美国国家公共电台 NPR Novelist Richard Powers Finds New Stories Deep In Old Growth Forests

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Richard Powers likes to explore big ideas in his novels. He has written about artificial intelligence, game theory, genetics, music and a lot of other things. In his latest book, "The Overstory," Powers takes on trees and the lives of a small group of people determined¹ to save them from destruction. Writing the book led Powers deep into the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is where NPR's Lynn Neary met up with him.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE²: Richard Powers' house in Tennessee is perched on a hillside on the edge of the park. Driving up to it, you notice something immediately.

It's kind of a treehouse.

RICHARD POWERS: It's very much a treehouse.

NEARY: (Laughter).

POWERS: That's why I live here.

NEARY: Powers makes no apology for his current obsession³ with trees, though he admits that for most of his life he knew little about them.

POWERS: I could probably name with some certainty maybe three or four trees.

NEARY: This is hard to believe because "The Overstory" is sprinkled with fascinating details - how the American chestnut⁴ disappeared, how a huge banyan⁵ tree grows from a small fig⁶, how trees communicate with each other. Powers did extensive research and says these facts are a crucial part of this story about the fight to save old-growth forests.

POWERS: What a tree can do to transform the atmosphere, to transform the soil is absolutely part of the story of humans trying to give to these huge, ancient, incredibly diverse and incredibly supple⁷ creatures the same kind of sanctity that we reserve exclusively for ourselves.

NEARY: Powers roots his book in the stories of nine people from a famous botanist⁸ to a down-and-out Vietnam vet⁹. All of them have some connection to trees. Some of them eventually meet as radical¹⁰ environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. Their struggle to save the old-growth forest ends in violence, but it begins with their reverence¹¹ for trees, especially one ancient redwood.

POWERS: The trick there was making the people come to see that tree and the magnificence of that tree. And to have these humans fall in love with that tree and want to protect it with their lives and fail to do so, that's something that a reader who's completely tree blind might sit up and take notice.

NEARY: Richard Powers is the very opposite of tree blind. Walking through the woods, he stops constantly to smell or touch.

POWERS: Look at this. Look at those leaf buds.

NEARY: Standing¹² on an overlook with a view of the mountains in the distance, Powers observes the scene with the keen eye of someone who understands forests.

POWERS: To a person who's not tuned¹³ into trees it's just a kind of massive green. But as your eye attenuates¹⁴, the mountains start to divide up into patches.

NEARY: Those patches are different kinds of forests. And Powers has hiked through all of them.

POWERS: I have these thrilling moments when I turn a corner and all of a sudden, from one step to the next, I go from one of these forest types to the other. It's the most dramatic thing. The ground under your feet changes. The smell of the air changes. The look, the color of the air changes.

NEARY: Writing "The Overstory" has changed Powers' life. He moved to Tennessee after first visiting the Smoky Mountains for research.

POWERS: The more I read about it, the more I thought, I have to see this if I'm going to write about these things. And I want to see what a forest looked like before Europeans came here. I want to see what America looked like 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 8,000 years ago.

NEARY: We head up to see such a forest, which is just a short walk off a winding¹⁵ mountain road.

Oh, this is beautiful.

POWERS: So this is quite different than anything you've seen so far.

NEARY: Yeah.

It's like walking into the primeval forest of folk tales, shrouded¹⁶ in fog with patches of snow here and there. Huge tree trunks and branches sprawl¹⁷ on the ground while living trees rise high above. Blankets of thick moss¹⁸ and lichen¹⁹ cover everything. A giant root system stands on its side, towering above us. A forest like this, Powers says, can't be tamed and should never be lost.

POWERS: There's something about an old-growth forest that flies in the face of management and rationality. It's crazy. It's messy. It's dynamic. It's brutal²⁰. But once you ease into it, that mess becomes part of the beauty.

NEARY: These trees have been here for centuries, Power says. To save them and ourselves will require a shift in human consciousness, a new way of thinking. And literature, he believes, will have a role in bringing that change about.

POWERS: There's a whole new kind of story that we're going to have to learn how to tell. And we won't be dispensing²¹ with the social or political, not by a long shot. But to add in this environmental drama, that's going to be a marvelous task and a great source of meaning for the writers of the future.

NEARY: Richard Powers - his new book is "The Overstory." Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF ISATO NAKAGAWA'S "MEGA TOP")