What's Wrong with the Overstory

 I originally wanted to read the Overstory because it was about trees and I heard people talking about is a powerful and "sort of spiritual".    However, it took a group I was in deciding to read it as a book group reading for me to actually read it.  I would have stopped mid way through if it were not for being in that group because of the dark and sad stories of the people and their families.  But by the time I finished it I was quite mad about the message it brings to the world.

Most Americans are completely unaware of movement history and certainly don't know the even more obscure history of the environmental movement.  Historic fiction is always a challenging jaundra because while bringing certain events of history forward, by taking artistic license to tell the story in a presumably more interesting way, we run the risk that it is actually revisionist history.   Revisionist history is dangerous in the way it reframes actual events and frames how the public comes to think about something.  A good example of this is how movies for decades portrayed Native Americans as sneaky and violent and dangerous - thus retelling the reality of white settlers stealing their land, cutting "deals" for ownership with them that they did not understand and slaughtering them.  This was a historic fiction that recast who the actual wrong doers were.

So one of my big problems with the Overstory is it is historical fiction.  It tells, but not accurately real things that have happened in the world.   What angers me is it takes the real story of activists who have worked with passion and determination for the saving of our world and retells the story in ways that seem half baked, ungroundely idealistic or maybe mentally ill (Olivia hears voices telling her what to do), and violent.  The real people this story have been based upon have been very life affirming, optimistic and visionary folks who have acted with love and commitment.

So far example Patricia Westerford is based upon Suzanne Simard a research in BC, Canada who has studied extensively the way trees communicate with each other.  She gave a powerful ted talk about how trees communicate.  She is an extremely positive and enthusiastic person and it is an insult to her integrity that the character based upon her tricks the huge audience before her into thinking she was committing suicide in front of them.  

The LDF group is roughly based upon Earth First and environmental group which originally started as a non-violent environmental group.  As it began to focus more on tree defense there as a lot of disagreement within the movement about whether destruction of property was non-violent and whether it a legitimate tactic.  A group called Earth Liberation Front (ELF) split off and was committed to tactics including destruction of property - earning it the distinction of being the most "extremist" wing of the environmental movement and winding up on the FBI watch list.  What is lost in this historical fiction version is that Earth First did have a mixed record of success at protecting trees.  The mass occupation called Free Cacadia at the Warner Creek Timber sale site lasted a whole year and did save that land.  Another blockade at SugarLoaf Mountain site involving hundreds of activists did result in arrests and the cutting down of a 400 year old tree.  A third two year long blockade took place at China Left.  The novel does correctly report the intense police violence against the protesters.  It does not report one died from a cut tree landing on him and another died in police custody.

None died in the fashion that Olivia does.   Olivia appears to be a mixture of Judi Bari and Julia Butterfly Hill (more later).  Judi Bari was an ELF member whose car did blow up, causing injury to herself and a male activist also in her car.  She was later arrested by the FBI who charged her with transporting a bomb in her car for the purpose of doing damage to a site.  The case against her was dropped for lack of evidence and she put a civil suit against the FBI and the Oakland police which was won by her estate after her death resulting in a large award.    Therefore it is extremely disturbing to me that the primarily unproven charges of violence against the environmental movement or reinforced in this novel with the added indignity of their killing one of their own members out of sheer ignorance and incompetence.

The other half of Olivia's character seems to be based upon Julia Butterfly Hill.  Butterfly sat in Luna a 1500 old California Redwood for 738 days to protect the tree which was under danger of being cut down.  She did experience helicopter harassment, and a 10 day angry seige by angry loggers as well as harsh weather.   However, unlike the books description of bitter defeat, Butterfly won a settlement with Pacific Lumber to leave Luna and all trees in a 200 ft buffer zone (keeping with the science that trees live in community not isolation.)   It was one the aggravations to me that throughout the book little of the success of the environmental movement is communicated, this communicating the activists as driven by personal reasons to do futile things with no effectiveness.

