The Overstory: Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A healthy forest must need dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds turn them to use, and small mammals, and more forms of insects lodge and dine on them than science has ever counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things. But she doesn’t have the data.
Richard Powers • The Overstory: A Novel
First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
Then, in a park above a western city after dark, the air is raining messages.
A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. T
... See moreBut this tough little tree has taken precautions. Right from the beginning, it puts considerably more energy into building up its root system than other species of trees. Here, it stashes away nutrients, and if misfortune strikes above ground, it grows right back without missing a beat. This often leads to the formation of multiple trunks, which ma
... See morePeter Wohlleben • The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature Book 1)
In this way, acorn animism turns bit by bit into its offspring, botany.