The Overstory Adaptation

[jo]

www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/game-of-thrones-creators-set-third-netflix-show-the-overstory

FEBRUARY 11, 2021 8:30am PT by Lesley Goldberg

'Game of Thrones' Creators Set Third Netflix Show: 'The Overstory'
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss attend the Season 8 premiere of Game of Thrones - Getty -H 2019
Taylor Hill/Getty Images

Hugh Jackman and author Richard Powers are also attached to the drama based on the book of the same name.
Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are putting to rest any questions industry insiders had about how prolific they'd be at Netflix.

Benioff and Weiss have set up their third show for the streaming giant under their sprawling five-year, $250 million overall deal: an adaption of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory.

Here's how Netflix describes the drama, which is currently in the development stage: "a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world. It tells the story of a world alongside ours that is vast, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. A handful of disparate people learn how to see that world and are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe."

Richard Robbins (Good Girls Revolt, 12 Monkeys) penned the script and will exec produce alongside Benioff and Weiss. Hugh Jackman, a notable fan of the novel, will exec produce alongside Bernie Caulfield (Game of Thrones). Author Powers is on board as a co-EP.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is a notable fan of The Overstory, telling The New York Times last year the 2019 novel is "a wonderful example of how great storytelling can help build understanding and empathy. Original and profound."

The Overstory is Benioff and Weiss' third show for the streamer. It joins The Three-Body Problem from Alexander Woo (The Terror) and half-hour dramedy The Chair, starring Sandra Oh and from showrunner Amanda Peet (Benioff's wife). Three-Body Problem has already been the subject of controversy, though Netflix swiftly responded to criticisms.

During their HBO tenure, Benioff and Weiss focused exclusively on Game of Thrones. When Netflix signed the duo amid fierce competition from other streamers and studios, many industry insiders questioned if the $250 million deal was a good investment given their penchant for focusing on one show at a time. With three shows already in the works, those fears — and the fact that they're no longer involved in Star Wars — seem to have been quelled.

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Here's the breakout reporting from DEADLINE --


deadline.com/2021/02/the-overstory-series-adaptation-netflix-david-benioff-db-weiss-hugh-jackman-1234691992/

HOME
TV
BREAKING NEWS
‘The Overstory’ Series Adaptation In Works At Netflix From David Benioff, D.B. Weiss & Hugh Jackman

By Nellie Andreeva

Nellie Andreeva
Co-Editor-in-Chief, TV

@deadlinenellie


David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Hugh Jackman
AP

Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have added another high-profile project to their Netflix development slate.


The duo is executive producing The Overstory, a series adaptation of Richard Powers’ acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Hugh Jackman also serves as an executive producer on the project, currently in development.

Richard Powers’ twelfth novel, The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world. It tells the story of a world alongside ours that is vast, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. A handful of disparate people learn how to see that world and are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe.

Richard Robbins wrote the pilot script and serves as executive producer, along with Bernadette Caulfield, the Game of Thrones exec producer who now serves as president of Benioff & Weiss’ production company. Powers serves as co-executive producer.

Jackman as well Benioff and Weiss are all big fans of the book, which was published in 2018 and won the Pulitzer in 2019, leading to them partnering on the adaptation. I hear there is a possibility for Jackman to act; a decision on that would be made down the road if/when the project is fully developed and gets a green light. Search is underway for a director.

As part of their overall deal with Netflix, Benioff and Weiss are currently at work as writers/executive producers on a series adaptation of the renowned and epic science fiction trilogy The Three-Body Problem with executive producer Alexander Woo; they are also executive producers on The Chair, a half-hour dramedy starring Sandra Oh from executive producer Amanda Peet.

