Ecoentanglement in The Overstory by Richard Powers
“First there was nothing,” the prologue begins. “Then there was everything.” Power’s use of the noun “everything” immediately suggests indivisible and intrinsic connection between all things. In this sentence he is not denying the temporal differences between the births of individual entities, but rather stating, with some bluntness, that these stretches of time are meaningless. The property of ecoentanglement in objects, living or non-living, does not depend on temporal dimensions, as entities caught up in the butterfly effect would be. Ecoentangled entities are connected by the fact of their existence, as Powers advises in this powerful opener.
Ecoentanglement is made visible through metaphor. The sentence “in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages” blends elements—air, and water via the metaphor of “raining”—to highlight their connection. Trees are given hearts—“in the heart of the wood”—and flowers are personified—“spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen”. Even beyond The Overstory, the ability of language to conjoin discrete entities suggests an inherent, in some cases subconscious, understanding of the ecoentanglement of all things. By joining objects together in language, Powers is highlighting the symmetry of their properties and actions, just as quantum objects mirror each other un quantum entanglement.
This symmetry results in the capacity of ecoentangled entities to influence each other. The woman in the prologue “lean[s] against a pine” and “its bark presses hard against her back”. Both woman and tree are affecting one another in this moment, and their previously intangible ecoentanglement is made material through the sensation of touch. It’s physically enacted again in the relationship between earth and tree. Just as the earth anchors a tree, trees grip the earth in Power’s novel: “every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it.” Poplar trees, shaken by the wind, shake the wind onwards through the verb “repeat”. The pine speaks to the woman “in words before words” and “her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies” to listen, as though she is receiving messages in the vein of quantum entanglement. Action has immediate mirrored reaction in this prologue, emphasising the ecoentanglement of these objects.
Ecological objects in the prologue to The Overstory are also given the ability to transcend time. Alder trees with bends which “speak of long-ago disasters” demonstrate an understanding of the past, poplars that “repeat the wind’s gossip” lie in touch with the present, and ancient oaks display the ability to “wave prophecies of future weather”. An understanding of past, present and future is collectively presented by these plants and this reinforces the idea that time holds no meaning to the ecoentangled entity.
Moreover, space, too, becomes meaningless when viewed through the lens of ecoentanglement. “A thing can travel everywhere,” Powers writes, “just by holding still.” This statement is presented to the reader as a message from a tree. It makes reference to the mycorrhizal network of trees, a web of fungi in the earth which links trees together, and that enables them to sense what other trees sense. It also references the reproductive cycle of trees, . In both cases, the tree doesn’t have to move to connect. Distance never has to be crossed by the ecoentangled entity because it is always already crossed.
In the second half of Powers’ prologue, he laments the failure of human individuals to recognise and utilise their ecoentanglement. Dozens of species of plants are mentioned in the prologue as communicating and connecting with each other, but only one human is present, and even she—who displays a connection with nature by listening—can only connect half-way. She hears the messages of the trees but cannot fulfil them: when asked to “close [her] eyes and think of willow”, “the weeping” of the willow she sees is “wrong”; when told to “picture an acacia thorn”, nothing she imagines is “sharp enough”. This idea of connecting half-way is further emphasised when the trees switch to speaking to humanity in general, and call the human imaginings of nature “amputations”. “Your kind never see us as whole,” they say—and then more explicitly: “you miss the half of it”.
The reason for the human inability to see their ecoentanglement is implied in the second to last paragraph, when Powers’ writes, “If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.” Here, “greener”, through the ambiguity of language, takes on a double meaning, and therefore gives us two instructions for achieving a comprehensive understanding of our place in the web of entanglement. The first instruction is literal, and presents as an impossible wish for humanity to more closely resemble plants. The second is more figurative, and asks us to think ecologically, to be more “green” in in our habits and thoughts.
The prologue ends with hope, with the pine speaking again to the woman, saying, “Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” Despite the fact that she—and by extension, we as humanity—are not “greener”, the pine tree she leans against still believes there’s value to be had in instruction. Although we cannot transcend divides of space and time the way other ecoentangled objects can, we still bear the property of ecoentanglement as existing beings, and therefore there is still left to us the capacity to listen, and to connect with the ecoentangled world through listening.
Works Cited
Powers, Richard. “Roots.” The Overstory, Vintage, 2019, pp 3-4.