![]() ![]() “That’s the trouble with people, their root problem”, he writes. This quote is typical of Powers’ exultant, endless descriptions of both visible and invisible workings of nature. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing … ” “The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twigs and out through their waving tips, while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. Powers describes this as a “religious conversation”, and you can truly feel this in the book. The Overstory is a 2018 novel by established American novelist, Richard Powers, who says that he wrote it because of a powerful encounter he had with a giant redwood tree. This year, instead, I read a book about trees which felt like it was hugging me. I picked a different tree each day – some old favourites, some I’d been blindly passing for years – and then took photos and wrote a blog post about it. The year before last, I spent the month of January hugging trees. (Photographs are from a photo essay on kauri dieback by Michelle Hyslop captions by Andrea Ewing). ![]() The Overstory, the winnner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an engulfing, worldview-shifting novel about climate catastrophe and hope, writes Susan Wardell. ![]()
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