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Where's the connection ? Notes from Wiki --

Benioff was hired in 2004 to write the screenplay for the X-Men spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). He based his script on Barry Windsor-Smith's "Weapon X" story, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's 1982 limited series on the character,[23][24] as well as the 2001 limited series Origin.[25] Hugh Jackman collaborated on the script, which he wanted to be more of a character piece than the previous X-Men films.[26] Fox later hired Skip Woods to revise and rewrite Benioff's script.[27] Benioff had aimed for a "darker and a bit more brutal" story, writing it with an R rating in mind, but acknowledged the film's final tone would rest with the producers and director.[23]

David Friedman (/ˈbɛniɒf/ /ˈfriːdmən/; born September 25, 1970), better known by his pen name David Benioff,[1][2] is an American screenwriter and television writer, director and producer. Along with his collaborator D. B. Weiss, he is best known as co-creator, showrunner, and writer of Game of Thrones (2011–2019), the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books A Song of Ice and Fire. He is also known for writing Troy (2004) and co-writing X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).

Btw, Benioff goes by his mother's surname because his father was former Federal Reserve NY President and also former Chairman of the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.

[jo]

More on "XMen Origins : Wolverine"

From Wiki --

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a 2009 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics fictional character Wolverine. It is the fourth installment of the X-Men film series, the first installment of the Wolverine trilogy within the series, and a spin-off/prequel to X-Men (2000) and X2 (2003). The film was directed by Gavin Hood, written by David Benioff and Skip Woods, and produced by Hugh Jackman, who stars as the titular character, alongside Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Dominic Monaghan, and Ryan Reynolds. The film's plot details Wolverine's childhood as James Howlett, his time with Major William Stryker's Team X, the bonding of Wolverine's skeleton with the indestructible metal adamantium during the Weapon X program and his relationship with his half-brother Victor Creed.

The film was mostly shot in Australia and New Zealand, with Canada also serving as a location. Filming took place from January to May 2008. Production and post-production were troubled, with delays due to the weather and Jackman's other commitments, an incomplete screenplay that was still being written in Los Angeles while principal photography rolled in Australia, conflicts arising between director Hood and Fox's executives over the film’s direction, and an unfinished workprint being leaked on the internet a month before the film's debut.

Hugh was officially listed as a Producer alongside his former Producing partner JPalermo ( this was a SEED Productions initiative). Too bad that Tom Rothman was supposed to have meddled too much in the direction of the film. If Benioff's original script had been followed and Fox agreed to the R rating - who knows how it would have been received? In a way, it is a forerunner of the rest of the solo trilogy, together with The Wolverine and Logan.

Jo

[jo]

What does an Executive Producer do?

Per Wiki --

Motion pictures

In films, executive producers may finance the film, participate in the creative effort, or work on set. Their responsibilities vary from funding or attracting investors into the movie project to legal, scripting, marketing, advisory and supervising capacities.[4]

Executive producers vary in involvement, responsibility and power. Some executive producers have hands-on control over every aspect of production, some supervise the producers of a project, while others are involved in name only.[5]

The crediting of executive producers in the film industry has risen over time. In the mid-to-late 1990s, there were an average of just under two executive producers per film. In 2000, the number jumped to 2.5 (more than the number of standard "film producers"). In 2013, there were an average of 4.4 executive producers per film, compared with 3.2 producers as of 2016.[6]

Television
Main article: Television producer
In television, an executive producer usually supervises the creative content and the financial aspects of a production. Some writers, like Stephen J. Cannell, Tina Fey, and Ryan Murphy, have worked as both the creator and the producer of the same show.[7] In the case of multiple executive producers on a television show, the one outranking the others is called the showrunner,[8] or the leading executive producer.

What will Hugh's role be ?

I am hoping that he will not just help raise awareness of the brand, but that he would also do some scriptwriting himself (he's a journalism grad after all and had supposedly started writing a script in the past) and most importantly maybe also act as lead or important character in at least one episode?


Jo

[jo]

What is THE OVERSTORY all about?

Per Wiki --

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overstory

The Overstory


Author Richard Powers
Country United States
Language English
Published 2018 (W. W. Norton & Company)
Pages 512
ISBN 9780393635522

The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W. W. Norton & Company. It is Powers' twelfth novel. The novel is about five trees whose unique life experiences with nine Americans bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Powers was inspired to write the work while teaching at Stanford University after he encountered giant redwood trees for the first time.[1]

The Overstory was a contender for multiple awards. The Overstory was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize on September 20, 2018.[2] It was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on April 15, 2019.[3] and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2020. However, critical reviews of the novel were mixed, with critiques of the character plots and melodrama, alongside praise of the structure, writing and compelling reading experience.

