinks this his brain floods with blood once more, and he can see all the trees in his backyard growing through the interval of “two life sentences,” racing towards the sky and endlessly branching out into new possibilities. Dorothy calls his name, but it is too late, and Ray is dead. The narrator notes that atop the pile of books at her feet is Patricia’s last work, The New Metamorphosis, containing a passage about Ovid’s myth of Baucis and Philemon turning into trees. “What we care for, we will grow to resemble,” she writes, “and what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”
Here, the book makes another logical leap, suggesting that the law should address not only other kinds of life and property, but time as well. “Imminent” to a tree might seem very far away for a human, but that doesn’t make the “harm” any less real. In her final book, Patricia fully leans into the idea of metamorphosis and returns to her childhood love of Ovid. As an example of this kind of transformation, the characters who care most about trees (like Patricia herself) have grown to resemble them in their patience, awareness, and selflessness.
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Mimi still sits beneath the pine tree as darkness falls over Dolores Park. She manages to remove the jade ring from her finger and places it in the grass. At midnight she achieves a kind of enlightenment and is able to understand some of the signals constantly being passed between everything green that lives. They tell her about seeds and how some seeds need fire, or ice, or to be smashed open before they will germinate. Mimi then recognizes that the planet is transforming into something else, and that the seeds and the forests will survive, but only once the “real world” ends. Mimi stays there until dawn, finally awakened by a police officer, but is unable to speak aloud.
This passage calls back to the scene that opens The Overstory, suggesting that it was Mimi being described there. Like several other characters, Mimi is now able to actually communicate with trees. She, too, comes to the realization that the natural world will be okay, but only once the human world—which is the only one that we think of as “real”—ends. All the destruction we are causing is also unlocking new potential for life, as things are always changing into other things, and some seeds require violence to open.
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Quotes
The day after Nick meets him, the man in the red plaid coat returns with three other strong-looking men and some equipment, all ready to continue the work of moving logs and finishing Nick’s sculpture. They work for hours, and then stand looking at the thing they’ve created. “It’s good,” says the man in plaid, and then he and the others start to chant in an old language. Nick can only add “Amen.” High above, satellites are already taking pictures of what they have created: the word “STILL,” made of fallen trees and visible from space. In the eyes of the “learners,” the word is already growing and blossoming, forming new connections that no human eye can see. Nick bids the men farewell and senses a voice from the trees saying that “What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.
Nick’s last message is just about being still and aware, letting go of our limited view of life and time and taking the perspective of the trees. Neelay’s bots can already see the sculpture and are learning from it, a new form of life adapting to thrive beyond humanity. Nick, too, can now hear the trees’ signals as they answer Olivia’s dying question: the “this” she was asking about were the gifts from life itself, which humans have been freely given but also must give back to in return. Life itself will never end, no matter the fate of humanity, and The Overstory implies that readers should take comfort in this fact.
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