In truth the environmental movement has suffered depressing defeats but also David vs Golith victories won by the sheer devotion of people who love the land.   But what is also completely missing out of this book at all is LOVE.   The characters rarely love people.   Mostly they do form blind loyalties to each other.  The men mostly adore a partner in a sort of dog like way, but are not loved back.  The woman don't seem to love.  There are none of the bonds between women which are the heart of movements, and because the people do not seem to actually love each other there is no love to motivate their actions.   What we are presented is that they love trees instead of people, and that they experience people as sort of monstrous, ignorant or cruel.   While certainly those qualities do also exist in the human condition, so do kindness, compassion, hopefulness, vision, collaboration, cooperation, and passion which is born of love.   These qualities are notably absent from Overstory, and is I think the reason why the book felt so dark to me.

In the end this novel, and its revisionist history plays into several false narratives that the environmental movement has long fought against: 1) that they are impractical idealists, 2) that they care more about trees and animals than humans. and 3) that they are a violent rather than non-violent movement.  All those things made me mad but the thing that made me the most mad is how some of the miracle of nature are both shared in the book but then used to make the cyncial point that we will kill ourselves but that the planet will live on.

I have heard this idea thrown out before, it is a popular one on the left: that we are only killing ourselves, that when the climate movement calls out the destruction of the planet - that the planet has great healing powers and therefore it will slowly use the power succession (described in the final discoveries of Ray and Dorothy) to restore itself.  It is absolutely true and very comforting that nature, in all of its systems great and small, is designed to rebalance, and rebalancing that means restore and heal where damage is done.  I have written about this before in my post on hope.  If we would get out of the earth's way it would heal.  Even now just on the edge of catastrophic and unrepairable damage to our ability to grow enough food if we heat the planet too much, even now in the midst of the 6th great extinction, the earth could heal itself if we IMMEDIATELY stopped all the fossil fuel heating.

But what I am sick of is how some people use this idea that it is only us who will die, as some self hating way to give up.  The statement is often made we simply deserve what we will get.   This statement however ignores all the other species of plants, animals, birds and insects we are taking down with us - and how we have no right to do that to them.  It also takes no account of how many millenia the recovery will take, as if that is of no matter, and how completely inappropriate it is that we few cells of the planetary experience would wield this disproportionate power.   As Powers rightly reflects if all of the earths history was reduced to a 24 hour cycle humans appear in the last two minutes.   Why then do we get to take the whole thing down?

To me this is simply a cop out, an arrogant excuse for not trying, for surrendering to other humans who are acting out of greed or ignorance.   NO, if life is oriented towards life...then we as life forms must also be orientated towards life, and the defense of life.

To me what is most disappointing about this book is during my activism the trees have been teaching me (as shared in other blogs) their truths.  They have been teaching me that we are in a reciprocal relationship - what they are doing for me and what they need from us.  It has been pure joy to learn the miracles of their interdependent relationships with each other and their power of succession.  To learn the wisdom with which they take care of each other...and us.  (Just the other day I learned that studies show they have been becoming more effective at drawing down carbon as climate change intensifies!  Miraculous!) And so it is painful to read those truths woven into a narrative that is dark, pain ridden and pessimistic.  As a therapist deeply aware of the despair that teenager and young adults are feeling in the face of climate change, the suggestion in the book that Plant Patty when talking on What we Can do? might answer with suicide as heroic/sacrificial act is a deeply irresponsible offering. I believe this author will be responsible for some actual teen suicides as a result.  That is so disappointing because these same facts about the natural world could have told a story of hope.

For me that miracle that the trees are the lungs of the earth (and recent studies show have actually become more efficient under climate change - still struggling to do their part to rebalance the system) and the ocean currents are the circulatory system of the planet....then clearly we are each just one single cell in a much much larger and greater life system.  It is time we learned our proper place in that system and learned to treat the body we depend upon not as we are its master but with the gratitude, respect and homage it deserves!