Patricia Westerford, one of the novel's central characters, was heavily inspired by the life and work of forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard.[4][5]

Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman, Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia Vandergriff are people who had unique relationships with trees which occasionally led to tragedy or salvation.

Patricia Westerford recognizes that trees are social organisms rather than isolated ones and presents research to prove this; however, she is ridiculed for being "unscientific." Later, scientists will realize that she was right and give her international recognition, but she has been disillusioned from this world and prefers to study old forest growth on her own instead. To share her research, she publishes a widely successful book about trees.

Neelay Mehta loves coding and embraces how insignificant he is. However, while working on a surprise coding project for his father during class, his teacher takes his project notes away from him. He desperately wants his notes back and accidentally curses the teacher, which prompts his teacher to threaten him. Scared of the consequences of insulting a white woman as an Indian child, he climbs a tree to escape reality briefly, but falls out and paralyzes himself. After paralysis, he is able to spend all day programming and initially develops open source games in a world of for-profit video games, like Robin Hood. Eventually, he becomes so successful he starts a video game company too.

Adam Appich is a curious psychology student with an unfortunate childhood. On the last day of his psychology seminar, his professor begins having a seizure. Thinking he is demonstrating the bystander effect, no one rises to help him, and the professor dies.

In 1989, when Olivia Vandergriff is one semester away from finishing college, she gets high and is accidentally electrocuted, briefly dying. Upon being revived, she comes to believe that higher powers are trying to give her a message. After seeing a news story about a group of activists trying to protect the remaining 3% of giant redwood trees, she decides that her purpose is to join them. On her way there, she meets Nicholas Hoel, now 35 years old, and at a loss of what to do with his life as the life insurance money he lived on is gone. He has sold the Hoel farm, the Hoel tree is dying, and his art is a commercial failure. After talking to Olivia, he decides to join her in her mission.

At the same time, in Portland, Oregon, Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese engineer who dies by suicide, is rising up the corporate ladder when she sees that a small group of trees by her building are scheduled to be destroyed by the city. She contemplates attending a town hall meeting to protest their removal but before she can, the city cuts down the trees in the night. Douglas Pavlicek, a veteran who has spent 5 years of his life replanting trees for major companies only to become disillusioned when he discovers that his work actually enables additional logging of old-growth stands, walks by the trees and sees them being cut down. He tries to prevent their destruction and is arrested. When he returns to the trees he is confronted by Mimi Ma, who quickly realizes he is not a city employee but an environmentalist. The two band together to start joining in protests against environmental destruction.

Nick and Olivia join a group of nonviolent radicals and give themselves "tree" names, Nick becoming Watchman and Olivia being Maidenhair. When they are asked to tree sit in a giant redwood called Mimas for two weeks, Olivia leaps at the chance. Their stay ends up lasting for more than a year, during which they watch as the forest around them is clear-cut. They are eventually joined by Adam Appich, who is doing a thesis on environmentalists. The night he is there Nick and Olivia are finally forced out of the tree and arrested so Mimas can be cut down. Nick and Olivia decide to do more work in Oregon.

Mimi Ma and Douglas continue going to protests where they are brutalized by the police and arrested. Mimi is eventually fired from her job and, like Douglas, becomes a full-time activist.

Changed by his time with Olivia and Nick, Adam goes to Oregon to rejoin them, and meets Mimi Ma, now going by the name Mulberry, and Douglas, going by Doug-fir, who are part of the same activist camp. He stays with them a month and they believe that they are finally achieving something until their camp is destroyed by the forest authorities and law enforcement. In the altercation Mimi and Douglas are both badly injured. In retaliation the group sets fire to logging equipment. Pleased by the results, they set two more fires intending the third to be their final act. During the final arson Olivia is injured and dies, and the four remaining activists burn her body and scatter. The fire is deemed the work of a crazed killer and the logging continues.

Mimi Ma sells a priceless heirloom her father passed down, which ensures that she can reinvent herself. Nick becomes a vagrant, Douglas a BLM ranger, and Adam returns to academia.

Patricia Westerford is developing a seed bank to preserve tree species before they become extinct. However, she becomes hopeless as she realizes that no one will take conservation seriously enough. Even though many are turning to technology to protect the environment, she believes the most effective conservation technology has already been invented: trees.

Neelay Mehta becomes the head of a successful video game company, but he would rather explore the world in his own video games and create new worlds than run it. Soon, he comes up with the idea to make his video game emulate the real natural world, a simulation that contains every species in existence and limited resources. However, his board calls this idea crazy and he is voted off. He wishes to hear the dendrologist, Patricia Westerford, speak to recenter his life.

Dorothy and Ray are united by their love for adventure and get married. Ray is a successful lawyer, however, Dorothy begins getting bored in married life, especially since she cannot have children, which Ray wants. She has an extramarital affair and Ray becomes paralyzed from stroke. However, as she helps him recover, she ends her affair and rejuvenate her connection with Ray, even though he cannot speak. They realize that trees are treated as property, with no one to fight for them in court, but they are living too. To them, humans are simply pesky, short-lived bugs. In the end, they have children together, trees.

Douglas is still haunted by what happened and writes down everything in his journal using everyone's forest names. Nevertheless, his journal is discovered and the FBI arrests him. In order to protect Mimi Ma he decides to give up one name and goes to New York City where he locates Adam and reminisces with him about the fire. Fingered by Douglas, Adam is arrested and sentenced to 140 years in prison, which strikes him as a small price to pay as it is barely any time in tree life.

Mimi Ma, who is now living and working as an unconventional unlicensed therapist of sorts, hears about the arrests and realizes that Douglas turned in Adam to protect her.

Westerford, now an acclaimed scientist, is invited to a environmental technology conference to speak. She is about to commit suicide for the trees in front of an audience that doesn't do anything to stop her, until Neelay waves his hands to stop her. She finishes her speech by toasting, "To unsuicide!"

Living in the forest, Nick creates a giant message from branches and dead logs that can be read from space. He is helped in this project by a Native American man who happens to be passing by, and later by some of the man's family. The message, which reads "Still," will be legible from space for 200 years before it is absorbed into the forest.

Characters
Nicholas Hoel – an artist of Norwegian and Irish descent who comes from a long line of farmers and whose great-great-great grandfather planted a chestnut tree that survived blight for decades and enthralled the Hoel family for generations.

Mimi Ma – the eldest daughter of Winston Ma, born Ma Sih Hsuin, who fled China and became an engineer in America. Mimi falls in love with the Mulberry bush he plants in their backyard and is deeply affected when her father eventually commits suicide.

Adam Appich – an inquisitive boy who is fascinated with insects and later becomes interested in human psychology and how humans can only understand things that are put into narratives. His father planted a tree before the birth of Adam and each of his four siblings; as a child, Adam conflated the characteristics of each tree with his siblings.
Ray Brinkman – a conventional intellectual property lawyer and Dorothy's husband who later in life falls in love with nature.

Dorothy Cazaly – an unconventional stenographer who falls in love with nature late in life.
Douglas Pavlicek – an orphan who enlists in the Stanford prison experiment before enlisting in the Air Force. He falls from his plane and is saved by a banyan tree. After being discharged he wanders across America, realizing as he does so that deforestation is ruining the country. He signs up to plant seedlings, only learning after the planting of his fifty thousandth seedling that this effort does nothing to help the trees and only contributes to their destruction at the hands of logging companies.

Neelay Mehta – the child of Indian immigrants, Neelay spends his life building computers and creating computer programs in Northern California. Despite being paralyzed when he falls out of a tree as a child, he goes on to become a computer programming marvel, eventually creating a series of video games called Mastery inspired by trees, deforestation, and colonization.

Patricia Westerford – a dendrologist with a hearing disability, Patricia spends most of her childhood and adulthood enthralled with trees. When she accidentally discovers that trees are capable of communicating with each other, her research is widely mocked leading her to contemplate suicide. She eventually finds work as a park ranger where, years later, she discovers that her work has been redeemed and expanded upon.
Olivia Vandergriff – a young woman in her early 20s who lives an impulsive and reckless life until dedicating her life to protesting deforestation.

Adaptation
In February 2021, it was reported that Netflix is in developing a television series adaptation of novel by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Hugh Jackman.[6]

Reception
The Atlantic called the novel "darkly optimistic" for taking the long view that humanity was doomed while trees are not.[7] The Guardian was mixed on the novel, with one review claiming that Powers mostly succeeded in conjuring "narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again";[8] another reviewer excoriated the novel as being an "increasingly absurd melodrama."[9] Library Journal called the book "a deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature".[10] Ron Charles of The Washington Post offered up effusive praise, writing that this "ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction."

Awards
2018 Man Booker Prize shortlist[2]
2018 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine winner[11]
2019 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist[12]
2019 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist[13]
2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2020 William Dean Howells Medal

[jo]

From Indiewire --

David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Hugh Jackman Team Up on ‘The Overstory’ Adaptation for Netflix
The duo behind "Game of Thrones" have added a third television show to their content slate for Netflix.

Tyler Hersko



“Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have added a third project to their Netflix slate: The duo is teaming with Hugh Jackman on an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory” novel.

Netflix announced on Thursday that its television adaptation of “The Overstory” — a novel written by Richard Powers that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 — will be executive produced by Benioff, Weiss, and Jackman. A release date and casting details for the project are under wraps, though Deadline reported that it was possible that Jackman may have an acting role in the series. The publication also reported that Richard Robbins wrote the pilot script for the series and will also executive produce alongside Bernadette Caulfield, who previously served as an executive producer on “Game of Thrones” and is currently president of Benioff and Weiss’ production company. Powers will serve as a co-executive producer on the series.


Powers’ “The Overstory” novel centers on five trees that resonate with nine diverse Americans, ultimately bringing them together and motivating them to address environmental destruction. The novel was well-received by critics and became a New York Times bestseller.

“The Overstory” adaptation further bulks up Benioff and Weiss’ content slate for Netflix. The duo signed a nine-figure deal with Netflix in 2019 and are involved in two other projects for the streaming service. Benioff and Weiss are serving as writers and executive producers alongside Alexander Woo on an adaptation of acclaimed science fiction trilogy “The Three-Body Problem.” They are also serving as executive producers on the Sandra Oh-led “The Chair,” which is executive produced by Amanda Peet.

Benioff and Weiss became some of the biggest names in television production due to the success of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” fantasy series. The show’s eight-season run concluded in 2019 and most of the show’s seasons were critically acclaimed and favored by awards season voters; the show earned 59 Emmys.

As for Jackman, the actor is best-known for portraying Logan/Wolverine in a variety of “X-Men” superhero films. Jackman recently starred in HBO’s acclaimed “Bad Education” film in 2019 as Frank Tassone. Jackman is set to star in Warner Bros. Pictures’ upcoming “Reminiscence” sci-fi film, which is expected to release later in 2021.

My response to the feature by Indiewire --

Jo

[jo]

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9251867/Hugh-Jackman-joins-Game-Thrones-creators-executive-produce-series-based-Overstory.html

Jackman shared his interest in the novel before joining in on the series during an episode of The Tim Ferris Show podcast from June 2020.

The X-Men actor revealed he had been given a copy of the book by former Senator Gary Hart after he played him in 2018's The Front Runner.

He called The Overstory 'the most transformative bit of fiction I have read in a long time,' and gushed that it 'completely reverses the way you look at the world when you walk outside.'

[jo]

The Atlantic discusses and reviews the book in great detail --

CULTURE
The Novel That Asks, ‘What Went Wrong With Mankind?’

Richard Powers’s climate-themed epic, The Overstory, embraces a dark optimism about the fate of humanity.

NATHANIEL RICH
JUNE 2018 ISSUE



The Overstory BY RICHARD POWERS W. W. NORTON

“People see better what looks like them,” observes the field biologist Patricia Westerford, one of the nine—nine—main characters of Richard Powers’s 12th novel, The Overstory. And trees, Patricia discovers, look like people. They are social creatures, caring for one another, communicating, learning, trading goods and services; despite lacking a brain, trees are “aware.” After borers attack a sugar maple, it emits insecticides that warn its neighbors, which respond by intensifying their own defenses. When the roots of two Douglas firs meet underground, they fuse, joining vascular systems; if one tree gets ill, the other cares for it. The chopping down of a tree causes those surrounding it to weaken, as if in mourning. But Powers’s findings go beyond Dr. Pat’s. In his tree-mad novel, which contains as many species as any North American forest—17 are named on the first page alone—trees speak, sing, experience pain, dream, remember the past, and predict the future. The past and the future, it turns out, are mirror images of each other. Neither contains people.

This article appears in the June 2018 issue.


Powers is the rare American novelist writing in the grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic Peter Brooks’s term, as a “historian of contemporary society.” He has the courage and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked. A former computer programmer and English major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Powers has written novels about the history of photography, artificial intelligence, nuclear warfare, race and miscegenation, the Holocaust, neuroscience, virtual reality, the chemical industry, and genetic engineering. It was only a matter of time before he took on the greatest existential crisis human civilization faces: the destruction of the natural conditions necessary for our own survival.


W. W. NORTON

“What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind” is the central question of The Overstory, as posed by Douggie Pavlicek, a Vietnam War veteran who reinvents himself as a radical eco-activist. Powers has assembled a cast of impeccably credentialed characters to come up with an answer. Douggie himself participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment as a college student, which led him to conclude that “the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” Adam Appich is a psychologist who studies the ways in which people blind themselves to catastrophes, particularly those that unfold gradually. Ray Brinkman is an intellectual-property lawyer who asks whether trees can be said to have legal rights. Nicholas Hoel is the heir to a family art project—several generations committed to photographing, once a month, the growth of a chestnut tree—that has instilled in him an awed appreciation of human transience. (The Hoel Chestnut photographs may have been inspired by a similar project undertaken in Norwich, England, from 1914 to 1942, while Patricia Westerford’s discoveries resemble those of the Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and of a German forester with the same initials, Peter Wohlleben, whose 2015 best seller, The Hidden Life of Trees, appears to be the basis for Patricia’s book, The Secret Forest.)




Powers’s dominant mode of narrative is synopsis, a necessary crutch given the novel’s mob of characters and epochal chronological scale. The opening section proceeds through five generations of Hoels; three generations of another family, the Mas; and the entire youth of most of the other main characters. Five of them later converge in a series of tree-saving “actions” that imitate the tactics of Earth First (a group itself inspired by a novel, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang) and the more radical Earth Liberation Front: human barricades, tree-sitting, sabotage, arson.

By the end of the novel, all but one of the nine have become committed activists. Two end up in federal custody, one dies, one commits suicide, two go into hiding. But all of them earnestly embrace the same platform: Forests must be preserved, or nature will have its revenge. The argument is divided democratically among the book’s voices, but it is unerringly consistent. Each of the following reflections belongs to a different character:

“Some of these trees were around before Jesus was born. We’ve already taken ninety-seven percent of the old ones. Couldn’t we find a way to keep the last three percent?”

“We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it.”

The towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man …

Reefs blanch and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

Each might also just as easily belong to Powers, whose authorial voice speaks in unison with his characters. When enormous ancient trees are chopped down, the sound is “like an artillery shell hitting a cathedral.” The tree-ramming bulldozers are “the color of bile.” The police are uniformly faceless and brutal, swabbing a protester’s eye with a Q-tip laced with chemical agents and beating others senselessly. The life of a tree-sitter, by contrast, is idyllic. After Nicholas spends weeks in the branches of a redwood, his senses clarify, his thoughts deepen, his spirit rises—he no longer minds that he has to use his feces as compost for the wild huckleberries that serve as the foundation of his diet. “Who could stay on the ground, once he has seen life in the canopy?” Nobody in his right mind is the tacit rejoinder.



The most rhapsodic prose is reserved for the trees themselves. Powers writes of a character being “drugged” by the glory of the green world, but every one of his characters becomes an addict. Many have visions. One is visited by beings of light, another by a ghost, a third by premonitions—all urging solidarity with threatened trees. When Patricia travels to the Brazilian rain forest, she overdoses:

There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad.

Why would anyone want to destroy all this? Powers’s characters blame the usual human motivations: greed, ignorance, inertia, primitive instinct. Nicholas rues the fact that every tree visible from his canopy perch “belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.” We never meet this Texas financier, however, or anyone else who might profit from development or deforestation, apart from several anonymous voices making threadbare arguments about well-paying jobs and preserving their “way of life.”

Such frail opposition is easily overwhelmed. When Patricia gives expert testimony in court, a skeptical judge quickly comes around. “I never imagined!” he marvels, as if ready to cast off his robe and climb the nearest ponderosa pine. “Trees summon animals and make them do things? They remember? They feed and take care of each other?” Patricia and the rest of the activists are right, of course. The great cycles of air and water are breaking, the Tree of Life is collapsing, things are going lost that have not yet been found, and people don’t see it. The bill is coming and we won’t be able to pay.

But why make these points in a novel and not, say, a tract, journalistic report, or polemic? Powers addresses this question within the pages of The Overstory. Ray, the intellectual-property lawyer, blames the collapse of human civilization on fiction itself: “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.” Adam, the psychologist, throws a novel against a wall because he is tired of reading “about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations.” (That does, in fairness, sound like a crappy novel.) But Adam’s critique is extraliterary: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” There is a term for stories written with the purpose of converting minds to support a cause. And it is the opposite of literature.



When Douggie sees from the air the effects of clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest, he observes that “it looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow.” Would it? If more people understood what was at stake, would they cease to consume fossil fuels or, as one character urges, “become indigenous again”? Is all that stands in the way of enlightenment the lack of a robust public-information campaign or a climate-themed Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

You’d think powers, if not his characters, would recognize the flaw in this argument. The climate problem is a human problem. A short-term species cannot adequately prepare for the long term—and won’t, if doing so means sacrificing present convenience. No amount of bad news will change that. No amount of bad news has changed it. That the culprit is misinformation, or a failure to excite the imagination, is a persistent, but self-defeating, fantasy.

Most Americans do not understand the perils of climate change—or of deforestation, clear-cutting, habitat loss. But those who perpetuate the disinformation campaigns, including the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the House and Senate majority leaders, and the president of the United States, likely do. It is easier, politically, to claim scientific murkiness than to tell the truth: They value their self-interest over the condition of the world their grandchildren will grow up in. Whether this self-interest is venal or foolish is irrelevant. It’s human nature. And that raises a more difficult question: not whether we should take action, but how to come to terms with the fact that our species has proved itself incapable of doing so.

“Humankind is deeply ill,” Adam concludes. “The species won’t last long.” This is the consensus among Powers’s characters, and it’s a darkly optimistic one. Optimistic for the planet, pessimistic for the fate of humanity. Once man clears out, nature will return. “Hang on,” Douggie thinks, addressing his beloved Douglas-fir seedlings. “Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.” The best way to cure man’s “endless suicidal appetite” for growth is to hasten the inevitable suicide. From death, life will burst. It’s the foundational lesson of forest science.

Powers’s characters embrace the urgency of activism and the passivity of fatalism, but he rarely places the two forces in opposition to each other. The only character who is consumed by this kind of self-questioning is the novel’s most convincing one. Neelay Mehta, paralyzed in a childhood tree-climbing incident, becomes a Silicon Valley mogul after he creates one of the most popular computer games on the planet—a world-building enterprise that resembles SimCity. Its millions of players sit cocooned in their bedrooms, bathed in the glow of verdant pixels, creating new Earths. With time, however, the game’s exoticism fades. The virtual Earths come to resemble ours, ravaged by gluttony, overdevelopment, and rapacious, short-term profiteering.



“We have a Midas problem,” Neelay tells his indifferent project managers. “There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.” He argues for land-use regulations and consumption taxes. His project managers think he’s gone nuts. What’s the fun in limits? And why jeopardize the game’s profitability? Let the obsessed players keep building infinitely, earning ever-increasing profits. The name of the game, after all, is Mastery.

This article appears in the June 2018 print edition with the headline “Rhapsody in Green.”

[mamaleh]

Sounds like the adaptation will be a very ambitious project. I hope it can generate a substantial amount of positive interest.

Ellen